Internal email this afternoon from President Reif:
To the members of the MIT community,
Last night, The New Yorker published an article that contains deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein.
Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation. This morning, I asked MIT’s General Counsel to engage a prominent law firm to design and conduct this process. I expect the firm to conduct this review as swiftly as possible, and to report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.
This afternoon, Joi Ito submitted his resignation as Director of the Media Lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute.
As I described in my previous letter, the acceptance of the Epstein gifts involved a mistake of judgment. We are actively assessing how best to improve our policies, processes and procedures to fully reflect MIT’s values and prevent such mistakes in the future. Our internal review process continues, and what we learn from it will inform the path ahead.
If Xeni Jardin's claim below is true, Joi Ito needs to resign from more than just MIT:
"I told the @nytimes everything. So did whistleblowers I was in touch with inside @MIT and @Edge. They printed none of the most damning truths. @joi is on the board of the NYT. THANK GOD FOR @RonanFarrow"
EDIT: NYTimes is now indicating that Ito has resigned from NYT Co board, effective immediately [2].
This is well-known now. Epstein cultivated powerful connections deliberately to insulate himself from scrutiny. It seems likely that he deliberately put politicians and famous people into compromising positions to ensure their cooperation (throwing lavish parties at his mansion, supplying the drugs and the underage girls).
MIT banned Epstein from donating after his Sex Offender conviction. Ito did an end-run around that ban (in addition to taking Epstein’s money personally which is a separate level of unethical).
Xeni spilled the beans on this (Epstein bypassing the ban, Ito’s involvement) to the NYT, which then buried the story likely due to Epstein’s political connections. Many papers and media outlets killed Epstein stories.
This seemed inevitable after the New Yorker article yesterday detailing how Ito and his team hid Epstein's involvement from the university, which had disqualified Epstein as a donor.
Taking money from a dirty source is one thing; hiding it from the university because they've blacklisted that person in particular is about as unforgivable a crime as you'll find in academia
> Taking money from a dirty source is one thing; hiding it from the university because they've blacklisted that person in particular is about as unforgivable a crime as you'll find in academia
TBH, I've never heard of a blacklisted donor at MIT, so I'm a little surprised (pleasantly, as an alum).
I'm confused by the blacklisted donor thing. The first questions I had when reading about it was "when did he end up on this list?", "why did he end up on it?, and "how big is this list?"
It doesn't seem like any of the journalists even asked. That sounds like a very interesting story in and of itself.
Yea, I suspect his prior conviction for “solicitation of prostitution involving a minor” may have played a part. But, the details could be interesting.
I'm just spitballing here, but if someone is involved in delivering millions of dollars' worth of donations to you, it would be reasonable to perform a basic background check on them, just to guard against huge potential PR problems. I doubt that they do the same over, say, $500 donations from random people, but once you're into the millions of dollars, you really need to know who you're dealing with. Background checks are used in many situations involving much smaller amounts of money (like entry-level jobs), so why not here?
Hi. According to MIT Epstein donated ~800k over 20 years, looking into a sudden large donor makes sense, but AFAIK there wouldn't have been anything to find 20 years ago.
Certainly possible, but it would be interesting to understand the timeline and reasons. The "keep this donation anonymous" would take on an entirely different meaning if it was prior to the prohibition, for example.
I remember similar stories about people who took money from Harvey Weinstein, for example there was an AIDS nonprofit he gave millions to.
It all highlights the difficult job facing people tasked with taking money from donors in this way. They won't always have 20/20 hindsight. They may learn about sketchiness after they already took the money. They may be so blinded by what they see as generosity and good will that they may be less able to see character flaws. I am not saying any of this happened here, but I would not like to be in a position to make these decisions.
Anyone care to explain the down votes? I am not defending anyone implicated, or claiming knowledge of specifics, but saying that vetting donors in a world where the category of "criminal-philanthropist" is a thing probably gets difficult.
You should read the article and https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer... and then ask yourself whether concerns about learning something retroactively are relevant to a situation where the problem was not just known in advance but established to the point that Ito had to circumvent MIT’s existing ban. Follow by considering whether bringing up generic distractions which don’t apply to this specific case is going to read like a good faith debate about the ethics of philanthropy or an attempt to distract or minimize.
You appear angry at me. I didn't argue anything in bad faith or attempt to distract anyone. Nor do I think the thing I said is totally irrelevant. There is a generic thing to be said about the "criminal-philanthropist" concept, it is a topic that many of us have not considered until stories in recent years, which seem to be a trend of more than one such offender, brought it to the forefront.
Note that I said “read like” — nobody in this thread can know what you were actually thinking what I described is the most obvious way I saw that those comments would be interpreted in a down-vote worthy manner. It might be useful to clarify your intentions to avoid that, especially since there are a lot of people who feel betrayed right now.
I didn't downvote you, but if I were to guess I would say people don't think discussion of the situation where a recipient might not be aware of the donors criminal activities is very relevant to this case. Epstein's felony conviction was public record and known to MIT.
Good. Here’s a particularly damning passage from Ronan Farrow’s New Yorker article [1]:
> According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.
> On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”
Ito worked with someone whom his staff suspected of continuing to traffic women — right there in their own office.
He also enriched himself from this relationship. From this NYT article:
> Mr. Ito acknowledged this past week taking $525,000 of Mr. Epstein’s money for the lab, as well as $1.2 million for his personal investment funds.
Sorry, I don't get it. Somebody having assistants who look like models and are from Eastern Europe is suspicious of trafficking women? How? Why?
I have heard about Epstein, obviously with hindsight all sorts of things he did can be seen in a new light. I just don't understand what is so damning about the passage above.
Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be more of a secret affair.
That Epstein was problematic --- something that in essentially no doubt at this point after his indictment, imprisonment, and subsequent suicide --- was so well-understood to the Media Lab team at the time that they were considering intervening to help Epstein's escorts, on the off chance that they had been trafficked. That is not a position most people's bosses ever put them in, but it's what Ito did to staff at the Lab.
If your point is "they probably weren't trafficked at least in the lurid sense we mean when we talk about trafficking", sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Ito's collaboration with Epstein was not incidental, but rather deliberate, overt, and actually disruptive to the operations of the Lab.
That sort of rests on whether the women were 'trafficked' in any meaningful sense. If they were not then the media lab team were being judgemental and unpleasant even though they did turn out to be right about his character. If they were then everyone involved is potentially at moral fault, irrespective of who was accepting what.
The greater story of this scandal has parts that should never have happened and parts that were fine. Giving money to MIT and visiting with a bevy of attractive women is eccentric - crass even - but not troubling. The scandal isn't Epstein's giving it is that he was running a child prostitution ring.
Why are there inevitably people who want to do the mental gymnastics of assuming innocence for a man convicted of sex trafficking?
I understand assuming innocence the first time someone is accused of anything unsavory because mistakes happen. But once you are convicted, serve jail time and are suspiciously behaving in the same manner...
Who are we serving by assuming innocence?
And let me remind you that in society we have different standards than a court of law. A court of law has to assume innocence, in public we might be doing another human being who is a potential victim great good by expressing concern about the nature their relationship with a known felon & abuser.
Mental gymnastics to avoid assuming bad intent without evidence is the only way to avoid becoming a deranged mob. This is a healthy instinct and you damage our ability to have rational discussions by attacking it. Until we get more evidence, and given that there is plenty of actual evidence of wrongdoing in other areas, let's focus our attention there, shall we?
At point in time in the story Epstein had already pled guilty to solicitation of a minor for prostitution as part of a sweetheart plea agreement avoiding sex trafficking charges. This was a well known fact. Noone should have been assuming his innocence then.
> Why are there inevitably people who want to do the mental gymnastics of assuming innocence for a man convicted of sex trafficking?
This is extremely good question that I continue to be unable to find an answer. Much bigger case than Epstein would be that of Donald Trump. Everyone knew he is a six-time bankruptee, posted record $1B (billion) dollar loss with IRS and haven't made any of his many business ventures successful, other than add some to the real estate fortune that his father left him, but nothing too spectacular (growing $400MM to $600MM in two decades, which adjusted for inflation is probably close to zero). Yet the consensus of 2016 was that he is the only man capable of steering forward a budget of the most valuable country on the face of planet Earth. Its boggling my mind, frankly.
> Yet the consensus of 2016 was that he is the only man capable of steering forward a budget of the most valuable country on the face of planet Earth.
To be fair, more people who voted didn't think he was the best choice of a person "capable of ..." than thought he was. He only won thanks to a) a quirk of the American electoral system and b) his opponent also being historically unpopular, by nature of having been in the public eye on one side of the US political system for 25 years.
> He only won thanks to a) a quirk of the American electoral system and b) his opponent also being historically unpopular, by nature of having been in the public eye on one side of the US political system for 25 years.
I can certainly agree with b) but a) is not a very useful way of looking at things. if you went back and changed nothing else about the election except making popular vote the win condition, hillary clinton would obviously have won. but this small modification would have totally changed the campaign strategy of every candidate. people who didn't bother voting might have voted. donald trump might have won anyway with a different strategy. we might not even have been choosing between trump and clinton in the first place!
not saying the electoral college is good, just that this isn't a strong argument to the contrary.
I get part of the impulse. The concept that attractive Eastern European women spending their time with a billionaire means that they were trafficked somewhat strips them of agency. Like "you wouldn't do this of your own accord". Maybe they would.
Of course, in this case, the fellow turned out to be a monster. But Sir Richard Branson is on the level AFAIK and he hangs out with attractive women. Presumably they enjoy the company.
EDIT: I can't answer the threads below because I've been timed out for making this comment. Fair enough, but I should clarify: My point is _precisely that_. It's the child prostitution that's the problem. You can just point at the "solicitation of a minor" thing directly. Making it about the attractive Eastern European women is completely unnecessary and only useful to decry the notion that they may choose otherwise than what the MIT folks would choose.
Innocent of what? Nobody is accusing Epstein of trying to do anything suspect via the MIT media lab. Anyone who thought he'd be wandering around MIT dragging trafficked women around with him is probably hypersensitive. Or Epstein was outrageously foolish. Either way; the reasonable assumption is that those women were probably not trafficked.
The argument here is "nobody should associate with Epstine" vs. "We can isolate the good and the bad parts of Epstine's actions and keep them somewhat separate". There is no need for someone to resign because they happened to know Epstien in a professional capacity.
> That sort of rests on whether the women were 'trafficked' in any meaningful sense. If they were not then the media lab team were being judgemental and unpleasant even though they did turn out to be right about his character. If they were then everyone involved is potentially at moral fault, irrespective of who was accepting what.
That is an odd position to take. We have the benefit of hindsight. Even if these particular women weren’t being trafficked, the staff’s general suspicions about Epstein were borne out.
Not to be nit picky, I'm genuinely not well versed in "moral fault" and I am interested in learning more. So if they ended up being trafficked, the staff members who tried to figure that out and offered assistance if they were would be at moral fault as well? Could you elaborate a bit on that?
I'm sort of assuming that if they were trafficked the staff members didn't do anything about it; I haven't paid a lot of attention to the story but I don't think it was tip-offs from the MIT lab were important to Epstein's arrest.
I can't edit the original comment, but to clarify: that passage is damning to Ito (and Cohen). The MIT staff were justified in considering the possibility that Epstein's assistants were trafficked, given his prior indictment and plea bargain admitting to procuring underage prostitutes. Ito and Cohen knew what they were doing was shady, as evidenced by their attempts to hide their dealings with Epstein from the university at large, which had placed him on a donation blacklist.
I'm an Epstein Absolutist and feel Ito should have resigned way before Ronan Farrow's article was published, so yes, I think this is all very shady. I don't generally think people have a moral right to hold on to prominent directorships like the MIT Media Lab --- when you take that job†, I think you also undertake an ethical obligation to leave that post as soon as it becomes reasonable to say that your continued presence is a distraction or disruption from the mission of the organization. We crossed that threshold weeks ago.
† Not all jobs! Just jobs like "Director of MIT Media Lab", where you're stepping into a high-profile role that you don't otherwise own or have some other moral claim on.
> when you take that job†, I think you also undertake an ethical obligation to leave that post as soon as it becomes reasonable to say that your continued presence is a distraction or disruption from the mission of the organization
While that's all well and good when it's an issue you agree with, would you be willing to apply that standard in the other direction? If Joi Ito had created a controversy by standing on principle for something you believed in, would you say the same thing?
My point being that you cannot divorce the distraction/disruption from the ethical view of the action itself. Many things are disruptive, but some disruptive things are ethically important. We do not want to discourage prominent figures from taking controversial stances simply because it might distract from the mission of their organization. At least, I don't think that's a healthy thing to do in an untargeted way.
I think people who accept high-profile positions don't have a moral right to retain those positions. It may not always be the case that they have a moral obligation to abandon them at the first sign of trouble; the analysis will always be fact-specific. Here, I don't think there's much doubt. Ito should have left weeks ago. He had to know this was going to happen; the last few weeks of drama have come entirely at the Lab's expense, seemingly as a long-shot gamble that Ito might weather the storm.
> I think people who accept high-profile positions don't have a moral right to retain those positions.
I'm not really sure what this even means. Everyone has some moral right to the position they're in. The question is how much.
> He had to know this was going to happen; the last few weeks of drama have come entirely at the Lab's expense, seemingly as a long-shot gamble that Ito might weather the storm.
This is sort of the crux of my point, though. Your original argument which you seem to be backing off of is that controversy alone is a distraction, and therefore he ought to step down because he caused controversy. And the fact that he caused controversy is certainly unequivocal.
What is equivocal is whether or not he did something wrong. And that is the true issue on which the rectitude of his resignation turns. It seems to me that he probably believed he didn't do anything wrong, and as such had a moral right to retain his position because he believed he did nothing wrong. Not that anyone in a position of power should resign as soon as they cause a stir.
This is, essentially, control fraud. Ito was spending the Media Lab's attention, focus, reputation and researchers.
I'd like to think that this would harm Ito's reputation, but fully expect him to be installed somewhere cushy soon enough. This likely makes him more attractive to a certain type of employer.
To put it another light, consider Steve Jobs’s Vice President/cross the Rubicon speech about reasons not mattering. When you take on an executive job like this, one of the major job responsibilities is to resign for the sake of accountability when something terrible happens, regardless of whether it’s strictly your fault.*
The other parable is the one of Write Two Letters.
* Clearly, Ito was very much at fault in this instance. The coverup!
Epstein was connected to many high profile, wealthy, and politically connected people. If he went to trial, his connections to these people may be exposed, and they may face legal liability.
There are a number of suspicious circumstances regarding Epstein's alleged suicide. In no particular order:
* Multiple bones in Epstein's neck were broken. This is possible in a suicide, but broken bones are more consistent with a homicide. [1]
* Multiple video cameras malfunctioned outside Epstein's cell coincident with his death. [2]
* Epstein's guards, who were supposed to be regularly checking on him did not. They were "asleep" before, during, and after Epstein's death. They later falsified records about this fact. [3]
* The explanation for the failed video cameras and the sleeping guards is that the MCC is under staffed. Yet, that's at odds with the fact that there was only one other suicide in the past 40 years at the MCC [4].
I try to think about how I would regard Epstein's death if it happened in a history book, in a foreign country.
"There was a guy who had material implicating numerous powerful figures. While he was being held in prison, recently released from suicide watch, isolated from his former cell mate in a cell by himself, cameras failed, his guards stopped checking on him, he became the first suicide in more than a couple decades by hanging himself by kneeling so forcefully against his bed sheet [5] that he broke multiple bones in his neck."
I don't think, if I were reading about this at a distance, that I would have any real doubts about considering Epstein murdered. The idea that Epstein's suicide is as simple as alleged strikes me as preposterous.
Because he had already been convicted before and was (as Swenson learned previously, as you can read in the op cited new-yorker article on the issue) banned from being a MIT donor for this reason. Context matters.
Because Bush-appointed US Attorney Alex Acosta (until recently Trump’s Secretary of Labor) made an illegal plea agreement to let Epstein off the hook and cover up the details of his criminality. https://www.miamiherald.com/news/state/florida/article226577...
Some extremely rich and powerful men were among Epstein’s child-rapist co-conspirators, so there are strong pressures on law enforcement officials to sweep the whole thing under the rug.
Not everyone works from the same knowledge base. OP could have heard about Epstein in passing, per se, and not known about his extensive criminal history or previous arrest/trial.
I only know about these things from Reddit posters and not much else. There is probably a whole host of information you and I do not know about him; it's important to be aware of your blind spots but also the blind spots of others.
I've read about the first half, which didn't mention that Epstein was already convicted for sex trafficking by the time he arrived at MIT in that story.
It didn't occur to me that he would be walking around freely doing deals if he had already been convicted.
I didn't have the information that he was let off the hook and there was also no indication I should google for something like that. What search term should I have used?
You read the first half of what exactly? From the subtitle of the article you responded to:
> New documents show that the M.I.T. Media Lab was aware of Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender, and that Epstein directed contributions to the lab far exceeding the amounts M.I.T. has publicly admitted.
What did you think "Epstein’s status as a convicted sex offender" meant? Are you earnestly confused, or are you trying to get a rise out of me?
That is the original article this while comment thread is attached to. It doesn't mention existing convictions in the first half. I didn't read the article the comment I replied to linked to.
I am not a robot. I can not simply recursively read the whole internet.
I was curious about the supposedly "damning paragraph", not about the whole article. The paragraph was quoted in the comment, so why should I read that article?
What exactly are you implying, anyway? What game do you assume I am playing?
My interest here was in how people judge other people, not in Epstein's exploits specifically. I don't see what I would gain from reading that article.
I would be interested in what made the Media Lab guy do it.
I suppose many people are confronted with an opportunity for "unethical gains" some time in their lives. Maybe the Media Lab guy simply weighted things in his mind and thought it was worth it, to keep the research going, finance his researchers, or whatever.
I would be interested if it would be wrong in all cases. Like maybe (hopefully) Bill Gates is clean, and via shady Epstein MIT could get clean Gates money. OK or not OK?
Like what - what should I have googled for? "Why did MIT staff suspect Epstein's assistants to be sex trafficked"?
I was replying to the comment about the "damning paragraph", so I assumed the damning parts would be in the paragraph, not in the back story. Therefore, I didn't see the need to Google.
>Sorry, I don't get it. Somebody having assistants who look like models and are from Eastern Europe is suspicious of trafficking women? How? Why?
In that it's extremely common. In the gritty real world, people know of such guys and what they do. Many have personality men such gentlemen and their entourages (of course most not at the level of Epstein, but frequent some circles in Eastern Europe, Russia, Paris, London, Italy, etc, and you'll meet such guys, no doubt in Asia and L. America too), and know what "assistants" who look like models and are from Eastern Europe sum up to...
Of course it won't be as evident to someone in rural Iowa, or growing up in the boy scouts, they'd need to have things spelt out for them...
>Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be more of a secret affair.
At such meetings like at MIT usually no.
But shady rich guys with political/drug/mafia/trafficking connections take their women (even underage or barely legal) all around, in restaurants, boats, nightclubs, business deals, parties, etc. And not just criminal/underworld types: this even includes world leaders, like Berlusconi, all kinds of royalty, rich moguls, etc...
In some countries you can't throw a rock in a public event without hitting one such...
Yeah, sorry about that. Couldn't you figure out that I was talking about the proverbial Iowa and boy scout (e.g. "not a worldly type"), and not necessarily the actual one?
> "I live in the gritty real world. Now let me tell you about my international experiences with the ultra wealthy, you hick."
How do you tell the difference between the sex-trafficked, forced-into-servitude eastern european model-assistants, and the eastern european models who see an opportunity to make a lot of money and a lot of connections, and take it?
I strongly disagree with the notion that this is something you need to personally witness to recognize. The dynamics involved in an old rich man surrounding himself with very young women are not something that requires much life experience at all to pick up on.
The people who are blind to it are probably willfully blind, not naive. (Excepting young children of course.)
In general, old rich men have no special powers over young women. It seems conceivable that usually, they choose to be around him of their own free will.
Otherwise, please explain what special powers old rich men would have over young women.
>Otherwise, please explain what special powers old rich men would have over young women.
The power that comes from being rich, well connected, parading powerful friends (even judges, politicians, financiers, and so on), aides, bodyguards, the means to have them beaten or killed if you want to, and so on? The power to get them fired from their jobs? The powerful to do "Eyes Wide Shut" level shit to them and them knowing it?
Or you expected some magical power that applies to every old rich person in any situation between them and a young woman?
So you assume every time young women are staying with an old rich man, they have been extorted to do so?
Sorry, that seems extremely unlikely. I find it shocking that you think that way.
Just because somebody is rich also doesn't mean they can simply destroy other people's lives at will.
Btw I have personally witnessed for example young women courting old professors, who certainly didn't have any power to destroy their life. They did have some power to further their career, though.
Expect: yes, I think in most cases it is simply that the young women expect some advantage from the rich guy. Maybe just material things, or maybe just more fun. Maybe they enjoy riding on yachts more than riding on skateboards, or whatever.
Is the critical thinking "Epstein did bad things. Therefore, everything Epstein did was bad"?
Critical thinking can tell you there is a higher chance the women were sex trafficked considering the employer and his immoral proclivities. It can't tell you if they actually were or not.
1) If a powerful man who has been accused of sex trafficking
2) shows up with two girls less than half his age,
3) who are from eastern europe (while he is an American, not exactly where he'd get girlfriends or assistants),
4) he passes them of like his "assistants",
5) while they look like models,
6) and they make everybody uncomfortable to the point of telling them to signal whether they're there against their will
then critical thinking says he's more probably than not indeed sex trafficking, and there's something really shady in his relationship with the two girls...
Not, "they're surely just his assistants, nothing to see here, why would anybody consider anything else going on without some written testimony, a full confession and perhaps lab evidence?"
This thread is amazing. Epstein could have confessed to personally trafficking children from the former Yugoslavia (an actual thing that Blackwater was involved in, btw), and if he showed up 5 years later with a couple of barely legal Eastern Europeans in tow, there'd be commenters ready to insist you never can tell for sure!
So you say "no", but then explain how critical thinking leads to "then critical thinking says he's more probably than not indeed sex trafficking". How is that different from the statement "Critical thinking can tell you there is a higher chance the women were sex trafficked considering the employer and his immoral proclivities" except putting that higher chance at >50%?
Sorry, but 1) is really the only valid indicator here (and it wasn't mentioned in the story). Otherwise you are denying attractive young women from Eastern Europe the ability to get work in the US.
I reckon it's a comment on your unwillingness to consider the context in this conversation. Epstein was a sex offender who had been convicted of raping children and he comes in flanked by young women, possibly children. Isn't that suspicious?
>How do you tell the difference between the sex-trafficked, forced-into-servitude eastern european model-assistants, and the eastern european models who see an opportunity to make a lot of money and a lot of connections, and take it?
There's not much difference between the two camps, especially if the "models" are just teenage girls from some Eastern European village or pre-adult girls (as low as 14) from broken poor families as he lured in the US, forced into it for the money or lured with promises of exposure, and often given drugs, beaten and passed around to "friends", and not professional models with actual (even if small) careers that saw an opportunity to make more money...
You might not know all this from mere looking, but you can see a lot of dynamics in direct play, especially if you know more stories about the same person...
(Also, I'd paraphrase the "summary" you did, more like "These things might not be obvious to some people without such exposure, but they do happen all the time in certain circles/countries/etc, and many people can tell when such shit goes on". Oh, and it doesn't have to be "ultra wealthy" at the Epstein-level, you can meet lower rent versions of such types at all scales, down to your friendly local scam rich from e.g. real estate, or construction, or political affiliations, or some state-given monopoly, etc).
Some of the things you mention are different from the others (drugs, maybe lies). But overall, in my opinion you are taking away too much agency from the women. It is too easy to blame somebody's actions on "manipulation". That would be a wildcard to accuse anybody of anything you want.
Having young girl-friends is not the same as sex trafficking, though, or is it? I thought sex trafficking would be luring girls out of their country with false promises, then burning their passports so that they can't flee.
I wouldn't consider it overly weird if rich guys have young girl-friends. Maybe it is just because Hollywood has groomed me to expect it, I don't know.
>Having young girl-friends is not the same as sex trafficking, though, or is it? I thought sex trafficking would be luring girls out of their country with false promises, then burning their passports so that they can't flee
Well, that pretty much sums up what Epstein did.
You don't even need to burn passports, you can psychologically manipulate, threaten, beat up, hook on drugs, pass to friends, parade your powerful connections (event to the law), explain how they have no alternatives, and so on.
Especially if you're a ultra-rich mogul with personal guards and powerful friends, and they're some teenage girl from some poor eastern european family that you promise money or to get "exposure", and so on...
"psychologically manipulate" - isn't that just a loaded way of saying "convince"? Did he actually do all those other things, beatings, threatening? Or is it such a stereotype that it is just assumed that it must have been this way?
Sure, "convince". Lots of predators convince kids into the abuse through pretty normal persuasive techniques, and the same to keep them quiete. It's not all knife to the throat kind of stuff. In fact, the vast majority of abuse is that soft sell long term grooming "convince" approach.
>"psychologically manipulate" - isn't that just a loaded way of saying "convince"?
"(...) The girls he allegedly abused were largely from troubled backgrounds, either in the foster care system, from broken families, or below the poverty line".
-- and as young as 14 year old, at that. Does "convince" really apply?
>Did he actually do all those other things, beatings, threatening?
(...) Multiple women say they attempted to refuse Epstein, but to no avail.
“I was terrified and I was telling him to stop,” said Araoz, recounting one visit during which Epstein raped her.
“If I left Epstein … he could have had me killed or abducted, and I always knew he was capable of that if I did not obey him,” another alleged victim, Virginia Roberts, said during a hearing.
Why are you going out on such limbs and repeatedly defending Epstein and his child sexual abuse in this thread?
I'm struggling to understand your motivations. This should be a clear and obvious case of someone who was really fucked up, did fucked up things, and deserves nobody in polite society defending him.
And yet here we are having this discussion, somehow.
There are degrees to this. The burning their passport thing is certainly in the black side, but there are plenty or dark shades of gray before you get there.
I haven't looked into his case. What was his method - what did he do, so that the girls couldn't call for help?
I think classically they are made to be illegal (no passport, have perhaps committed crime of prostitution, so they think they can not go to the police). Is that also what Epstein did?
You seem to think that if people aren't under lock and key, they aren't being coerced. Which rather misses the wider spectrum of coercion. It could, for example, simply be a guilt trip about how poor their family is, how the extra money he was giving them would help. They wouldn't want to make their family starve, would they? Or not. There's no end to the possibilities.
Why not? Your initial comment in this discussion was an hour and a half before this one, and was in response to somebody linking to an article containing many of the relevant details.
Because my comment was about the cited paragraph, not about Epstein. I had no reason to assume Epstein was already known as a sex trafficker when he visited MIT. It would be a very weird assumption - why would the head of MIT Media Lab meet with a convicted sex trafficker?
I have no issues with him being forced out of his position. I have an issue, in this sub sub thread, with people mandating that I should have considered that head of Media Lab would openly meet a convicted sex trafficker.
Because it's weird for a 60 year old dude to be traveling with unrelated women who are under the age of 18?
Why are you so incredulous that people would assume the worst when the guy had a reputation and the girls looked way too young to be traveling the world with the sleazeball?
Paragraph said nothing about the girls being under 18. It says "young women". Also didn't say anything about his reputation (at the time the story took place).
Epstein was clearly a pedophile. Even at the time in question, it was already quite clear that he was a pedophile. So that's what's so damning.
Trafficking of young women from the former Soviet Union is a complicated issue. During the collapse, and well into the 90s and mid 00s, many people were desperate. Literally starving, with ~no public services. And many criminals took advantage of that, recruiting young women for work as models, nannies and prostitutes. Plus of course all of the websites for Russian etc brides.
And that's still happening, because many areas are still very poor and chaotic. And Epstein clearly took advantage of that. Along with many other Americans, mostly in less abusive ways.
Generally, people who recruited destitute young women in legitimate ways would have no reason to hide that. Wives, nannies, servants, models, etc. So I guess that Epstein was just trying to maintain a pretense of legitimacy.
Edit: Here's a personal example. Indirectly through family, I knew a young woman who made it to the US in the late 80s. She'd been trained as a restoration artist, and the demand for that collapsed along with the Soviet Union. But once here, she worked for some years as an exotic dancer.
If they didn't know he was sketchy why did they go to such lengths to obscure the origin of his donations? If you are rich and you really want to make an anonymous donation (perhaps out of humility, perhaps to avoid solicitations from other worthy causes) you hire a lawyer and direct them to submit the funds on your behalf.
The world isn't TV, you might be surprised what people can get away with in plain sight.
When you're supplying these girls to British royalty, politicians at every level, certainly law enforcement of various flavors, and plenty of generic rich people (VC/finance, old money, Donald Trump, etc.), yeah, you might kinda get the idea that you're operating with impunity. Because you are, especially when you have blackmail material on all of them.
Even young East European models have to work somewhere (at least some of them). (Paragraph called them "young women", not "teens", btw).
Should young women only be allowed to work for poor people, if they are attractive? Or maybe only for other young people? I don't think that would be a good rule.
I don't think it would be enough for an accusation. Of course with the background that Epstein was already known as a sex trafficker, it is a very different matter.
Relevant to that quote, it's important to point out that this kind of influence peddling fell apart, not when Epstein himself got caught, but when enough people at a high level decided they didn't want to be part of it. Ito himself clearly viewed himself as a kind of fellow traveller in Epstein's world (no idea if that involves sex trafficing! That's not my point!). Gates did too.
But Signe Swenson wasn't as willing to put up with that, even if she couldn't personally stop it. And by 2016, she was in the room too.
You can look at this through a "fuck the patriarchy" lens or insist on the fact that this was just people being people. But at the end of the day this is why diversity matters. Epstein's lures only worked on hetero men, and he fell when faced with a world of influential women.
In which case it would be really useful to have some strait dudes at the table when discussing the gay pedo's contributions, no? I think you agree with the point, just not with the particular identities in the example.
This is gossip, but it’s well founded gossip as I am one or two hops away from him. Epstein was very upfront with the people he worked what that he liked “young woman” while giving them money and invited them to his parties etc.
I think it was his way to enmesh them and make them unwitting partners in his systemic abuse. Most people just went along, and were eventually given a massage from a child at his behest to further enmesh them into the conspiracy. No one could play the innocent whistleblower because of their tangential complicity.
> In the early ‘90s, at a Joan Rivers dinner party, my wife and I encountered Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of disgraced British publishing mogul Robert Maxwell and Epstein’s girlfriend for a brief period in the '90s. She has been accused of recruiting and grooming girls and women for Epstein; she denies this. I’d met her several times with Epstein; we were also “friends,” in that transactional Manhattan way. And might now become better friends. “If you lose 10 pounds, I’ll fuck you,” she said, with my wife standing next to me. And she too became dead to me.
> As his legend grew, many others were fascinated or amused or impressed by Epstein or simply delighted that he wrote checks to their charities. His interest in young women was no secret; Donald Trump famously applauded it in 2002. Vicky Ward, who published a long profile of Epstein in Vanity Fair in 2003, recently revisited transcripts of her interviews: “What is so amazing to me is how his entire social circle knew about this and just blithely overlooked it . . . all mentioned the girls, as an aside.”
It’s why he was so disgustingly coy about what he did. It’s why Ito, who is quite smart, probably knew what was what. And it’s why he deserves his fall from grace.
I'm not sure if this is self-aware or not, but Ito's fund is called:"Neoteny", meaning "the retention of child-like attributes through adulthood". Apparently, Epstein's funds / projects were named with innuendos. (edited)
Ito reminds me of Epstein in that I have no idea how either got their money.
Wikipedia must be skipping over some important details, but it describes him as a two-time college dropout, a nightclub manager in Japan, (EDIT: nevermind, mystery solved! His MIT bio says he was the founder of Japan's Digital Garage and CEO of its first ISP [1]), then he's the president of MIT Media Lab, visiting Harvard Law School professor, on several boards of directors, and runs a VC fund.
I'm not implying he got his money by nefarious means, just that it's interesting to see people who find success (and in this case, downfall) within these institutions despite their unconventional backgrounds.
Beyond the business stuff, he was basically Japan's first Western-style (Wired, Mondo 2000, etc.) New Media personality. Back in the early 90s he also took form as an action sports impresario, techno culture maven, and theorizing gadabout.
Aside from this MIT issue, Joi is a very impressive person who earned his money honestly against great odds. Joi was treated as an outsider in Japan and still managed to become successful. I’ve known him personally and found his story to be inspirational. Not defending any of the behavior at MIT but it would be sad if this is how he’s remembered.
I have only read about him but he seems very talented. He represents the think-outside-the-box attitude that characterizes some of the best Media Lab work and he's very good at raising money, which is critical for the person in his position.
That said maintaining the connection with Epstein in spite of repeated warnings was unconscionable. Joi Ito needs to step down and think hard about what he's doing. Not every rule is meant to be broken.
From his MIT Media Lab bio: In Japan, he was a founder of Digital Garage and helped establish and later became CEO of the country’s first commercial Internet service provider.
Probably netted him enough to set the rest in motion. Still, landing professorships at MIT and Harvard without a college degree is pretty wild.
and/or a random portfolio investment of one of the VC funds he is an LP of
and/or a lottery ticket
and/or employment from multiple sources and picking stocks
and/or a particularly lucrative real estate holding
and/or it probably wasn't linear at all just like your wealth probably doesn't materialize linearly either
so doesn't that make this whole discussion rather odd and clickbaity? I saw similar articles regarding Epstein and thought "thats not how any of this works?"
if I was ever put under similar analysis nobody would know anything accurate, they would just google me and see a big crowdsale I was on the executive team of and saw that it collected several million dollars and assume "thats how I made my money" even though they have zero transparency on who was paid what and how, or how the organizations made its revenues or not, or the investing patterns and homeruns and leveraged losses I had - which resulted in a useful exemption from capital gains tax on my next homerun, and would have zero information about what partnerships I'm part of, what hedge funds I'm invested in, how any of those things perform, etc.
In my own memory, at the time Ito was best known for having a gee-whiz style tech blog. Then for some reason he got hired to manage MIT's Media Lab -- a real head scratcher.
Joi was a behind the scenes player in a lot of successful Valley startups. Once someone reaches investor level it’s impossible to fully understand where their wealth is generated because it tends to be diversified. But he was a very well connected and respected technologist and investor who pretty much pursued whatever his interest were at any given moment, read his blog and you’ll see that it was pretty diverse.
I'd guess by this point, he'd already made some money as a tech founder and CEO in Japan. He was apparently an early investor in Twitter, which was founded eight days after he wrote this blog post.
Among other things, before joining the Media Lab, Ito had served on the boards of the Mozilla Foundation and Creative Commons (where he was also Chairman of the Board).
No, 'neoteny' doesn't "usually" mean "animals with childlike features", but rather "the retention of juvenile features into adulthood".
It's conjectured that a lot of humanity's advanced intelligence & culture has been achieved with the help of our species' extended retention of juvenile learning-capacity & neural plasticity:
In the other thread, people were saying "I'd take Epstein's dirty money and do good with it."
But the problem is that doing so normalizes the behavior. Everybody who has doubts about working with the creep looks around the room, and when they don't see anyone else objecting, ends up thinking "I guess we're all ok with this behavior" and goes along to get along.
That doesn't sound quite right. If everyone did it, there would be no correlation between funding and reputation and power, and there just wouldn't be much reputation for someone to try to launder in this way.
But everyone doesn't do it, and so we have this norm about how if someone X is an investor of Y, then some of Y's reputation transfers to X -- we assume Y did due diligence on X for us.
The problem exists because accepting morally tainted money isn't a norm. (I'm not arguing that it should be!)
> Everybody who has doubts about working with the creep looks around the room, and when they don't see anyone else objecting, ends up thinking "I guess we're all ok with this behavior" and gets along to go along.
Let's be honest - a lot of people in the tech community and related subcultures (particularly genre fandoms) are either ok with, or are ambivalent towards, this behavior, or have a lack of empathy which leads them to view things in purely game-theoretical terms.
It's a trait that I've heard derisively referred to as "engineer autism" in some circles, though I doubt the literal truth of that description. But whatever it's called or ascribed to, there seems to be a genuine underlying trend of some sort. It's a topic I'd like to see defined and addressed; as tech becomes more important to society the pathologies of engineer types become more and more socially relevant as people with those traits acquire more power and status.
I suspect that's at least a large component of it. It might also be reversed; kids who have trouble socializing pick up tech hobbies that are more conducive to a low-social lifestyle. It might be one or the other depending on the individual, or it may be that one exacerbates the other.
I don't see evidence of that--Epstein seemed to be fairly well accepted and even chummy with the Media Lab management. Nobody consciously says "Hey this is a thing we do now--hang out with child traffickers as if it's normal" but that was the end result.
I believe normalization, in this anecdote, would be whether or not Epsteins' behavior encouraged other people to engage in similar or like behaviors.
In other words : normalization occurs when something is spoken of casually and without second thought -- nearly every illegal facet of Epsteins' behavior was done behind closed doors, a testament to everyone's knowledge that what he was doing was indeed against the law and abnormal.
There is precisely zero need for assumption here. The only way Epstein's behavior could have been more in the open is if he were advertising screenings of the "home movies" he made with these girls.
When you continue to associate with that guy, you're saying, "People who do that are okay with us." That's normalization. Especially when, say, your day job is as the head of a pretty damned prestigious institution like Joichi-san.
There is, in principle, no difference between this situation and all of the museums and whatever distancing themselves from the Sackler family and their opioid money. You don't get to white-wash killing tens of thousands of people for profit by having a new museum wing bear your name, just like you don't get to wash your hands of trafficking children for sex, just because you funded some AI research.
Just because he has been convicted before doesn't mean this time he did it again.
Thats for the police to figure out.
I disagree, even if its proven he did it, taking money and hanging out with child trafficker doesn't mean one condone the practice of the trafficking itself.
Sorry let me rewrite that, hanging out with child trafficker doesn't mean normalizing child trafficking. What makes Child trafficking normal is if the law enforcement doesn't do anything.
>What makes Child trafficking normal is if the law enforcement doesn't do anything.
I am trying to understand all the mental hoops you are going through right now to write that sentence in the midst of marijuana legalization right now.
From "reefer madness" to now, the accepting of marijuana came directly from people working with, socializing with and being exposed to people smoking weed despite the fact that law enforcement pummeled millions of dollars and jailed an immense number of people for carrying insignificant amounts of marijuana. Law enforcement did an absolute shitton, and marijuana was still normalized.
Hanging out with child trafficker, and accepting money from them and inviting them to your private events is normalization. You are saying to the world, that despite it being well known that this guy has been shown to have some socially objectionable character, that he is someone that you are totally ok to have around. Whether its drug-use, sexual orientation, or anything else.
In regards with marijuana, more and more people disagree that it should be illegal therefore its harder and harder for law enforcement to prevent it.
With child trafficking, very rarely people want it to be legal.
>Hanging out with child trafficker, and accepting money from them and inviting them to your private events is normalization
Yes, it is normalization. The normalization of hanging out with child trafficker and accepting money from them.
Note that is different than the normalization of child trafficking itself.
There are could be many reason one want to associate with child trafficker that has nothing to do with child trafficking itself, likewise with taking money.
Your marijuana point makes no sense. Now your logic is circular --
1. Normilization is when the police stop enforcing something
2. More and more people started to disagree with the legal status of marijuana
3. It became hard for police to enforce drug laws.
You are now arguing that step 3 is normalization. What do you call step 2? I think most would agree that step 2 is normalization, and its effect is step 3. If step 2 is not normalization, then what is it?
Remember - people truly believed marijuana caused people to murder and rape people all the way back in the 30s. In terms of public perception, it wasn't too far from child trafficking.
>Note that is different than the normalization of child trafficking itself.
It's not - you cannot remove those two. You can take parallels to how LGBTQ are portrayed in media. People credit Modern Family - which featured a homosexual couple - as normalizing homosexuals in our society, but you are making the claim that is"only normalizing homosexuals on tv." Thats ridiculous - the two are inexorably linked. It's not what happened.
It showed people that if you are gay, you no longer have to live in hiding, that people will accept you, and you can live this "happy sitcom" life.
If I am a child trafficker, and I see this guy Epstein shaking hands and kissing babies with a top academic, how is that not sending the message that "hey we know you kidnap kids, but we don't mind, come to our dinner"? Isn't that normalization?
Normalization is when the occurrence something increase so that it become common.
In regards in marijuana, More and more people started to disagree with the legal status of marijuana is not because the police lessen their enforcement but because people marijuana is not dangerous anymore. So yes you can say the step 2 is the normalization.
In the regards with homosexual, the analogy is : many people disagree with act itself but still fine hanging out with them. Because they the act of hanging out with homosexual and the practice of homosexual itself is a two different thing. This may normalize the act of hanging out with homosexual but not necessarily the homosexual itself.
If I'm hanging out with a child trafficker, does that increase the number of child trafficking to occur ?
While that could increase the number of people who hanging out with a child trafficker but not the child trafficking itself. The number of child trafficking increases when the law enforcement stop doing its job.
Note that child trafficking is still illegal but hanging out with child trafficker is not.
Please take some effort to improve your understanding of the notion of "social norms", how they're enforced, and how they evolve.
I promise you, a person in a position of prestige or power openly, willingly associating with — even benefiting from — someone who is known to have committed a transgressive act is definitional of normalization.
3. Normalization of people who commit transgressive acts.
Once again, for the nosebleed seats: this whole argument is about how the Media Lab's taking Epstein's money, and welcoming him on the premises, conveys the message, "Well, he can't be that bad."
Remember how we follow the behavior of people more than their words, in determining what is and isn't acceptable? When people tell us one thing, and behave differently, we pretty reliably follow one of those over the other.
So it does not matter how many times anyone says Epstein was a shitty guy who behaved shittily. Every single word is utterly undermined by the press release photo of him and Joichi-san smiling and shaking hands, or whatever.
EDIT: So, while normalizing the person isn't directly normalizing the behavior, it's also kinda a distinction without a difference. A person who wants to behave like Epstein has been shown that he's still able to be socially accepted, even at the very highest levels of society, even if he does the thing that brazenly.
How, exactly, is that not normalizing the behavior? In what possible way is that not all kinds of "Eh, whatever..." over something so egregious?
> 3. Normalization of people who commit transgressive acts.
This could happen if the law enforcement let it happen. The question you should ask is why he is not already in jail since the transgressive act in question is already is illegal.
Media Lab is not in position to put someone in jail or charge someone a crime.
the HN comments on all the recent Epstein stories have been very strange.
I have to assume at least some of the more contrarian views are coming from people who haven't been following the full story in the US news, and so don't quite grasp the nature of the allegations. The case is far from just "some rich guy turned out to be an abuser".
If you can't understand why the reaction is so strong against those who maintained ties with Epstein, it's worth looking into the full story, perhaps starting with the Miami Herald's "Perversion of Justice" story last year.
I think it is simple to understand common understanding of criminal justice when no one asks where was Michael Jackson’s servants when he decided to spend private time with terminally ill children.
I think it's reasonable to agree that Epstein is a despicable person who should be maligned, ostracized, and punished for his misdeeds… while simultaneously believing that it's possible for there to exist a situation in which the good done by "maintaining ties" with this person could outweigh the bad.
Of course, this depends on the nature of those ties: How much good are they doing, versus how much bad? If it's possible to do that cost-benefit analysis, we might as well do it, because why not?
In this particular case, I have no idea how much additional good the Media Lab was doing as a result of this money. Thus, it actually is impossible for me to do the cost-benefit analysis, because I don't know the benefit side of the equation. But I can enumerate some of the costs:
- It contributed to Epstein being able to feel that he's accepted by society and can shameless appear at meetings and such, in public, with reputable people, despite engaging in despicable behavior. Alternatively, ostracizing him would've sent a strong message and perhaps contributed to a change in his behavior.
- It signaled to people at large that Epstein is a good guy who donates to charitable causes. (This was somewhat mitigated by keeping the donations anonymous.)
- It signaled to people at large that it's okay and normal to work with people who do despicable things. (This was also somewhat mitigated by keeping the donations anonymous.)
- It risked to the Media Lab's reputation if discovered, thus hindering the organization's ability to do more good in the future.
- Other things I'm leaving out?
So clearly a ton of bad. And I'd guess the bad outweighed whatever good was done, given that many people who were working within the Media Lab were opposed to accepting the donations.
But I don't know if it's as simple as "if the guy is bad then always say no full stop." That seems like an oversimplification, and not necessarily the best way to analyze it.
Makes me think that in the future these organizations are still going to accept the money but bring in a "fall guy" to accept the blame when the anonymous donor is found out.
I don't think Joi would have done this personally. He's a smart guy.
> I don't think Joi would have done this personally. He's a smart guy.
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding, but are you saying there's a conspiracy to cast Joi as the fall guy and he's going along with it? I highly doubt that's the case.
He may be smart, but that doesn't automatically make him ethical or socially aware. It also appears he gained quite a lot personally by dealing with Epstein.
Why would Bill Gates need Epstein to be the middle man for his $2 mil donation? Why didn't he just donate to the Media Lab directly?
And given his insistence that the donation be made anonymously, it seems like he was well aware the optics would be bad if the public knew there was a connection between the two, and yet he chose to make the donation through Epstein anyway.
Even though we won't find out more, this Epstein issue has given us a tiny glimpse to the mechanics of the plutocracy we really do live in.
It's pretty clear that for certain individuals higher up in the social hierarchy than most of us will ever see, Epstein offered a very exclusive service. And was part of a world of that we mostly think of as fiction. Similar to when the Snowden leaks happened we all saw that "yes, the government really does perform mass surveillance on the population", we are now seeing that "yes, the extremely wealth do play by completely different rules and shape our society in complex ways".
But we won't see much more. Joichi Ito is probably the least powerful person caught up in all this, and him and people like him provide the public retribution we all want to see. We'll see the justice has been served, and return the illusion that this was just a strange aberration rather than the status quo.
Probably the most astute comment on this entire thread. In particular the willingness of putatively skeptical and inquisitive people to accept the most transparent, dissembling excuses from the likes of Gates has been quite a sight to see.
Bill Gates has given many times personally to the Media Lab secretly. He gave on this occasion on Epstein's request. To him, this was just a financer asking if he could give some cash to the Media Lab, considering Gates had donated before, AFAIK.
Its hard for me to believe the emails were lies but I guess it is possible that Epstein lied to Ito about the money coming from Gates? Unless the money came from Gates' account and wasn't first transferred to an account controlled by Epstein, it will probably be hard to tell.
Many philanthropists will say "I wish to donate $X", and then ask a friend/group/organization, "Where would you like me to donate this?", hence a "directed donation".
Gates is denying Epstein was involved in this donation at all, despite the emails. Plus, Gates was well aware how unsavery Epstein was given his insistence the donation be made anonymously.
I didn't see anywhere in the article explaining the Gates wanted the donation to be anonymous. It looks like Peter Cohen of MIT wanted to not mention "Jeffery's name as the impetus for this gift."
This certainly doesn't look good for Bill Gates. I have trouble believing that Ito was lying in his 2014 email concerning the Gates donation. Possibly, he was mislead by Epstein but I can't think of any reason Ito himself would lie.
As someone else commented about a different aspect of the article, I'm doubt we will ever learn more.
The involvement of people like Gates and Hoffman, for whom Epstein's money was effectively chump change, certainly does pose the question of what else he was bringing to the table for people with that level of wealth.
I don't think that thread shows that Hoffman defended Ito, despite the author's claims. I'm basically willing to take Hoffman's responses at face value. Clearly there was an ongoing investigation, as demonstrated by Ito's resignation today. When news broke about Ito and Epstein last month, Giriharadas was pretty far down on the list of people who Ito needed to answer to (since he was just part of what I imagine to be a mostly ceremonial award committee.) I see evidence that Hoffman didn't think Giriharadas should be dictating the course of the investigation, but not evidence that Hoffman tried to impede in any way. After all, this same Disobedience award went to #MeToo activists last year...
Ultimately, this thread does feel a lot like the author making a dreadful scandal about himself.
This isn't the only dodgy behavior that's been reported about Hoffman in regards to Epstein. It's also been reported that he hosted a well attended party in Silicon Valley where Elon Musk introduced Epstein to Mark Zuckerberg. We will probably not see much more on this thanks to the plutocratic wagon circling that baron_harkonnen talks about, but it's naive to take Hoffman's statements at face value here.
>Clearly there was an ongoing investigation, as demonstrated by Ito's resignation today.
That's not clear at all, at least if you're talking about an investigation conducted or commissioned by MIT. Ito's sudden resignation seems likely to have been prompted by the damning New Yorker article published yesterday. Another commenter posted the email sent out by MIT's president today, which refers to yesterday's New Yorker article and indicates that the university has just commissioned an investigation in reaponse to it.
Adjacent: that’s well-written PR spin from the Gates’ camp:
> “Epstein was introduced to Bill Gates as someone who was interested in helping grow philanthropy. Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true. And any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grant making for Bill Gates is completely false.”
Note the part “Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively” which implies that Gates was a victim or at least an uninterested party in this affair. If that is true, why then cough up $2 million dollars via Epstein? Why does it matter if Epstein was aggressive or not if Gates wrote the check?
Some follow-up questions that Gates should answer to clarify his role:
1. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein regarding the $2 million donation to the MIT Media Lab?
2. What correspondence or communications did Gates have with Epstein since his conviction in 2008? Best option would be to list all of the times Gates (including any representatives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) met with or liaised with Epstein since 2008 - including via any intermediaries or third parties and electronic communications.
3. What is the definition of business partnership in Gates’ above refuttal?
4. What is the definition of personal relationship in Gates’ above refuttal?
PR and disaster management ‘gurus’ often wordsmith their clients’ way out of these affairs.
Gates should at least clarify his role here. Otherwise, his position as a philanthropist also seems tainted.
> Why does it matter if Epstein was aggressive or not if Gates wrote the check?
To respond to concerns that the two were spotted together frequently. This is an answer to a question. Figure out the question and you will understand.
Surely Bill Gates hires big burly men who can enforce his personal space. I find it hard to believe that Bill Gates could earnestly be the victim of such hounding for more than a brief moment.
Some lawyers I know were in Seattle to take depositions for a big lawsuit they were on. They went to dinner at a restaurant, and then went out to get a cab back to their hotel.
A bunch of other people were leaving at the same time, and people going in the same direction were agreeing to share cabs so people would not have to wait as long.
They were about to get in to the cab with one of the other diners who was going in the same direction and agreed to share, when they realized that other diner was Bill Gates.
Since Microsoft was the defendant in the lawsuit they were taking depositions for, and they were lawyers for the plaintiff, and were in the midst of a fight with Microsoft's lawyers over whether or not they could depose Gates, they realized sharing a cab with Gates was probably not a good idea, so waited for the next cab and let someone else share Gates' cab.
Not too long ago someone posted this: https://www.wired.com/story/joi-ito-ai-and-bus-routes/ Basically, Mr. Ito describes his role in torpedoing a change to bus routes that would have had significant benefits for most students in a school district. He wrote a shitty op ed about it and got the plan cancelled without ever interviewing the people who had designed it. He had thought they hadn't engaged the community, but in fact there was a lengthy community engagement process that led up to the plan. The parents who were mad were wealthy parents who would have had slightly less convenient bus schedules.
Anyway, in this retrospective he never apologizes for his blunder. I'm not really sad to see him go. He seems like a bad character.
>Mr. Ito has been a board member of The New York Times Company since 2012. The company did not immediately comment on Mr. Ito’s decision to leave M.I.T.
This is the 7th paragraph in the story. Shouldn't it be higher up?
I'm curious about Media Lab. They setup a branch in Dublin way back and it was such obvious and painful BS. But overall have they produced interesting work? At all?
> But overall have they produced interesting work? At all?
Yes, quite a lot. (In the American sense of 'quite', not the British...)
Just look at what has come out of the Life-Long Kindergarden lab, and see how many things you recognize. Historically the Media Lab has done a lot of very creative things. A person could spend a happy lifetime doing nothing but following up on ideas that started there.
This is a bad episode for the Media Lab, for sure. But don't paint all of the researches within with a scarlet letter because of it.
It’s the same with Harvey Weinstein and it was the same with Jimmy Saville in the U.K. Everyone know, but they made rich, influential people richer, so they were covered.
Just look at who Epstein and Weinstein have been photographed partying with over the years...
An entire system that incentivizes and absolves this behavior at all levels. I’m serious. This is what power and wealth do: they allow you to break the rules that the rest of us plebs have to abide by.
> “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”
That same future president being quoted in an article about Epstein in 2002.
To the members of the MIT community,
Last night, The New Yorker published an article that contains deeply disturbing allegations about the engagement between individuals at the Media Lab and Jeffrey Epstein.
Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation. This morning, I asked MIT’s General Counsel to engage a prominent law firm to design and conduct this process. I expect the firm to conduct this review as swiftly as possible, and to report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.
This afternoon, Joi Ito submitted his resignation as Director of the Media Lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute.
As I described in my previous letter, the acceptance of the Epstein gifts involved a mistake of judgment. We are actively assessing how best to improve our policies, processes and procedures to fully reflect MIT’s values and prevent such mistakes in the future. Our internal review process continues, and what we learn from it will inform the path ahead.
Sincerely,
L. Rafael Reif
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