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].
I read a few more of Xeni's tweets, and wanted to get HN's honest opinion on them. It seems (to me) like a lot of people on Twitter (and HN?) are over-reacting.
For example, Xeni's pinned tweet references this other tweet (https://twitter.com/xeni/status/1165266579560521728), which implies that anybody who was ever at a dinner with Epstein should be considered complicit in Epstein's crimes. Take this quote, for example:
> I would like to not be sued or disappeared, but I would also like people to seriously register the fact that Amazon and Google CEOS/Founders were at the gathering alluded to in this Twitter thread. Their names are in the screen grab. Don’t sue me please. I have no money.
This seems to imply that anybody at this dinner (that Epstein) was complicit. Other attendees include Daniel C. Dennett, Steven Pinker, Marvin Minsky (yes, that Marvin Minsky!). Is it just me, or does that strike anybody as an overreaction?
It just sounds like you haven't been paying attention at all. Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island?
Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express" and helped with Epstein's legal defense, a legal defense that led to him avoiding a prison term in a manner that seems aptly describable as "corrupt"?
If you were not aware of these things, please engage in some honest introspection regarding how you ended up decrying attempts to reach justice for them as overreactions on the Internet.
> Are you aware that a woman has claimed that she was forced to have sex with Marvin Minsky by Epstein on his island?
Yet the her deposition does not actually make that claim, but rather that she was directed to approach Minsky for sex. A third party witness reports that that he turned her down and was apparently complaining about the incident. https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/339725/
If you were not aware of these things, please engage in some honest introspection regarding how you ended up decrying attempts to constrain overreaction-- and potentially defaming an innocent person who isn't around to defend themself-- and allow a calm deliberative process to search for actual justice.
Why should we believe Benford? How do we know there weren't other incidents?
Given Minsky's well-established long-running ties to Epstein, I don't think we can afford not to believe the allegations against him. I find it especially painful because I was once a student in one of his courses, it was a great experience and I didn't suspect a thing about him - but you never know.
You could start with because the claim Minsky went along with it was never offered by the accuser in the first place!
There is something to debate about how far you should believe accusations without investigation or evidence ... but this isn't that, this is jumping to hysterical ends without even an accusation being made, assuming the worst about someone whom-- as far as I know-- no one had even the slightest concern about, even in the face of contradicting evidence. It's an area that deserves more investigation and inquiry, but as far as I can tell-- that's it.
I don't know how to see that as anything but a straight up witchhunt where no one targeted could ever be found innocent.
My above comment is now, I think, my highest upvoted HN comment ever, even though it is a striking contrast to most of the posts in this thread. I suspect a lot of people are afraid of challenging the witchhunt.
Even if everything Benford said is true and there were no other incidents, Minsky still knew that Epstein was pimping young girls out at his conferences and kept taking Epstein's money and attending the conferences for years afterward. That's awfully damning.
> I don't know how to see that as anything but a straight up witchhunt where no one targeted could ever be found innocent.
Perhaps literally no one partying with the (confessed, convicted) pedophile and his suddenly definitely-consenting-and-of-legal-age entourage was innocent.
Where are you getting the idea that Minsky knew any of it was at Epstein's direction or that she was underage?
The description by Benford was that at Epstein's event a young woman explicitly propositioned Minsky, he rejected her advance and was put off by the experience enough to remark to Benford about it.
It might well be that there were additional details-- that the offer was "Hi, I'm 17 and my boss says I need to have sex with you", or what not, and I'd agree with you if that were the case-- but no one there has suggested this yet.
Nothing obligates you to take the most charitable interpretation, but if you're going to claim you are doing so you ought to actually try.
I'll grant you that it sounds like it should have been inescapable to Minsky that Epstein surrounded himself with women where there were huge age and power imbalances, to the point of it being obviously creepy. But the same could be said about, say, Richard Branson or Donald Trump. It's a big jump to go from your original allegation of Minsky engaging in statutory rape and prostitution to 'he had to know that this guy running events for him was at least a bit of a creep'.
Maybe once investigations happen and disclosures are made it turns out that Minsky really did partake in those awful things but at this point they haven't even been factually alleged, much less persuasively demonstrated.
I don't believe you responded cjbprime's point here at all.
To make it 100% clear: the most sympathetic reading of Minksy's defense seems highly implausible: that he noticed and objected to prostituion of girls on Epsteins island in 2002 and subsequently, after Epstein's public conviction for trafficking girls and after encountering prostitution on Epstein's private island the first time, he still decided to host a different conference on Epstein's private island, this time in 2011.
The reading of this accusation is: if we allow that Minsky decided prostitution on Epstein's private island objectionable the first time, we are forced to ask how objectionable that could really be given that: it can't have mattered to him enough to go to a different venue for his 2011 conference.
Other relevant factors include how close Minsky and Epstein were. I believe Minsky's name and contact details appear in Epstein's black book; which certainly doesn't establish guilt, but should equally certainly justify at least some amount of suspicion.
The fact pattern for the plea agreement would lead one to conclude that Epstein could have been convicted for trafficking, and there certainly were rumors. It seems as if Epstein and his associates took everything rather lightly, which is something that the criminal justice system does not reward?
We are just now learning facts, many testimonies were sealed. Even the plea agreement was kept from the victims. Many victims are just now becoming aware of the existence of other complaints. Yes he did terrible things, but the full extent wasn’t clear to most people, including the media who continued to interview him after his conviction.
Epstein’s plea agreement is something Epstein had access to, he could have provided it to others on request. Epstein’s crimes being something others didn’t care about seems even more extraordinary when the worst crime in high society seems to be associating with Trump, at least according to Dershowitz.
If a bunch of underage girls were unexpectedly present, and obviously had nothing to contribute regarding artificial intelligence, then 2002 Minsky can only conclude Epstein (as the organizer) welcomed the underage girls, or else Epstein (as the organizer) would have thrown them out. It's on an island, it's not a small town music concert where girls can jump the fence to skip entrance fees... they would literally have to swim to the island in order to ... attend an AI conference? Everybody present must have known what the girls were for.
How do you explain his experiencing and concluding this and repeat by asking Epstein for another conference?
Why are you assuming any of the guests knew they were underage as opposed to just young?
Why are you assuming that the guests in general knew they were there there for any other reason than the waitstaff at hooters is there for? -- To host the event and be attractive.
If things were as you seem to imagine them, why are the victims who have come forward not even alleging that?
One of epstein's victims said that they were directed to offer Minsky sex ( https://twitter.com/_cryptome_/status/1159946492871938048 ... and yes, I did indeed look before sharing the link to Benford's comment, did you look before spreading defamatory conjecture? ). That's it, wrt Minsky. They didn't say they did offer it (though a third party did). They didn't say they had sex with minsky. They didn't say Minsky or other guests knew they were underage, or that minsky knew they were involved in prostitution.
Beyond repeated proximity to epstein there has been no specific allegation of wrongdoing by Minsky that I've seen, but there seems to be plenty in the imaginations of the posters here.
Maybe it turns out those things happened but if they had you would expect them to have been mentioned in the allegations. Maybe they'll be alleged later-- nothing wrong with that. Until they're at least alleged, however, I think it's pretty absurd, and frankly extremely unethical, to just assume them out of absolutely nothing. Hell, if there was a victim saying "Minsky was a really bad man" I would have said nothing about the further speculation, it's only the utterly reckless outright fabrication from peoples perverted imaginations that I thought deserved any rebuke.
>One of epstein's victims said that they were directed to offer minsky sex. That's it. They didn't say they did offer it (though a third party did). They didn't say they had sex. They didn't say Minsky or other guests knew they were underage, or that minsky knew they were involved in prostitution.
>Beyond repeated proximity to epstein there has been no specific allegation of wrongdoing by Minsky that I've seen, but there seems to be plenty in the imaginations of the posters here.
>Maybe it turns out those things happened but if they had you would expect them to have been mentioned in the allegations. Until they're at least alleged, however, I think it's pretty absurd to just assume them.
With your karma, I would expect you not to:
1) retroactively change your upstream comment to reply to my downstream question
2) retroactively link to cryptome where you previously didn't, in response to my questioning if you even invested the effort to dig deeper
what bothers victim(s) beyond compare is not just perpetrators in denial, it's also those who blindly support people in high standing claiming there is no evidence while making no effort whatsoever to locate such evidence.
I would certainly agree if a potential victim of Minskky made a single twitter post claiming she had been "directed to have sex with Minsky" would look like some very misleading innuendo without actual claim of what happened subsequently.
However this is not what happened, you blindly follow Benford's conclusion, who is in turn citing the NYT, who is in turn summarizing an unsealed deposition. An unsealed incomplete deposition I should add, assuming the NYT isn't seeing the same incomplete deposition I am seeing. The choice of wording only appears suspicious because it is ripped out of context.
People like you are triggered by the seemingly suspicious choice of words "told to have sex", correct?
Did you or did you not before reading this comment actually even try to locate such a deposition? I don't know.
Part of me thinks you did, because you seem absolutely certain she only claimed to have been directed to offer Minsky sex. "That's it" in your words. How are you so certain? Do you have access to the complete depositions? If so, please share.
On the other hand, I think you didn't try to locate and read the depositions, because then you would have realized 1) there is nothing suspicious at all about the choice of words and 2) that in all likelihood, probably such a thing did happen.
Let me clarify 1) and 2), but first let me point out that incomplete depositions can be had at cryptome:
Let me clarify 1) the circulated choice of wording "directed / told to have sex". This is a case between Giuffre vs. Maxwell, so obviously a lot of emphasis is placed on Maxwell's role in the underage prostitution scandal. Testimony needs to establish the facts that Maxwell directed these children as a third party to have sex with clients or targets. If the testimony merely said the child had sex with Minsky, then it would inaccurately leave out the fact that this was under Maxwell's (and indirectly Epstein's) direction. That's it. Your whole weird-phrasing-must-be-a-form-of-insincerity theory rests on the simple fact that her testimony is being ripped out of context (namely court proceedings in a case between Giuffre vs Maxwell.
2) regarding whether it did or did not happen
In the zip, go read pdf pages [144-149], note that those boundaries correspond to jumps in the deposition pages 128->203 and 208->247 so they are incomplete (as nearly all depositions in this dump). If you have the complete depositions, again, please share.
EDIT: a question to anyone who knows: I know the PDF file format allows for previous versions of a document to be contained within the PDF stream, but I am not sure how to extract or revover these, the reason I ask is because the file sizes are far from proportional to page numbers, so if anyone knows how to inspect this let me know.
> then 2002 Minsky can only conclude Epstein (as the organizer) welcomed the underage girls, or else Epstein (as the organizer) would have thrown them out. It's on an island, it's not a small town music concert where girls can jump the fence to skip entrance fees...
Aside, It's a tangent because what happened to the victim was crap regardless of their age... But, the conference referred to was in April 2002, and the victim was born in August 1983, so they were of age at that time. (I didn't comment on the underage thing earlier because I think it's a distraction to point out that it also looked like they were technically of-age-- it's always possible that there were other earlier interactions, but that's pure speculation and I don't see why anyone should assume such a thing unless someone makes some kind of accusation of it)
>...the victim was born in August 1983, so they were of age at that time
How do you go from "the victim", to "they were of age"?
You are replying to a comment that does not name a specific victim, the comment questions Minsky's choice to have his AI conferences repeatedly held on an island with groups of unsupervised underage girls, with pictures of topless underage girls scattered around the compound:
This contractor worked there for 6 years starting from 1999 which means its representative of 2002
Also reread carefully what I wrote in my other comments, I never claimed it was Giuffre who probably had sex with Minsky, the deposition can contain testimony from other witnesses as well.
The public discussion about Minsky stems directly from a particular deposition that mentions him, without it I don't believe there would be any more discussion of Minksky+JE than there is of, say, Hawking+JE. This same deposition is what is discussed in the article Benford commented on.
I acknowledged the possibility that there were separate incidents at other times from what Benford mentioned, as well ("it's always possible that there were other earlier interactions, but that's pure speculation and I don't see why anyone should assume such a thing unless someone makes some kind of accusation of it")-- but was pointing out that if it was a was assumed up thread then she would have been of age at the time. From the description in her depo, she would have been a victim regardless of her age.
I've preferred to avoid using her name gratitiously because having idiotic internet discussions showing up in searches forever utterly sucks-- it can feel violating, with the public assuming ownership of your identity against your will.
I was of the impression that it was absolutely clear what depositions we were talking about-- I don't see how you could think it was anything else. Unless I missed something, the only other mention of Minsky in the depositions was a pilot that listed him as a person that was brought to/from the island.
Edit: according to The Verge (obviously citing the same testimony discussed in another comment) is from Giuffre, and a witness corroborates the account. That would have been in 2001, when Giuffre was 2001, so before the conference, validating my questioning
1) how Greg Benford knows positively that Giuffre is the same girl he saw at the event
2) how Greg Benford can exclude any other events: i.e. Giuffre and Minsky possibly having had sex before the 2002 conference.
>>“In a deposition unsealed this month, a woman testified that, as a teenager, she was told to have sex with Marvin Minsky, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, on Mr. Epstein’s island in the Virgin Islands. Mr. Minsky, who died in 2016 at 88, was a founder of the Media Lab in the mid-1980s.”
>Note, never says what happened. If Marvin had done it, she would say so. I know; I was there. Minsky turned her down. Told me about it. SHE SAW US TALKING AND DIDN'T APPROACH ME.
So irrespective if people were at times in private rooms, or at times in public spaces, people got opportunities to witness the presence of these girls. If she could see him, he could see her.
These people will not be the first biological organisms to be reanimated: that would entail too much risk as a guiny pig.
More probable is that before trying to reanimate any of these Alcor members, the technology of uploading will need to be tested (at least on animals first) to verify the upload conserves the episodic memories of the biological original.
This means time will pass in the interim, and regulations will have time to adapt to such new realities.
An obvious conundrum is the concept of time in law. If you can pause a person's life and then continue it, what about crimes commited before the pause? How does the statute of limitations then apply?
It is entirely foreseeable that legislative bodies will decide it is the subjective experience of time that counts: punishments are of a reformative nature, and a person who did not evolve between his crimes and his apprehension has not reformed.
So yes, in such a future it will be a frequent occurence to accuse the dead, and there should be no shame in that.
So even if a victim of a reanimated person is by then older than a perpetrator of some crime, or if the victim is already dead, it is still in the interest of society to punish and reform the criminal.
People who laugh at the plebs and don't worry about crimes they commit in their quest for immortality (thinking that the ends justify the means, thinking they will have the literally last laugh) may be sourly surprised when they wake up to discover things don't work like that.
If privileged people go down like this even without enough proof or contradictory claims (I don't think this is the case, but the user you are replying to seems to believe that), then you certainly should worry about it. It may well happen to anyone else, privileged or not. It's not only a problem for the privileged.
I’m 38 and afaik nobody has ever sent me underage women for me to have sex with them, that way I could have boasted to an external third party that “I refused”. When you’re 88 years old (so when biologically sex is one of the last things you should be thinking about) and when one of your close friends “sends” you an under-age woman that only means that that close friend of yours knew what you liked and what you were into. And make no mistake, Epstein was a friend of Minsky.
And I don’t buy this “it could happen to you, too”, because, again, afaik not me not anyone of my close friends has been sent “underage girls” as “gifts” (for one reason because we don’t befriend paedophile pseudo-billionaires).
> ... that only means that that close friend of yours knew what you liked and what you were into
That's the only possible explanation?
Perhaps Epstein wanted to ensnare Minsky in a situation that could be used to coerce him. That's consistent with Minsky turning her down, unlike your version.
What’s there left to coerce in an 88 year old who had been pretty happy to take photo shoots with Epstein before and whom the same Epstein had in his pocket based on the potential financial donations alone? All I’m saying is that Minsky’s influence was at that point behind him.
I’m saying that when a close friend of yours sends you a child to be raped then I assume that that close friend of yours knew that you liked raping children, orherwise he would have sent you something else or nothing at all.
Lucky you. I am 38 myself, it happened twice in the last year, both times only to make me complicit. The guy is in prison now, though for an unrelated matter and the girls are fine, albeit still digging for gold (but at least on their own terms).
Not on specifics, but the scheme is the same: Sugardaddy brings girls to party, invites his "friends". Somebody takes pictures and suddenly you are not just "friends" but "best friends forever" with police, state attorney and judge.
Please forgive me for presupposing that your life is nothing close to the lives of the people we are discussing here and your intuition is not a useful model for figuring out what is normal and what isn't.
So how do I go about finding out if someone is convicted of anything?
I just googled how to get someone's criminal record and the answer is basically: you can only get your own criminal record, because of privacy. If someone else, for example an employer, wants your criminal record, you have to get it yourself and give it to them.
I know a few people who are easily 10x more powerful than I am. In your experience, how can I best approach them to have them give me a copy of their criminal record?
You don't. If they require any restricted contact with the general populace they will be either incarcerated or have restraining orders. If you believe the person should forever be in societies debt I guess the death penalty is more practical. (the last sentence is in sarcasm)
> Are you aware that Pinker has flown on the "Lolita Express"
(1) This happened in 2002, (2) Pinker didn't know Epstein personally at the time and the ticket was booked by his literary agent, (3) the flight was to a science-related event in California and included other scientists who were also booked by the same literary agent.
Simply saying, "Pinker has flown on the Lolita Express" and leaving it at that is an intentionally misleading attempt to create a false image of what happened in the reader's mind.
> Pinker… helped with Epstein's legal defense
Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard alongside Pinker, represented Epstein in that case. Pinker is a linguist. At some point Alan asked Pinker for his opinion about the semantics of a law, Pinker gave it, and that opinion was cited in a court document.
Again, it's intentionally misleading to simply say that Pinker helped with Epstein's legal defense that led to him avoiding a prison term.
This is one of the worst things about the Internet -- people happily joining in on witch hunts intended to destroy other people based on no more information than a misleading soundbite, headline, or tweet.
You're proving the OP's point about overreactions.
> the flight was to a science-related event in California and included other scientists who were also booked by the same literary agent.
That literary agent being John Brockman, who seems to be in as deep as anyone - he pitched "science-related events" to his writers by saying Epstein would be bringing girls!
Alan Dershowitz tends to deny the accusations with unnatural lawyerly wording and odd personal attacks - this has led me to adjust my priors so now I suspect there is a >50% chance that Dershowitz is a pedophile rapist.
Pinker being close to Dershowitz is a red flag to me.
The world is full of defense attorneys. They play a necessary role in our legal system, and I would generally hope that they defend their clients with zeal. This doesn't make them noble and good by any means.
But to claim that a defense lawyer being lawyerly means they are >50% likely to have committed the same crime as their client is questionable, to say the least.
The human tendency to direct our ire and malice in an ever-outwardly expanding circle of blame-by-association is exactly what feeds lynch mobs.
I'm talking specifically about the allegations that Dershowitz committed rape, not his actions as a defense lawyer.
I encourage you to read his statements and decide for yourself whether his refutation is credible - I find his insinuation that the accuser was attempting to extort him implausible.
I've been shocked to see in the past few years how common it is for nothing more than the implication of some unqualified 'association' between people/groups to settle folks' minds on some issue or other.
That some vague association exists between people/groups at most creates a demand for more information—it's a type of statement characterized by the giant hole in its front and center. Further, it's a type of statement whose information content is 100% latent until the hole is filled. It is a prompt for investigation—not an indictment of any kind.
Note: I have no comments on the particulars of this situation (in fact everything I've read leads me to believe a lot of people with varying degrees of guilt are being rightly exposed)—I'm only commenting on the general structure of stance-taking, information sufficiency, and valid argument forms in general.
I think what’s interesting is the question of how powerful people may be knowingly covering for one another. We can’t say from them being at the gathering that they for sure aided in Epstein’s crimes, but it might warrant further investigation.
It seems that a lot of people are of the opinion that Epstein did not get due punishment for his crimes and whatever jail time was given to him he tried everything to reduce it's severity by using his money.
This is true but instead of acting or speaking out against these loopholes in the justice system which to be fair are exploited by every rich/influential person convicted of a crime, what is happening is that people have got out the pitchforks and they want to burn everyone who ever associated with Epstein. A mere association or even a suspicion of association is being equated to a crime. This is not justice this is a mere knee-jerk reaction to the inadequacies of the justice system and will do more harm than good.
This is mob justice, I agree, but will do some good in the long run. It will serve as a reminder to self regulate in the future. If another Epstein comes along there will be visible distancing from him.
There wouldn't be a mob if the DOJ didn't cut him a sketchy plea deal. The failure of the institutionalized process is what has lead to distrust in the institutional narrative about Epstein.
The issue of the two tiered justice system which exists for the benefit of plutocrats is separate from and in addition to the issue of plutocrats associating with a known and confessed child predator, in exchange for god knows what favors. Whether or not they did anything criminal, these individuals' "mere association" with Epstein after his 2008 conviction demonstrates extremely poor character judgment at best, and makes it completely reasonable to wonder whether something more sinister was at work. Why did people like Gates and Hoffman, for whom the amounts Epstein donated were a rounding error, have anything to do with him in the first place?
Marvin Minsky was directly named by one of the victims in documents that were published a couple of days before Epatein’s convenient death, and those documents were mentioning that Minsky had directly sexually profited from an under-age woman. In other words he was a paedophile.
I submitted an article detailing all this stuff on the day of Epstein’s death, it had reached the top links of HN in less than an hour but then it was ominously flagged. I lost a great deal of let’s call it respect for the people that keep this website up, apparently letting other people know that a now dead AI luminary was a paedophile is considered tabu.
Of course it isn't taboo, and the idea that we've been moderating HN to try to "suppress the Epstein story" or whatnot is beyond absurd; it makes one feel a bit sick.
I don't have a link handy but the Minsky connection was definitely discussed here.
I have also noticed HN mods engaged in blatantly political flagging, probably driven by deference to YC's tech industry pals. My link to the Bloomberg article about all the WeWork CEO's utterly scammy self-dealing shot to #1 on the front page, then was flagged by mods as "dupe" even though another link to the article was nowhere to be found. Totally killed off the discussion.
You've noticed no such thing. Users flagging one of your submissions isn't "mods engaged in blatantly political flagging".
The WeWork story has had numerous huge threads—two major ones have been on the front page today alone. With suppression like this, who needs promotion? Ditto for the Epstein story, our only relation to which is nausea and a desire to hold it at the end of a stick, same as everybody else.
Please use the HN search box that appears at the bottom of every HN page and you'll have no trouble finding the major discussions that you're claiming don't exist here.
If only Reid Hoffman, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos had demonstrated a similar desire for remove from Jeffrey Epstein, maybe this forum wouldn't have to grapple with an avalanche of headlines about Epstein's close ties to the tech industry, but alas.
I think it's sad that to even engage in rational discussion about whether and to what extent people were complicit in this, you felt compelled to use an anonymous account. I don't blame you, either, mob justice is horrible.
Far worse, actually. Mob justice is the force behind almost every human on human mass slaughter in history.
It's a far cry short of say diarrhea or malnutrition in terms of actually horrible things that kill millions of people every year, but as human-caused catastrophes go mob justice is many orders of magnitude worse that "pedophilia being protected and normalized." Sure, I'll die on that hill.
"Oh but think of the children."
It's very important to protect rational deliberation, dispassionate pursuit of justice, and truth-seeking behavior in general. Do you disagree?
What is Xeni Jardin claiming? That she brought the story to the NYT but they buried it because Ito was on the board? Why didn't she take it elsewhere?
Edit: I was looking for a bit more context than a random tweet. Had to search through a bunch of tweets to find it, but apparently Xeni tweeted about Joi Ito's connection to Epstein weeks ago.
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.
> NYT, which then buried the story. /.../ Many papers and media outlets killed Epstein stories.
So, I imagine many editors from NYT and many other papers has resigned from their jobs and their memberships in whatever professional organizations, boards, etc. they have been on, because of that? Or the press is not supposed to be held to ethical standard because... well, because they are The Press, so they are above scrutiny?
The NYT has very prominently been in ethical collapse mode for several years now. This is just another in a line of a dozen or so scandals surrounding their credibility, or rather, their no longer existent credibility. They're the biggest joke in mainstream news in the US right now and that's not an easy thing to accomplish while Fox News still exists.
There is zero chance editors and journalists at the NYT resign over this. There are probably some infamous tabloids with higher ethical standards than the NYT at this point.
Sources? I haven't heard of any of these scandals. And even this story could simply be the NYT failing to corroborate the more salacious accusations with more than one source yet, therefore not running them.
IDK about their ethical motivations, but they made serious errors in judgement.
They delayed publishing on Bush’s illegal surveillance because his admin asked them to. IIRC they had the opportunity to break this story before he was reelected and didn't.
See also Judith Miller’s botched reporting episodes.
Interesting to see the choice of the word “prominent law firm” rather than “excellent” or similar... an appeal to reputation rather than ability. Essentially, what Reif aims to do is what Epstein did... salvage his tattered reputation by affiliation with a more prestigious, untainted one.
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.
The original New Yorker article says he was blacklisted after his 2008 felony conviction. I've been told that the CRM software used by university development offices is pretty phenomenal. It was hinted to me that it automatically annotates donor records with SEC stock transaction disclosures, and I wouldn't be surprised if it also annotates donor records with public criminal court proceedings.
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?
Apparently "disqualified" status was a flag in their CRM essentially just meant "don't bother trying to cold call this person", usually set after three failed attempts to fund-raise from them. It in no way signaled any kind of prohibition on fundraising, and only available to development staff in any case. The whole tangent was essentially spurious and signified nothing except that his donations weren't coming in through fundraising cold calls.
Media Lab's acceptance of donations from Epstein was known and approved by senior staff in MIT administration, the president even sent a thank you letter. The Media Lab had been directed by the administration to keep Epstein's donation's anonymous to avoid him using MIT for publicity or to enhance his own reputation.
So this whole idea that Ito was demonstrating mens rea by concealing his actions from the administration appears to be completely false. I find it shocking that MIT took a week to clarify this point.
I'd say I told you so-- but I didn't know, it just sounded a little suspect to me. Your alternative understanding also sounded reasonable enough...
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.
What's wrong with a charity accepting donations from someone naughty? It doesn't make them complicit in their offences. Criminals often donate money to charities and victims in an effort to get reduced sentences, at least in my country.
Let's say I'm some really prestigious organization. By donating to me, a bad actor is in part increasing their own prestige by using my brand. By allowing them to do this I make it more likely that this bad actor can continue to be accepted by polite society and continue their crimes.
There are red lines beyond which a person should be considered socially radioactive and ostracized.
Not to mention the prestigious organization could be doing worthy work and gets tainted by the bad actor, especially if the organization has been seen as knowing about it or concealing it.
In my example of Weinstein, it remains a worthy cause to help people with AIDS, to prevent new infections, fund research, etc. But now maybe people hesitate to donate because of how they dealt with Weinstein.
In the case of media lab, obviously there are people making their career there who have nothing to do with this Epstein controversy. Now they may experience a sense that they are also tainted.
When such an organization turns a blind eye to this problem, they risk harm towards their stated goals and they do a disservice to employees, other donors, those who believe in them, etc.
Didn’t you answer your own question here? Criminals paying money to reduce the penalties from their crimes seems like a net negative for society, even if it helps charity.
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.
In quoting me, you cut off my comments mid-paragraph. That is removal of context. I described several hypotheticals, the hindsight question being one.
Yes we can point at the misdeeds of Ito and others and they are awful. But there is a nonzero amount of people here that could fall into similar traps if they were in a position to accept millions from shady characters, which most of us aren't. If Ito, as bad as his acts were, had full realization of consequences (as he now does in hindsight), do you think he would have done this? I don't know the guy, but I am guessing not.
That is not to exculpate him or trivialize or distract. He screwed up majorly.
Here is one thing. If you want to get technical, without knowing everything we now know about Epstein, I am not sure a conviction is enough. MIT is not the criminal justice system. We now know that Epstein got a light sentence and the guy responsible had to quit his job in disgrace. But maybe not everybody knew this. Maybe he says, "yeah I did this thing, but I served my time blah blah, by the way please take this million dollars". And in the abstract, do you want to stigmatize every single convict or do you believe that some of them are reformed?
Obviously Epstein was not, and MIT didn't want to take the risk, correctly.
In this case, I do know. It the stories were similar, then it was not not knowing.
In others, if you don't know, why does one assumes it was innocent situation that highlight how unclear everything is and required hindsight? It is real question btw, not rhetorical one. The older I am, the more I see how many of much lesser ethical conflict situations have not just red flags all over them, but clear breaches going on long before something blows. And how people like to not act on it all, because it benefits them.
It is possible that innocent people are being framed in that or this situation. But the issues with rich psychopaths building impenetrable circles of enablers around them are not that situation. People willing to go there are given advantages and build further circles of people willing to support them around them too.
> if you don't know, why does one assumes it was innocent
This is the same standard the US legal system uses, for one. "Innocent until proven guilty."
In the case of my comment I thought that it is easy to point out misdeeds but we cannot be overconfident in our own ability to prevent them under exceptional circumstances. If you were given money by a Weinstein or an Epstein, we all hope we could have the good sense to do the right thing. But how much is that actually the case? None of us are actually in that situation; few of us have been tested in this way. We could also be conned by these types. It is instructive to take a step back and understand that part. Perhaps this would help us be more vigilant should the situation actually arise.
The final point I would make. It breaks down a bit for supervillains like an Epstein. But for lesser transgressions, such as those I have seen in my own life, I can say that I used to spend a lot more time questioning people's motives, and indeed labelling people as psychopaths, sociopaths, and narcissists at a distance. Eventually I came to a realization that mentally maintaining these labels and reacting to them was a big stress on me and source of anxiety. It may sound radical, I would argue that thinking better of people by default will lead you to better mental health. But I have not figured out how this policy may apply to an Epstein, Ito, Weinstein, Hitler, etc. Thankfully I think such supervillains are a minority.
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.
the only thing I can figure is that in English vernacular the phrase "I am not saying any of this happened here" generally means "It may have happened, but we don't know" which is different than "obviously this didn't happen here but" which you evidently intended.
Lawrence Lessig just asserted on Medium [0] (without specific evidence) that the anonymization of Epstein's donations was done at the direction of MIT. If true, that loops the Institute generally into the whole scandal, where previously they had an almost bulletproof defense.
The general argument of 'it's okay to take money from bad people as long as that money isn't blood money and you take it anonymously' is hard for me to sympathize with. At the very least it gives that person leverage over you in two ways: firstly by the threat of ceasing donations if you become dependent on them and secondly by the threat of revealing their involvement in your institution.
Agreed, and I would that there's no such thing as "anonymously" except with respect to offical records. All the office staff knew it was Epstein. Donors outside the circle (like Bill Gates) knew Epstein was an agent of the Media Lab collecting donations. There's no meaningful sense of "anonymity", which makes Lessig's description of it as a shield almost comical.
This whole sordid affair and some of the ways people are commenting and writing about it has been one of those situations where I'm taken aback by how differently some people see it to me.
Just... don't deal with bad people if you can avoid it. Maybe your institute's endowment will have to remain at 16 billion dollars instead of increasing to 16.02. If MIT (and the MIT media lab) don't have FU money then who does?
I just don't understand what he would gain from the anonymous donation. Tax deduction? Even for the tax purposes the name of a donor has to be matched with a certain record, right? I probably sounds too naive but I want to know.
Lessig really seems to be glossing over Ito's facilitation of Epstein's power brokering. Just because his donations were 'anonymous' doesn't mean he didn't receive social benefit.
> “Have you managed to talk to many of my friends?” Epstein had been supplying me the phone numbers of important scientists and financiers and media figures. “Do you understand what an extraordinary group of people they are, what they have accomplished in their fields?"
People are complicated. It’s entirely possible that Epstein was simultaneously involved in child sex trafficking and also genuinely wanted to donate to research initiatives he considered important. People can be pretty horrible on aggregate and still have a few good intentions left.
or perhaps the much simpler explanation that it was hush money / hush salary for victim(s) studying, PhD studying or working at Media Lab. What Ito received for himself was hush money to shut up about the hush money...
so why would a smart person like Gates voluntarily pay someone else's hush money? why are we holding Gates (sponsoring his behaviour) to a lower standard than Ito (passing on hush money) if my hypothesis is correct?
The official version in the media makes no sense to me: why would Gates finance Epsteins prestige through this so-called prestige-for-cash scheme? Why would Ito accept the money if the only way Epstein can enjoy the prestige is if everyone finds out about Ito? You can't publically associate while not publically associating with each other...
I do not know this, of all the different explanations I explored this to me is the simplest one that explains most observations, i.e. selecting for maximum likelihood.
For example people have been noting many unusual things: for example that Ito used to run a nightclub, I am not saying he was doing anything nefarious there, but if Epstein is looking for a hushable department heads to place his "expired" victims, one can easily imagine him compiling lists of department heads with their backgrounds, and Epsteins reading of a department head without college degree who once ran a nightclub may explain this as Epsteins preferred choice.
There's a longer writeup analyzing the Ito related news articles and especially Anand's communication with Ito and Hoffman that made me think this:
but the most important observation is in my opinion the inconsistency of Ito being perfectly aware he can't be publicly seen accepting Epstein's money, while at the same time supposedly allowing Epstein to publically brag about his funding MIT Media Lab. Ito would never agree to simple prestige-for-cash since it would deterministically lynch him. No, it's MIT who doesn't want to be outed as doubling for a Cloak of Charity to host a couple of broken souls for cash.
Also consider that Epstein & any of his child abuse clients / blackmail targets, would prefer providing the victims hush money through a cooperative intermediary (who may be lied to that it is mere compensation, from a plea deal, "perfectly legal" etc) for 2 reasons:
1) interacting directly is dangerous: the victim could set up a hidden camera, record conversations, document financial transactions, have witnesses present, or have her bank testify on the origin of the hush money transactions. Financial transactions may be used by the victim as financial acknowledgement of their involvement in a past crime. They want to keep the victim silent without creating an ever increasing trail of evidence.
2) by having the hush money pass through societal institutions, they can continuously undermine the victim's faith in society, to make sure she stays silent.
Also consider the timing of the MIT Media Lab scandal: after Epstein's death, and escalating as the new academic year comes closer and closer.
Upon Epstein's death the victim, department head are worried about what will happen to the flow of hush money. And (ex-?)clients that all payed through Epstein are now forced against their will to find a new intermediary, or interact with Ito directly, or ignore and risk the victim speaking out?
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 thought you were going to mention that comment about Trump saying that Epstein liked "his girls on the younger side".
I think what's interesting is the ethical dilemma here.
You have 1000s of people around you. No one is saying anything. Then they offer you money. Do you take it? Everyone else is? Then the counter to this is that of the 1000s of people that come crashing down why is it just Joi Ito and a few others?
The key detail here is that Joi isn't an isolated "king" like the rest of the people here.
The sad reality is that the only folks who actually "suffer" from shame are those that have the capacity to see the world from a perspective other than their own.
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.
A model from Eastern Europe is someone that does fashion modeling and is from that area. Euphemistically it could be someone from EE that has sex for money, but you don't want to beat around the bush when describing child sex abuse.
So they should either clearly say underage-looking girls or remove that paragraph because it's irrelevant and confusing.
I mean this is a story about child abuse and the author didn't think to ask those women if the "models" looked underage?
This guy was having sex with underage teens and possibly pre-teens, not "models" and not "young women".
Why should the New Yorker remove that paragraph? It’s the observation from someone who became a whistleblower on this matter. She tells the reporter that the situation bothered her staff so much that they suspected the women might be trafficked. Whether they “looked underage” is still conjecture and doesn’t make the situation significantly worse than what the whistleblower alleges.
There are no situations where an 11 year old having sex with a grown adult man isn’t rape.
Sure, some cultures or religions might say otherwise, but at the end of the day it’s just basic ethics.
It is just semantics, but everything in our life is semantics, so words are important. “Having sex” makes it sound casual and like relationship of equals, which it is not.
There are benefits of this style. The whole point of the law is that having sex when not equal is the bad thing, not the inability of a minor to consent.
Here it’s quite common that an 18 and 15 year old who are dating are being relieved from the criminal responsibility because they are considered to be close enough in their stages of development by the judge.
It may be harder to do that if it’s defined via rape. Because how would the development level of the older partner affect the younger ones inability to consent.
Personally I’d rather have this way instead of reading from the news how a married couple has the older one saying they are a registered sex offender because they banged eachother as teens.
> It is just semantics, but everything in our life is semantics, so words are important.
Only if you don't understand the meaning that someone is intending to impart by using those words.
And I'd say that in this case, there should have been zero confusion, and that it was perfectly clear what people were trying to say, so the words used don't 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.
So the only thing that can stop a hetero man is not a hetero man? No. Men who bought into his image were a certain type of person much more narrow in category than hetero man. And so you don't get the wrong idea, I'm absolutely not saying diversity isn't important. It is, for so many reasons, important to have people of diverse backgrounds and experiences around, in positions of authority, at all levels. Just not for this one particular reason of sniffing out predators.
> It is, for so many reasons, important to have people of diverse backgrounds and experiences around, in positions of authority, at all levels. Just not for this one particular reason of sniffing out predators.
You're being hyperspecific here with your disagreement.
I think if start enumerating them, you'll find almost all of those advantages you believe in are isomorphic to "different perspectives prevent groupthink". And alignment with the social world of a hyper-rich sex peddler is absolutely a kind of groupthink, no?
Again, Epstein could have his way with organizations run by horny men. That was literally his scam. And as the article (and others) details, this remained true even after he got caught, because enough horny men didn't "really" see what he did as so bad. But that ended once someone was in the room who didn't see things through that lens. That is diversity at work.
I think you're oversimplifying. You're seeing a single example of a woman standing up here and extrapolating that it was because she was a woman, and assuming that no men were willing to do the same. It's not like she was the only woman to ever come close to his sphere of activity. Also there were plenty of men involved in both the first and second investigations that didn't buy into his schtick, even if his power an influence got him off lite the first time. And his female assistant is reputedly the one who did a whole lot of the dirty work involved in recruiting and grooming his underage victims.
I'm not saying her worldview and background didn't help here. I'm disputing the idea that people of the same gender are unable to do the same. The fact of his multiple investigations points towards plenty of other people likely some female and some hetero normative males played significant parts there. Again, sniffing out sexual predators just isn't the exclusive domain of people with different genders than the predator.
> You're seeing a single example of a woman standing up here and extrapolating that it was because she was a woman
No, I'm taking an illustrative (and, frankly, really apt) example as a way to show readers here (who like you aren't generally very receptive to feminist arguments) the power of "diversity" in a way that makes immediate sense.
I'm certainly not saying that no straight man could possibly have been offended by Epstein. But, just as a matter of historical fact, most of his marks were fine with him, and they were AFAIK exclusively straight men.
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.
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.
* Ito's position at MIT was so compromised that, for the good of the organization, he needed to quit. He had an obligation to do so; MIT didn't owe him his role, but rather he had joined to serve MIT. He was doing so no longer.
* One reason he was so compromised, in my estimation of the available information, is that he repeatedly did something egregiously wrong. Once again: I've never even heard of a boss anywhere else in technology putting their employees in a position where they felt they may have had to intervene --- at the workplace --- to thwart sex trafficking by an invited VIP guest.
The former argument I think is clear and defensible even if you harbor doubts about how bad Ito's actions were.
> * Ito's position at MIT was so compromised that, for the good of the organization, he needed to quit. He had an obligation to do so; MIT didn't owe him his role, but rather he had joined to serve MIT. He was doing so no longer.
Of course MIT has the right to fire him. I don't really understand what you're trying to argue. The question is whether they should have fired him, which in my view is entirely determined by the badness of his actions.
I really cannot see you pursuing this line of argument with the moral tables turned. If the CFO of Chik-fil-a got forced out because it turned out they were supporters of gay marriage and Chikfila's customers didn't like that, would you be making the same point? That that CFO had no moral right to their position?
> * One reason he was so compromised, in my estimation of the available information, is that he repeatedly did something egregiously wrong. Once again: I've never even heard of a boss anywhere else in technology putting their employees in a position where they felt they may have had to intervene --- at the workplace --- to thwart sex trafficking by an invited VIP guest.
I think that's a very unfair framing of the issue. He invited Epstein over. Epstein brought his 'assistants'. It's still a question mark whether they were even prostitutes, let alone prostitutes operating in any sort of non-consensual capacity. What we have here is simply that someone at MIT speculated whether they were being trafficked. There is no evidence at all that their presence was anything other than consensual.
> I think that's a very unfair framing of the issue. He invited Epstein over. Epstein brought his 'assistants'. It's still a question mark whether they were even prostitutes, let alone prostitutes operating in any sort of non-consensual capacity. What we have here is simply that someone at MIT speculated whether they were being trafficked. There is no evidence at all that their presence was anything other than consensual.
How is it unfair? Have you ever been put in a position at work where it even crossed your mind that associates of a guest your boss invited might be sex trafficked? Have you even heard of that happening until now? We are talking about a truly extraordinary situation; can we not agree that if you have to even consider the question, something is very wrong?
The focus on whether or not they were correct about these particular women being trafficked is myopic. It’s 2019, and we have the benefit of hindsight: Epstein was indeed still sex trafficking. This instance may or may not have been an example of that, but ultimately the Media Lab employees’ fears about him were borne out.
Yes, "why do you use 'sex trafficking' term?" is an important question.
Yes: if under "sex trafficking" we understand [consensual] "prostitution", then in some states it is OK.
But even if "sex trafficking" is not ok -- there are various degrees of "not ok".
That is why it is important to use clear definitions in a discussion. Unclear "sex trafficking" term converts discussion from rational to irrational, when everyone is free to imagine what exactly "sex trafficking" means.
1) I would assume so
2) I have no idea what to say about this. The punishment should have been served by the legal system which as we all know failed the first time around. The forced suicide as you call it is a terrible outcome, lots of important people escaped and sighed relief. We don't know what Epstein would have divulged and now we will never know that.
> How is it unfair? Have you ever been put in a position at work where it even crossed your mind that associates of a guest your boss invited might be sex trafficked? Have you even heard of that happening until now? We are talking about a truly extraordinary situation; can we not agree that if you have to even consider the question, something is very wrong?
Of course i've heard of that happening. People speculate all the time that older men out with younger, attractive women are being "trafficked" in the sense meant here. That sense being: they're prostitutes / escorts. Sometimes it's true, sometimes it's not.
> The focus on whether or not they were correct about these particular women being trafficked is myopic. It’s 2019, and we have the benefit of hindsight: Epstein was indeed still sex trafficking. This instance may or may not have been an example of that, but ultimately the Media Lab employees’ fears about him were borne out.
The entire point under discussion however turns on the question of whether or not the evidence of him engaging in this behavior warranted him being exiled by MIT at the time. Not the evidence today.
> Of course i've heard of that happening. People speculate all the time that older men out with younger, attractive women are being "trafficked" in the sense meant here.
That is not the question. Has your boss at your tech job ever invited an important guest to your workplace, who brought associates whom you reasonably thought might be there against their will?
> The entire point under discussion however turns on the question of whether or not the evidence of him engaging in this behavior warranted him being exiled by MIT at the time. Not the evidence today.
No, the discussion is about whether Ito should have known at the time to not work with Epstein. tptacek is also arguing that he should have left once Epstein’s involvement with Media Lab was first discovered, since he had to know the depth of the story.
> That is not the question. Has your boss at your tech job ever invited an important guest to your workplace, who brought associates whom you reasonably thought might be there against their will?
No, and neither did Epstein. They had no reasonable basis to assume these women were there against their will.
> No, the discussion is about whether Ito should have known at the time to not work with Epstein. tptacek is also arguing that he should have left once Epstein’s involvement with Media Lab was first discovered, since he had to know the depth of the story.
I think you just reiterated my point. Yes, the question is whether, at the time Ito should have known not to work with Epstein. Whether the publicly available information at the time was sufficient to justify his exile from MIT.
If we can’t agree that it’s suspicious for a pedophile known for prostituting young girls from Eastern Europe to then show up with two young girls from Eastern Europe, I think we’re done here.
Let me be more clear, then. If Epstein indeed showed up with a pair of 'assistants' that looked like they were underage, that is terrible. If Joi Ito condoned that or failed to act upon discovery of that, he deserves all the blame he's getting.
However, I note that the article avoids actually stating that the women appeared to be underage. It avoids saying anything about their age or appearance at all, other than that they were attractive. Had they appeared to be underage, that likely would have been made explicit in the article, since it fits the fact pattern that the article is trying to establish. Therefore we can reasonably conclude that the women in question did not appear to anyone to be underage. And as such, it is likely that they were simply high class escorts, and under no form of duress and in no need of rescue by anyone.
A conviction years before on exactly the relevant charges certainly should have cast suspicion on him showing up with young girls in tow, especially when they would be arguably unnecessary in that meeting context.
It was unstated what the age of the women referenced in the article was. Indeed if it appeared that they were underage, that would have been deeply problematic. But I note that the article does not actually say that, which strongly implies that they did not appear to anyone to be underage. Because if they did, that would have been made explicit, since it fits the fact pattern attempting to be established here.
the evidence of him engaging in this behavior warranted him being exiled by MIT at the time
So dude who is (at the time) convicted of a sexual crime involving a minor shows up at MIT Media Lab with a pair of very young, model-looking women assistants, what what are rational moral actors supposed to think? That he's just a railroaded maverick?
> So dude who is (at the time) convicted of a sexual crime involving a minor shows up at MIT Media Lab with a pair of very young, model-looking women assistants, what what are rational moral actors supposed to think? That he's just a railroaded maverick?
It was unstated what the age or appearance of the women in question was. If they were of legal age, then they were likely simply escorts, in no need of anyone's rescue. If they appeared to be underage, that likely would have been stated in the article.
Someone was troubled enough to resign over this. Like, what the fuck, at his point, man? Every single comment you have posted about this includes some blatant misrepresentation.
> Someone was troubled enough to resign over this. Like, what the fuck, at his point, man?
People resign over things all the time. That isn't really evidence of much at all.
> Every single comment you have posted about this includes some blatant misrepresentation
You keep acting like you've made actual points, but you haven't. I'm happy to listen to your point of view, if you actually want to articulate one. You are calling out "misrepresentations". What do you think i've misrepresented?
> You started with conflating whatever happened to Epstein with felon disenfranchisement
I have articulated a justification for that comparison. You making an actual point would be referencing that justification and attempting to debunk it. That's how you make actual points.
> Somewhere in the middle you made up a definition of 'ostracism'.
I made one up? MIT refusing to accept donations from someone is not my definition of ostracism. It is the definition of ostracism. You may believe that that ostracism is justified, but the word's meaning is quite clear.
> Now you're saying a person convicted of sexual abuse of a minor should raise no questions when he brings women half his age to an MIT fundraising meeting.
> No. Not even close. I left you a lengthy comment about this to which you did not respond
I responded now. I simply hadn't seen it.
> You're making excuses for a child rapist. Over and over and over. Again, what the fuck, man? Once again, I'm asking you this directly.
I'm not sure why you insist on misreading me. I'm not making excuses for a child rapist. I'm not excusing Epstein's behavior. I'm excusing Ito's behavior.
> The question is whether they should have fired him, which in my view is entirely determined by the badness of his actions.
Are you arguing that he did nothing wrong? In that case why did he hide his actions from MIT, after it had explicitly blacklisted Epstein as a donor?
> someone at MIT speculated ... There is no evidence at all that their presence was anything other than consensual.
Maybe so, but they had good reason to. Epstein by that point had already been convicted on the sex offender charge. And then he was going around accompanied by young European women, and there's nothing suspicious about that? Come on.
> Are you arguing that he did nothing wrong? In that case why did he hide his actions from MIT, after it had explicitly blacklisted Epstein as a donor?
Yes i'm arguing that Joi (not Epstein, obviously) did nothing wrong. I don't believe he did hide what he was doing from MIT - he hid it from the public, by not listing Epstein as a donor.
> Maybe so, but they had good reason to. Epstein by that point had already been convicted on the sex offender charge. And then he was going around accompanied by young European women, and there's nothing suspicious about that? Come on.
If these European women were underage, sure. If they were adults, what's the problem here? If they were underage, or the other employees of the media lab suspected they were underage, that would have been made explicit in the article. But it wasn't, therefore they weren't. Which means the only explanation for the term 'trafficking' in this context would be that Epstein was holding them against their will, something I don't think he's ever actually been accused of.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that the notion that the employees at the media lab were worried these European women were "trafficked" is bullshit. What they were actually made uncomfortable by was that these women were essentially prostitutes, and that I understand. That'd make me uncomfortable too. But it's not the same as bringing non-consensual slaves to your MIT meetings as implied by the phrasing of the article.
> Everyone has some moral right to the position they're in. The question is how much
They have some kind of right without any obligations? Care to expand?
> 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
The latest reveal is that Joi Ito deliberately hid interactions with Epstein from the rest of the lab and from MIT.
His earlier denials were lies he told to keep his position.
The strongest possible form of your argument becomes 'He thought the behavior was fine but knew that others would disagree, so he deceived them to manage the situation', which is not exactly a slam dunk for your moral rights argument.
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.
> 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?
No.
We are not computer programs incapable of making judgements without relying on some arbitrary and sweeping generalization.
We can, in fact, distinguish between making a stand to support human rights or speak truth to power, say, and taking a stand to continue to engage with a convicted pedophile.
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.
> 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.
This is worryingly common in prison and mental health hospitals.
> Yet, that's at odds with the fact that there was only one other suicide in the past 40 years at the MCC [4].
Do you know what they're counting and how they count it? How do they define "suicide" and "at the MCC"?
I'm not an expert in ligaturing. Everything I've read though backs up what I wrote above, that it is possible that bones in the neck are broken in suicide by hanging, but more likely that they are broken by homicidal strangulation.
This news source [1] goes over multiple academic papers that attempt to measure the likelihood of neck bone fractures in suicide versus homicide victims. On my own, I've searched and found multiple additional academic papers that, while disagreeing on the exact probabilities, all support the general conclusion that neck bone fractures are possible in a suicide but more likely in a homicide.
The implication of your comment is that, unlike me, you do know much about ligaturing, so I'd be interested in getting your expert opinion. Are neck bone fractures equally likely in suicidal hanging and homicidal strangulation?
You also write that the guards falling asleep is "worryingly common". I'm sure that's true - but what worries me most about this case is the confluence of multiple unlikely circumstances. Unfortunately the guards fell asleep, unluckily the video cameras failed, against the odds multiple bones in his neck broke while he knelt against his bed sheet, and, surprisingly, Epstein was the first suicide in 21 years at the facility.
Regarding your question about definitions - my understanding is that "suicide" is meant as a person killing themselves, and "at the MCC" means an MCC inmate who killed themselves at the MCC.
[I was fantastically rude the first time I wrote this reply. Sorry. I've edited it to be much less rude, but I might have missed some.]
> Are neck bone fractures equally likely in suicidal hanging and homicidal strangulation?
It's not a question I'd ask. We don't need to know which is more likely. We only need to know that it's perfectly possible and normal to break bones in the neck from ligaturing.
> Regarding your question about definitions - my understanding is that "suicide" is meant as a person killing themselves,
This is wrong.
Hypothetical Bob takes an overdose of pills, but does not intend to die. He calls an ambo. The ambo doesn't get there in time, and Bob dies. Bob took an action that ended his life: did Bob die by suicide?
> and "at the MCC" means an MCC inmate who killed themselves at the MCC.
Is it where the death happens, or where the action that causes death happens? If someone takes an overdose of medication and is then transferred to hospital does that count as a death at MCC or a death at the hospital?
The point I'm trying, and failing, is that suicide is very common, especially among prisoners, especially among those facing trial for sex crimes. You've present four items that you think are unusual, especially when combined. But these are not in anyway unusual. They're very common.
The thing that stands out is the "no suicide here for X years" which is clearly nonsense. I can't be bothered to trawl through Manhattan laws and stats to try to understand it, but if people wanted to they might want to look at who rules a death as suicide, why they might chose not to do so, what definition of suicide they're using (especially around mental state and intent), what burden of proof they're using (beyond all reasonable doubt or balance or probabilities), and where the deaths occur and whether that makes any difference to the stats.
You're free to ask, or not ask, the questions you like. If you want to discuss a topic though, it would seem reasonable to answer the questions asked of you. As I asked before, are fractures of neck bones equally common in homicide versus suicide?
This is actually a meaningful question. We know that Epstein died and had bone fractures and are trying to determine whether the cause of death was murder, or suicide. How likely is the homicide conclusion given bone fractures? How likely is suicide? This strikes me as a time to apply Bayes Theorem and update our beliefs about certain explanations.
To put the situation into a metaphor involving urns - suppose you have drawn a red ball from an unlabeled urn. You know the urn is either an urn containing 80% red balls, or an urn containing 20% red balls. Are you ambivalent about which the urn you've just drawn from is? Statistically speaking, you should not be - having drawn a red ball, while possible to do from either urn, is more likely done from the 80% red urn.
To explain the metaphor - the red ball is a bone fracture, the 80% red urn is homicide, and the 20% red urn is suicide.
I'm surprised to see you disagree about the definition of suicide. The example you gave doesn't seem to be compelling evidence of ambiguity in the term. In your example, an inmate has taken an action that resulted in his death and this is clearly suicide. The fact that your notional inmate didn't intend to die may make for a philosophical debate about the definition of suicide - but given that nobody could know what the true intentions of the recently deceased were - it seems perfectly obvious that, yes, a man who has killed himself by taking too many pills has committed suicide.
I think this is a poor line of argument. The idea you are advocating, as I understand it, is that, there are possible alternative meanings for the words "suicide" and "at the MCC", and though you don't have any evidence that those alternative definitions exist or are in use, you're willing to offer that possibility as a criticism of what is reported in major news outlets. I agree that news outlets may have gotten confused about possible non-standard definitions of terms like "suicide" or "at the MCC" - but I disagree that we should assume this is the case without any evidence to think so.
You also write that the four circumstances I've presented are "very common". Without knowing how you mean the term "very common" I can't agree with that characterization. I'm also not at all convinced you have any idea how common it is for multiple video cameras on the same subject to fail, for guards to sleep through their rounds, for guards to falsify their records, for multiple neck bones to break during sheet strangling suicides, or for prisoners at the MCC to truly commit suicide. If I'm wrong, and you do know how likely these things are, kindly share a reputable source that explains the likelihood. I'd find that enlightening.
Pay attention to which MCC staff get moved/promoted or die. Someone knows and will 'want more' than they were initially paid. They'll either take a bump up or get bumped off.
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.
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.
There's plenty of actions that, while not illegal, decent people can find distasteful enough to shun people who engage in them. Using your money -- whether directly enough to be considered prostitution, or a little more indirectly -- to surround yourself with women who are 18 years and 10 minutes old is legal but more than a little gross. And extremely gross if they had a choice in the matter roughly equivalent to the Anatole France quote: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."
Richard Branson “hangs out” with 2x-year-old women, not 14-year-old girls. The difference is literally infinite in the legal realm and still enormous in the moral realm.
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?
So not taking donations from a felon convicted of sex trafficking and not going to his dinner parties and showing concern for young women from poor countries he keeps around him is being a deranged mob now?
No. I was trying to make a broader point about how we should conduct public discussions. We have a responsibility to about jumping to unwarranted conclusions, and devil's advocates help with that.
Now, making straw men of anyone who dares espouse anything less than full belief in the guilt of the accused, that's definitely a deranged mob kind of thing to do. People assuming the worst about others' motives is the dominant reason we can't have nice things.
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 agree that it isn't a useful argument, but it makes it difficult to argue that Trump had a majority of Americans thinking he was competent to run the country.
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.
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.
>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...
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?
>"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.
I'm in no way defending Epstein in any way. It is horrifying how many people in this thread seem to be unable to understand that. I hope nobody of you works in the legal system. You have a prejudice, and you can only see what confirms your prejudice, despite nothing of it being there. You think I defend Epstein, but I never did.
I asked a question about a paragraph describing a scene of a guy visiting MIT Media Lab with young assistants (not teens, they were described s young women), and Media lab staff being concerned.
I did not have the context of Epstein already being convicted as a sex offender.
There was nothing in that paragraph about Epstein having sex with teens, and I didn't mention that, either.
I am merely of the opinion that in general, young women from Eastern Europe should also be allowed to work as assistants for old men. That doesn't imply I endorse older men taking advantage of teens.
The context is very relevant though. Epstein already was a known, convicted sex offender by the point he was visiting MIT Media Lab with his young ladies of questionable status in tow. It's not relevant to the matters at hand that you, a random person who wasn't there, was not aware of the context.
You can't remove this question from its context. The people at MIT Media Lab who were worried about it certainly were aware of the context, and they were worried, but ultimately forced to go along with it because their boss wanted the money too badly.
Also, enough with the "just asking questions". Instead of asking lots of questions, just go read the relevant articles and learn the truths directly, rather than requiring people to spoonfeed you through HN comments.
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.
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.
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.
This whole thread is in the context of the actual trafficking and sexual abuse of minors. You can’t get away from that context. No matter how much you try, it’s the place your in here, in this discussion and I think it’s worth taking that into account.
Inadvertently I’m sure, your and some other people’s posts here come across as normalising the outward behaviour of Epstein and people like him. But the behaviour of Epstein in particular is not normalisable. The women concerned about the status of the girls Epstein took with him weren’t faced with ‘a rich guy with some young girls’. They were faced with this rich guy with these young girls, face to face, with all the emotional context of actual direct human interaction.
I can image he a situation in which I meet an older guy with some young girls and it’s all fine. I can also imagine ones where I would be deeply uncomfortable and queasy about the interpersonal dynamics going on.
The women at the lab weren’t in a hypothetical situation, they were in a specific real life situation, and the way it made them feel was clearly very, very uncomfortable to the point of deep distress.
So I can see why you think talking about hypotheticals is all fine and you don’t understand why it upsets people. But a lot of wealthy powerful people have spent a lot of effort trying to normalise, justify, write off and cover for Epstein’s behaviour. Those efforts created a context where Epstein was able, again, to traffic and sexually abuse children. So any direction of the discussion towards a context that even inadvertently appears to be normalising any aspect of his behaviour, well, I’d say this thread at this time on this topic isn’t the time or place.
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!
The amazing thing to me is and yet at the time nobody actually did anything. That is why he got away with it for so long, he could repeat the same thing that already got him convicted once with such impunity because everybody was willing to look away when confronted with the specifics.
Each and every one of those people underneath Ito who suspected something might be up had the opportunity to do something about it, including going to the board, and given their suspicions they should have. And yet, nobody did.
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.
Some of the "women" (including some who testified) were 14 year old at the time, and a majority below 18.
He once jocked for a 17 year old that "she is getting too old for me".
The girls were scouted and selected by a group of trusted aides "from troubled backgrounds, either in the foster care system, from broken families, or below the poverty line"...
Not sure how much 'agency' we should give them.
These are not really women going with some boyfriend or merely a young girl with a much older guy. E.g. I'm OK with Louis CK asking to masturbate, and then doing it when the women said yes (I don't consider their "yes" to be any kind of manipulation, rich or not, powerful or not, they could always say no).
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?
> via shady Epstein MIT could get clean Gates money. OK or not OK?
Not okay. Why? To answer, we have to admit that "clean" is a word which carries an unhelpful metaphor here: bacterial contamination.
The problem isn't that the money is in some way contaminated. The problem is that the flow of money establishes a relationship with two effects:
1) Someone who owes or regularly gives you money can influence your decisions.
2) Having someone associate with you gives them social status, especially as a donor to a beneficial institution.
The metaphor for which people should reach for should be drawn from something like the song Molasses to Rum from the musical 1776: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeuaTpH6Ck0
So getting money from Gates via Epstein would still be bad because Epstein has the power to stop that flow of money. Gettin money from Epstein via a federal court order would not be bad because Epstein doesn't have the power to stop that.
--------
> I would be interested in what made the Media Lab guy do it.
I too would be interested in what made led him to do so. Because in order to receive donations, an organization like the media lab generally needs to be able to lean on its brand and its ability to invite companies to sponsor them. So we'll likely see that taking that money was long-term harmful financially to the Media Lab.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Fair enough, I guess, and if you'd just said that you'd have been better off. What you said instead showed a complete lack of understanding for how sexual abuse is inflicted on people. By implication that anyone not held directly against their will couldn't be a victim. That power dynamics play a huge part, along with shame, guilt, and sometimes necessity.
"By implication that anyone not held directly against their will couldn't be a victim."
I never said any such thing. I said the opposite thing: that it is possible a young assistant to an old guy is not a victim. That's an important distinction.
I think establishing a rule in society that young women can't work for old men would be wrong.
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.
If you are walking around with 2 girls who look like models and are from eastern europe (there must be some impression about being model from eastern europe which I'm unaware of), what do you think people gonna think?
You are reading stuffs. People have seen this. If they were uneasy at this sight, they must have felt/observed something more than that, so much so that they thought that these girls might not have been there by choice.
People do get suspicious of fishy people and if you ask them why they are suspicious of some people, they would say, "he was behaving a bit different, something was off about him". And people like you will dismiss it.
Even in real life, I see people walking around with girls. Most of the times I feel or suspect nothing but sometimes I do feel something is off or fishy about it but yet I can't describe it fully.
Now you know a lot more about Epstein, what do you think why he brought "2 models (possibly quite young, given the reputation of Epstein) who are possibly from eastern europe" in MIT lab?
Now we know a lot more about Epstein, people must have felt something much more about those 2 girls which you can't imagine.
Personally, I feel like you are arguing for the sake of arguing. I was shocked at your line of thinking.
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.
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.
> Epstein was clearly a pedophile. Even at the time in question, it was already quite clear that he was a pedophile.
He wasn't a pedophile, at least from what I've read. Pedophilia specifically refers to an attraction to prepubescent children - Epstein was interested in adolescent girls, which would make him a hebephile. If Epstein was going around with an entourage of 10 year old girls it would've been extremely obvious, and he would've been arrested in about 5 minutes. OTOH it can be legitimately hard to tell the difference between a 14 year old and an 18 year old. People may have heard rumors or had their own suspicions, but they probably weren't sure and that uncertainty made it easy to take the safe route and stay silent...
OK, so is there a huge distinction between prosecutions and judgments for pedophiles and hebephiles?
I haven't followed his case well enough to know the age range for his young friends. But yes, I don't recall that he was grooming ten year olds. But probably 13 year olds, I think.
And yes, it's hard to tell about preteen people. Looking back at old pictures of close friends and myself, the most obvious changes were later, at maybe about 19-20. Mainly a loss of gangliness, I think. Puberty is not uncommon now before ten, so secondary sexual characteristics alone are unreliable indicators.
Way back in the hippie days, when I was about 18-20, I had a few 13-16 year old girlfriends. And I don't recall that they were all that obviously distinguishable by age. But of course, in old pictures, we all look like children.
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).
that is a in fact a big problem with some of the earlier reporting around stories about Epstein. Lots of headlines ran with "young women", but deeper in it explcitly says "as young as 14"
I'm with you. Posters here seem to be making several logical leaps due to hindsight bias. His previous convictions do not imply that he's a human trafficker, and if he was, he almost certainly would not be advertising it in this manner.
> Would somebody who is trafficking women really take them everywhere he goes? I thought it would be more of a secret affair.
After everything Epstein has did and got away with, I don't think it's a stretch that he would have been brash about it. Look at how brash Trump is about some of his personal sexual exploits.
I'm not sure the point is these women were trafficked for sure, but Ito was obviously unwilling to overlook a pretty questionable situation for his personal financial gain.
Regardless, he isn't being thrown in jail, he's just losing his position of power because he obviously isn't capable of avoiding conflict of interest.
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.
Why two beautiful young women though - that seems not to be likely due to chance and surely enough to make any rational person wonder what they hell is going on?
The thing is to make everyone who you meet a bit complicit. Two young women at the meeting is not quite enough to make anyone at the meeting intervene, but it is enough that there is then a lever - "you were at the october meet, you met Siri and Alexa... you were there weren't you? You are smart, you knew what was going on then and you didn't do a thing. How will that play if that gets out?"
It's not much of a lever, but my suspicion is that there is a slow enmeshment and escalation; a dance of probing and pulling - more intense for the more useful or more dangerous contacts. The aim is to have protection, cover and support. People who say things like "one of your assistant was sobbing in the loo, so I called mental health services" suddenly find that colleagues are talking about how socially inept they are, and how important that they are kept out of certain meetings. People who join in and show approval are regarded as "good" and "fun". Bit by bit it becomes normal. The transgressions shown to "outsiders" are safe - or at least there are explanations and the outsiders are carefully selected to be vulnerable pressure from people in the circle, but each time this happens that tar pit of complicity grows and deepens. Eventually powerful people are looking at personal ruin if the offenders are exposed.
"Why two beautiful young women though - that seems not to be likely due to chance and surely enough to make any rational person wonder what they hell is going on?"
What if a person likes to work with beautiful young women? That's generally part of why people are being called beautiful - because people feel elated in their company.
Let's not pretend that looks don't matter in this world. If you have two equally qualified candidates for a job, perhaps you take the prettier one.
Maybe there is also an effect on meetings. Haven't there been studies on how men behave differently in the presence of attractive women? Maybe it is strategy to bring attractive women to business meetings, to change the dynamics.
Just saying there could be any number of reasons.
Personally I feel it is OK to act according to one's preferences (within bounds of no coercion and so on). If you prefer to be surrounded by attractive women, you should be allowed to act accordingly. I know not everyone agrees. (and please, I am not defending Epstein, I don't think sexual exploitation is OK - I am talking here about the general setting of hiring young assistants).
To contact mental health/wellbeing officers in your institution, and to be on record as having done it. There will be short term costs, but in the long term the costs of not doing so could be catastrophic.
>Should have Joi Ito recognize that "two beautiful young women" bait and cancelled all potential business with Epstein?
I don't know because I wasn't there and I don't know the circumstances around the meeting. In the hypothetical universe I think that the best case is that people's radars click into action and the folks left in the room say "that was super weird, I don't like this, what the hell are we doing talking to these people, let's stop". In the real world when you're doing something you believe in, you need money for that, and you are under pressure, I can imagine that not happening.
A big problem is that it shouldn't be a single person or a narrow group making these decisions. There should be wide group who met with Epstein and knew what was going on, and in the best case I think that it would be good to get everyone in a room and say "what did we think"? Perhaps also some specific follow up meetings with quieter or more insightful members of the group "what did you think?". One question "ok, does anyone have a red flag here?" would (I think) give me a lot of comfort even if it later turned out that I had made a deal with Stalin - at least I asked, at least I wasn't just a fool.
We never should have made that deal, Stalin was actually worse than the whole Nazi regime of murderous scum. At least the Germans had style and before you accuse me of being some kind of 88er, I will remind you that the big shots in the US loved Hitler in the 1930s, the adored what he was doing for Germany because it was so technologically progressive and forward looking.
Plenty of American businesses made money off of the Nazi regime. IBM. The Bush family, and many others. It wasn't until the horrific crimes committed during the war that everyone here quickly distanced themselves from Germany and pretended that they never liked them and were never anti-semitic.
As far as Epstein goes, I don't think we're even asking the right questions. The underage girls, despite being underage, all knew what was going to happen when they went to that island or to meet up with Epstein or his compatriots. What is more important is, how did the blackmail operation run and who received the photos and videos?
I don't disagree that something didn't appear right here. However, the folks here at Hacker News are only judging these women by their appearance and nothing else.
It's not good when an attractive young person visiting MIT is viewed with suspicion because of some prejudice against attractive individuals and youth.
On the day they met, Epstein wasn't a fugitive. He was exonerated. Due diligence showed that Epstein went through the legal process and came out the other end intact. Epstein remained a powerful, rich, influential who clearly established himself as among the highest class of political elites. Refusing Epstein's money would have hurt the lab's reputation among his people. Accepting the money was far less costly.
>We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”
Oh I'm sure that happened! /s
It is worth noting that this person not only resigned in part because of the ties to Epstein (according to her) but also knew about said ties before she took the job.
Why is it hard to simply tell everything as it happened without trying to embellish one's picture in vain?
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'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.
A lot of smart people, when they acquire power, start to behave recklessly. It’s not necessarily irrational — powerful people are almost never held to account for their crimes, so you see people getting life in prison for robbing a liquor store but a $3 million fine for creating the opioid epidemic. So maybe it’s because they’re smart that they behave recklessly — because really, Joi Ito is going to be fine, and for every one of him there are 1000 that nothing happens to at all.
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'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)
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:
I've flagged your comment as a completely unprovoked personal attack on Gojomo. It's not okay to call people names because they point out your misconduct.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
The Media Lab in particular is a corporate PR/money vehicle, it’s not really an academic lab like a cancer research institute. There is some real research there but also a lot of “stick 25 Arduinos in something and make a video for a Fortune 50 company who will give you $10 million”
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 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.
> 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.
The number of YC based start-ups that took dirty money is rather large. You may be on to something there.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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 sure if that illustrates that Gates was accessible or that it further illustrates the point that the super-rich (including their entourage of lawyers) travel in small, connected circles.
That Epstein could get himself into Gates' personal space once is something I explicitly accounted for. What I continue to sincerely doubt is that he could do it twice. For the first time, Gates' default allow policy would allow him to get close. But after Bill Gates has told his security team "this guy is a pedo freak, never let him approach me again", would that not be the end of it?
My mother works in the non-profit fundraising sector, originally centered on education, but now runs her own consultancy for non-profits of all sizes. She knows pretty much all the rules and laws about donations and propriety within fundraising foundations. I've helped her with her business, both in actual operations and for her IT concerns. I've also worked in other regulated industries, so I have a fair amount of familiarity with what sort of rules and laws are involved and what the consequences of violating those rules tend to be.
We are livid right now. She has to help a lot of orgs navigate it, where the rules can sometimes be tricky and somewhat counter-intuitive, especially if you don't have accounting experience (and let's face it, most people in fundraising foundations are some of the lowest paid people on campus, and you get what you pay for). Stuff that could get you fined or jail time for what lay-people might consider an honest mistake (but definitely should be considered 101-course material for fundraisers, considering the stakes).
Joichi Ito's actions go way, way beyond that. Who knows just how far the harm he has caused will actually spread. He's harmed the reputation of his institution, his program, and anyone associated with the program. He's lied and cheated for personal gain. It's a no-brainer that he needs to go to jail. Whatever investigation will follow should be focused on finding all the people who knowingly helped him to lock them up alongside him.
A simple one that comes up a lot is back dating when a donation "occurred" to be within a certain tax year. Donations don't "occur" until they are processed completely. The end of the tax year has lots of donations come in. If the foundation isn't on their toes, they might not process all of them in time for the tax deadline. It's illegal (though completely possible, and happens all the time) to back-date the donation date to before the end of the tax year, after the tax year has ended.
Others come up as errors of classification. A certain donor might donate a certain good or service instead of straight money. That donation has to be recorded at fair market value and has to be treated as if it were a proper vendor relationship. Determining that value can be quite complex, especially considering such donations are usually done out of excess stock or time that the donor doesn't have a good valuation on out of their own books.
And often, those sorts of donations come with an expectation of quid pro quo: I give two dozen bails of hay that I have just lying around and expect to get a ticket to the next fundraising ball (which might have a few-thousand dollar list price). If the foundation gives that ticket, the bails of hay are no longer a donation and listing it as such is tax fraud.
>A simple one that comes up a lot is back dating when a donation "occurred" to be within a certain tax year. Donations don't "occur" until they are processed completely. The end of the tax year has lots of donations come in. If the foundation isn't on their toes, they might not process all of them in time for the tax deadline
To fix this, many nonprofits have a fiscal year that is different than the calendar year (calendar year being Jan - Dec) while a fiscal year can be any 12 month period (for example, July beginning to June end). The organization reports based on its fiscal year, so it has plenty of time to process December donations. See here for detail: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/exempt-organizatio... (this details for nonprofit orgs but the same can be done for businesses and sole-proprietor orgs should this interest someone).
(I have experience in working AML and Compliance for a large multinational bank)
You're aware of specific instances of people actually going to jail for this sort of thing? I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but honestly I'd be surprised if it did, and surprised if Ito was criminally charged in relation to this conduct.
Hiding the information on from whom the donation came from is a crime. Even if the donor wants to be listed anonymously, you have to at least record in your database (and these foundations have extensive databases going back decades) who it came from.
He hid the donations from MIT. Since Epstein was on the blacklist, MIT might have a civil case against him. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if that would be, for example, "fraud".
It doesn't matter if he literally asked or not. Anti-corruption laws are much more concerned with the appearance of impropriety than they are with the actual turn off events. That is to say, they err on the side of caution. Anything that could have come about through abuse of the professional relationship is verboten, even if it was "happenstance".
Simply put, disregarding all of the other issues, given the prior relationship between Ito and Epstein for the MIT Media Lab donations, there was no legitimate path for Epstein to invest in any private venture of Ito's.
I'm just glad we appear to be mostly past the 'well so what if he gave money they did good with it herp derp' stage. If it had been NRA money heads would have rolled immediately. No spiked stories. No game theory debates about what wonders might be achieved with such donations despite the source.
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?
It is now apparent that Joi Ito was an opportunistic scumbag who elevated personal gain above ethics. Good riddance to him. And good riddance to the reputation of Nicolas Negroponte as well.
Personal gain? He didn't pocket the money as far I know.
Ethics is also a touchy subject, people can't fully agree on whether taking a criminal's money to do good with it is ethical or not. So it's not as cut and dried.
He did however violate MIT policy so that's a valid reason for his resignation or even firing in my opinion.
Epstein also invested in Ito's private investment fund, which financially benefits Ito directly.
Personally I suspect Ito was more incredibly naive than scumbag, but being naive is also not a good trait for the leader of a prominent group like the Media Lab.
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.
Just a heads up, this thread is now full of accounts defending Epstein and his pedophilia full force. No idea who's behind it, but it's... Interesting.
The social network / ostracism obligation aspects of this are fascinating and personal for me.
Within the last couple of years I became aware of an extended family member who was intermittently violently abusing his wife. This is someone I see at most once a year, usually at funerals.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what I would do if I found myself in a social situation with this person. The best I could come up with was personal ostracism.
I decided that I would not call him out, due to fear of unintended consequences, but that I would treat him as a pariah. At a recent family reunion, I was set to avoid him, but all of a sudden he was next to me, asking after me, and jutting out his hand for a shake. I reflexively shook his hand (I fucking hated myself at that moment), but managed to turn away and put my back to him as he was talking.
I feel like I eventually held up to my principles, but was a disgusted by how the people around me just ignored the elephant in the room. And yet ... difficult situation to be in. I mean this as a bystander, not someone with something to gain from associating with him.
EDIT> The time of "open secrets" needs to be over. I dislike gag orders and secret settlements because they deprive the public of crucial information. How many people are victimized by someone who is anecdotally known to be dangerous, but still socially tolerated? Epstein was radioactive since 2008-2011, and we should be very critical of anyone who treated him normally after that period.
EDIT2> My family member had already been reported to the police and his wife went back to him. So, he's on record as being an abuser. I am not covering for him in that sense.
The Media Lab was near the top of the heap of university-industrial consortia in terms of both glamour and income. There really wasnt a need for all this back-channel stuff.
This is what surprises me. MIT is very well endowed, has an extra-ordinarily wealthy alumni network and overall Media Lab is perhaps better positioned financially than any other lab. In emails, the lab director is begging for $100K from a billionaire doner so he can extend one contract. I don't understand.
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.
>'In an email in October 2014 — six years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty to a sex charge involving a minor in Florida — Mr. Ito wrote that a $2 million gift from Mr. Gates was “directed by Jeffrey Epstein.” Peter Cohen, then a development official at the lab, wrote in a subsequent email, “For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey’s name as the impetus for this gift.”
Mr. Cohen, now the director of development for computer and data science initiatives at Brown University, did not respond to messages seeking comment on Saturday.'
While Ito is rightfully being held to account I think it's important to consider all the other enablers who condoned and accepted these arrangements as well.
Two things stand out from this fiasco. 1: Even very powerful and successful people are dazzled by money. 2: The ability of an individual or a family to accumulate massive private wealth inevitably leads to a lot of messed up behaviour.
Folks should remember that Rafael Reif was the provost under Susan Hockfield who orchestrated the whitewashing of research misconduct allegations that MIT Professor Ted Postol launched against MIT Lincoln Laboratory for using fabricated data to report results of a critical ballistic missile defense test to the Pentagon. MIT was found "guiltless" by Provost Reif after an "internal investigation" was conducted over the course of almost a decade. Steve Weiner (a highly respected former director of ballistic defense research at Lincoln for almost 20 years) has since accused MIT of engaging in a "kickback scheme" whereby Lincoln would tell the MDA whatever it needed to hear about the viability of a Starwars-inspired missile defense shield in order for executives at Raytheon to receive multi-billion dollar contracts to build it. The phony missile defense tests that Postol challenged intensely for almost a decade were one small but critical piece of the massive fraud that MIT has perpetrated against the United States taxpayer here. President Reif needs to be incarcerated, not just fired!
The network associated with Jeffrey Epstein & Ghislaine Maxwell (daughter of Mossad Agent Robert Maxwell) runs deep in the tech industry. Also note that Aaron Swartz was involved with the MIT Media Labs.
Where did Epstein's money come from? He claimed to be a hedge fund manager for select clients, however in the aftermath of his rearrest after the Miami Herald series there were comments from Wall Street people that there was little evidence of how he actually made so much money. Pure speculation, but the original source of Epstein's donations might also prove a problem.
It was tactically smart to initially refuse to resign... it shifted the Overton window so that now he’s seen as defeated simply by stopping being the Media Lab director, instead of needing to make any attempt at restitution for the damage he has caused to Epstein’s victims and to MIT.
There needs to be an investigation as some time into what is under the Ark Academy in Brent, London, sponsored by Arki Busson, who gets a mention in Epstein's Little Black Book.
After recent events centered on the Media Lab, I know there is a tremendous sense of pain, sadness and disappointment across campus and throughout our global community. We all want answers.
For now, I write to share two important updates.
Last Saturday, we retained the law firm Goodwin Procter to perform a thorough investigation of the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s interactions with MIT. This work has already begun. We have asked the firm to explore all donations received by MIT, both those that came directly from Jeffrey Epstein and his associated foundations, and any donations that may have been received at the direction of Jeffrey Epstein. In addition, the investigation will cover who at MIT may have been aware of the donations. We have instructed Goodwin Procter to follow the evidence where it leads, and we are counting on this independent investigation to ascertain the facts. As I noted on Saturday, the firm will report back to me and to the Executive Committee of the MIT Corporation, MIT’s governing board.
If you have information relevant to the investigation that you would like to share with the law firm, please email REDACTED.
To be thorough, such an investigation will take time, on the order of a month. Although media reports will continue to focus on the issues during this time, I am hopeful that the MIT community will avoid forming a final judgment before the process is complete and will respect the privacy of members of our community who may have become involved in this matter in the course of doing their jobs for MIT.
Once we have the results, and once our separate internal review of our current processes on gift acceptance is complete, we will be able to understand what happened and what needs to change.
Supporting the members of the Media Lab must now be at the center of our attention. The Provost has asked the Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning to work with the Media Lab community on interim leadership for the lab and a search for the next director. The interim plan will be finalized shortly, and we will share the news as soon as possible, along with other plans to support the lab community.
I know this is a difficult and disorienting moment. But I have profound faith in the MIT community to learn from these events and find a constructive way forward.
He was convicted of a crime, and he served his time. In hindsight, the sentence was too light, but as regular people are we really supposed to understand all the details? If I met someone who went to jail, should she be exiled forever after serving her sentence? I just don't understand. And people get lenient sentences all the time, am I as a non-lawyer supposed to understand this and then give my own sentence on top of that? Or should some people who commit crimes should never, ever be allowed to interact with other humans again?
As far as I can tell, from the perspective of those around him in 2014, Epstein was convicted of a crime, and served his time. By 2014, he had committed no further crimes from what people knew at the time, so why exactly is this an outrage. Obviously in 2019, we know that he committed further crimes and he rightly went to jail, and it's sad that he won't face justice. But in 2014, did anyone know this and should they be treated so harshly if they didn't?
The only real problem was covering up the donation, which Ito definitely should have been fired for, but I don't understand why Epstein at that time should have been considered a persona non grata.
The biggest question is: should criminals never ever be forgiven for their crimes? And should anyone who decides to forgive them and associate with them also be considered despicable as well? Or is it just some criminals depending on their crime? Who judges which crimes should never be forgiven and which should?
I will reserve the right to not do business with pedophiles and sex traffickers — even if they have served time in prison for their crimes. And I reserve the right to judge people who do harshly, especially since I know that horrible people sometimes use these sorts of donations to launder their reputation and I don’t want to be anywhere near that.
Want to remain a part of polite civic society? Don’t rape kids.
But what about people who feel otherwise and think that by serving out his sentence he has paid for their sins? If those people associate with criminals who have served their sentence, are those people worse in your eyes? It seems like not only is redemption for criminals no longer allowed, but you're not allowed to believe in redemption for others as well.
I don’t know what we’re arguing. If you want to professionally associate with people who have raped and exploited kids from a position of extreme wealth and privilege, then I guess you’re probably legally allowed to, as long as you’re not putting people in danger. You have to decide where you’re at on that. I know where I’m at. I think most people do. Which is why they’re disgusted.
The question isn't about legality. It's about morality. Is it morally wrong to judge people who decide to associate with criminals after they have served their sentence? That to me is the crux of the issue here.
What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
> What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
Sounds about right.
I'll add that it is difficult to forgive people who show no remorse for their crimes.
There are also certain crimes and evil actions that are hard to forgive, period. Sexual abuse, rape, and murder are all very hard to let go of (with very good reason), and even more so when the victims are children.
Epstein checks all those boxes, which is why even the people around him are so tainted by association.
> Is it morally wrong to judge people who decide to associate with criminals after they have served their sentence?
No. Judge away.
> What it sounds like is that criminals are not absolved by serving their sentence. Or maybe some are but it depends on the crime? And sometimes it's okay to ostracize those that believe that criminals are absolved by serving their sentence, depending on the crime?
He never served his time and he continued to commit crimes and yes, people are allowed to not want to associate with someone who raped children and helped others to rape children.
The poster is not defending Epstein (is anyone?) but is instead defending (in the abstract) people who may have met him, heard that he had been convicted and served time for sociliting underage women, and, given no other information about him, decided that given he had served his time with no further convictions that he had been rehabilitated and should not be alienated.
For every Epstein, there are others who have been convicted of similar (or worse) crimes who, ten years later, have served their time, are reformed, and are no longer a threat to society. This doesn't mean you don't have the right to choose to avoid interacting with them (I personally wouldn't when it comes to underage solicitation as was Epstein's conviction), but I'm inclined to agree with the poster that I wouldn't morally judge those who do because they on good faith, and with no contrary evidence, assume the person has faced justice and has been rehabilitated. I think it's important that as a society we don't have a general rule that it's OK to discriminate against convicted felons -- it seems wise and just to, in general, try to forgive and be fair to those who have been convicted of a crime in the past and who have no other evidence to disprove the claim they have changed and are rehabilitated.
To me this has no bearing on the details of this specific case here, because based upon peoples' behavior it seems likely that everyone involved actually knew this guy was still an abuser after his conviction. It sounds like Epstein made a point of telling people about his behavior as a means of controlling them, so in general anyone who took money from this guy I think is guilty of at the very least a moral failure.
I'm perfectly okay with executing rapists, sex traffickers, etc, if that were the sentence imposed.
But if you don't impose a life sentence, but then believe a person should continue to pay for their crimes after the amount determined by a court of law, isn't that hypocrisy? Having someone serve their sentence in jail but then making them never able to interact in society again because of outrage over their crime is fundamentally unfair. If you're going to do that, then just execute them or throw them in jail forever, because that's effectively what they're doing. And as I said, I'm perfectly okay with making execution for crimes the punishment for a large swathe of crimes, including everything that Epstein did.
And even worse, if someone believes that a person deserves the right to be forgiven for their sins, and they are thrown into the same bucket for even associating with them, is that even fair?
Apparently Bill Gates met with Epstein several times after his conviction. Should he be punished as well?
>"He told the crowd that he had “screwed up” by accepting the money, but that he had done so after a review by the university and consultation with his advisers."
Interesting his choices made it unimpeded through his own conscience though.
More and more problems seem to be linked to provenance of money. Money Laundering of dirty cash is one major obvious example (see impact on everything from London house prices to international banking) and yet just being able to trace / label money coming out of Epstein and into MIT lab would have raised this issue a decade ago
Imagine somehow being able to tag bitcoin address / transactions with "this money came from a man convicted of sex trafficking"
Then having that tag appear on the accounts sheet at NIT
That's such a bizarre concept. Morality isn't something that can be inherited by accepting research contributions, in my book.
Why taint the money, when it can help us learn, build, heal, and grow? Epstein, not the money he donated, is responsible for bad things he did.
As an alum, I'm not surprised at the Institute's cowardice, but I'd like to see MIT stand up for someone, ANYONE in its community when under fire publicly, just once.
As a thought exercise the only morally justifiable framework I can conceive of for this would be some kind of crypto or escrow based channel for anonymous donations that would be completely 'laundered' of the origin. For example, if a donor donates to this channel, there'd have to be some mechanism in place that even if they accurately stated publicly the amount and time they took the transaction, there would be no way to prove that claim. Then, if a blacklisted donor comes to you, decline their offer to donate in name but note the above channel exists
In a situation where people are communicating and facilitating the donation with such a blacklisted person they are a) able to confirm the donation and b) are in a position to participate in some kind of quid pro quo -- this seems extremely hard to justify given the difficulty of disproving that no such quid pro quo took place. In this specific instance, it sounds like Epstein did receive material attention and visitation so safely assuming that this was a neutral transaction flies out the window completely.
So what happens when Epstein wants special access? His entire trade was influence peddling (usually by means of inducing people to commit sex crimes), the dude is going to want access to people.
He donates 2 million dollars, threatens to pull the funding when you don't let him visit.
What happens? If you think its anything besides "welcome with full access" I don't what to tell you, because that's whats going to happen in 999/1000 cases.
He was already on the MIT donation blacklist for this very reason.
This is way beyond "the dude is evil, but his money isn't"
If Donald Trump can invite the Taliban to Camp David, I think MIT can have meetings with a donor who is a felon. As long as MIT doesn't engage in illegal activity, I don't see the problem. Public opinion of Epstein is the public's business, not MIT's.
> Why taint the money, when it can help us learn, build, heal, and grow?
Because when that much money is involved, there are strings attached. In this particular case, Epstein got to visit the lab and had people like Ito covering for him, pretending the situation was normal and on the level.
Why do people make such a hypocritically huge fuzz out of some pimp, like Epstein? Look at poor neighborhoods - there are literally millions pimps prostituting millions of women in the world. I doubt any of you want to pay for their education, so they could stop prostituting and do useful jobs, and I doubt any of these prostitutes want to work at a sweatshop or a factory, or even in office, doing heavy and unhealthy work in disciplined environment.
The MacArthur Foundation today accepted the resignation of Joi Ito as a member of our board and our affiliate
@LeverforChange , effective immediately. We thank Ito for his service.
Can someone explain if knowing someone nowadays can mean a ruin career by modern day social witch hunt or is there a darker reason behind Joi Ito resigning?
This is one of those things where somebody noticed that things just didn't seem right and the proper response to that is to raise concern and ask questions.
Sorry, but a 60-something "finance" guy with an entourage of teen models doesn't add up. Sure some of these people have trophy wives half their age, and it raises eyebrows, but this is far beyond that and totally unacceptable once somebody looks into this guy's history.
At a minimum Ito should have used better judgement after being altered to this stuff.
"teen" is a big range. If they were 14 - then that is a problem. If they're 19 then I don't really see why I or anyone else should care. In fact, it seems like one would be attempting to remove autonomy from these women if you tried to prevent an adult from serving as an assistant "for their own good" because you're creeped out by the employer.
Clearly it is - I don't know why you would think I implied otherwise. My point is that maybe you have a hunch they are trafficked, but it is a logical leap to simply state it as a fact that they are trafficked.
Yes - sorry. I had one logged in on my laptop and one on my phone which I switched to. I initially created this secondary account to talk to some other poster about hiring advice at my company without linking it to other autobiographic details I've possibly posted on my other account in the past, but have since unfortunately muddled the two in a big OPSEC fail(don't worry - I'm not in cybersecurity).
No - I only have two accounts that I post under, basically one with an autosaved password on my computer, and one on my phone. And I don't see what is so strange about my arguments. I'm not arguing that Epstein was a good guy or that his assistants necessarily weren't trafficked. I'm saying no one knows - and so far, not one of them has come forward, so regardless there is no real way to know. I would be saying the same thing if people were arguing that all the children who went to a church were raped by a pedophile priest who clearly raped, say, at least 10 children. I don't see my points as logically too difficult - merely that the subject is a clear baddie, and that means if someone says he has 19 fingers and another person responds that he probably has 10, that person will be accused of defending the baddie.
And really, this isn't a point I particularly care about. But message boards let you focus on parts of a conversation and address them independently of the rest. This isn't something I'd try to defend to the death, or would even feel the need to rebut in actual conversation. But as long as threaded messages exist, I don't see a problem with talking about these details.
She’s getting money, he’s getting ... something. (sex? youthful energy? sight of beauty?) As long as it’s legal, it’s a fair exchange.
Or do you object to young women (and otherwise beautiful men and women) acting in movies and things like Victoria’s Secret shows as well (well, you could object on the “encouraging body image problems” angle but that’s orthogonal).
The fact that some of the women in the lab suspected a human-trafficing situation and try to get the girls to open up about it makes NOT LIKE a scenario where some guy merely has a penchant for younger girl-friends.
And anyway, if it were some kind of "fair exchange", WTF is going through his mind to bring that "entourage" to a place like the media lab. It sounds like a script to a Sacha Baron Cohen film.
It is not so unusual to have a trophy wife, it is the trophy harem that goes against Western culture.
Also it is highly unusual for somebody to show up at an academic event with even a trophy wife in tow.
As for the VS fashion show you do know that Epstein had some kind of hold on the CEO of their parent company, he harassed women under the pretense he was a talent scout for them and plausibly could have abused the models.
Yes, in places where there is an extreme power imbalance, with few employment opportunities for the disadvantaged, and no morals or accountability among elites, all manner of scummy things happen.
We should strive to ameliorate the conditions in the world that make this happen, so that young women can aspire to being scientists or doctors or businesswomen, instead of some corrupt asshole’s decorative servants.
It's this type of attitude that makes most on the right cringe at the left. The notion that if someone isn't living their life in a way that you deem to be of value, then there must be a "power imbalance" that needs to be corrected. Has it occurred to you that not everyone wants to be a doctor, or "businesswoman". And that many young women actually like sex and furthermore like using their sexuality to get things in return?
Has it occurred to you that there's nothingwrong with that? It doesn't have to be a "power imbalance". When I buy an orange at the grocery store is that a power imbalance? Should that grocer find a better job by your estimation? Should he have been a doctor? Does he need your "saving"?
If a young woman wants to follow a man to meetings, live in his mansion, have sex, and look beautiful at all times, and in exchange gets what she considers fair compensation, then what exactly is the problem? It's an exchange of goods and services on the open market. It does not imply a "power imbalance".
Who said anyone’s life lacked value? There’s nothing wrong with being a market clerk, or a restaurant server, or a farm laborer, or a fashion model, or an administrative assistant, or a factory worker, or a janitor, or a soldier, or a mail carrier, or a taxi driver, or a stay-at-home parent, ....
The problem is that many people in many places are stuck with a choice of either working themselves to death at a job they hate for shit pay and no benefits (or maybe just starving on the street) or else selling themselves to a very wealthy asshole. When that happens, it indicates a profound structural failing of the society. Prostitution or feudal servitude shouldn’t be anyone’s only shot at a comfortable life.
In theory there’s nothing wrong with a career in private security. But it’s messed up to be an enforcer for the dictator family who who rule Equatorial Guinea and live lavishly while keeping the rest of the country in miserable squalor.
In theory there’s nothing wrong with being an actress. But it’s messed up if getting a leading part depends on giving blowjobs to the studio executives.
Etc.
> It does not imply a "power imbalance".
If the young women in such relationships had all the money and power and the old men had none, how many of those couples would still be sleeping together?
There are porn stars who live comfortably yet remain in the business. There are even wives who like to be pimped out by their husbands because it's kinky to them; that's technically still prostitution.
I don't think the 'happy hooker' is just a theoretical thing. I think it exists, and it happens all the time. The fact that there is prostitution doesn't imply there is a power imbalance. Maybe if prostitution wasn't so stigmatized, it would be even more common.
Having said that, in this context there is obviously a power imbalance. Somebody says they're scared to leave because of the threat of violence. I'm sure this also happens in way too many cases around the world. I share your view that possibly a significant chunk of this misery can be done away with by getting rid of poverty. However, let's not forget the contribution to said misery by the mere psychopathy that drives people like Epstein.
The women could simply lead a normal life without Billionaire perks, like Billions of other women do. They are not forced to sell their bodies in exchange for a Billionaire lifestyle.
Have you seen how much scientists get paid nowadays? Don't even get me started on how most people who follow that career path just end up as lab techs at best, who earn even less. Everyone I know who majored in bio, chem, or physics has ended up in tech. For the money. And why should they have done otherwise?
It is a huge waste of talent and misallocation of resources that a large proportion of the smartest and best-trained scientists and engineers in the world get sucked into working in finance, business consulting, advertising/surveillance, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with individual people making this choice (I have many friends in those fields). It’s just evidence of large structural problems in the society.
(Of course, not all “tech” is zero-sum or harmful.)
You don't have to be smart or well-trained to get the big bucks. I don't have a STEM degree. The most successful engineers I know don't even have a degree at all.
No, it is a pretty good allocation and a great use of that talent. That talent is producing value at a scale unprecedented in human civilisation. The human race has spoken, and this is what it wants. And I, for one, love it.
> talent is producing value at a scale unprecedented
As far as I can tell, much of this “value” consists of inserting oneself into existing money flows and diverting a tiny part into one’s own pocket, at the expense of everyone else in the society.
Wages in the broader society have been stagnant for decades despite steep increases in labor productivity. Healthcare, housing, and education costs keep skyrocketing without commensurate improvements in quality.
In the USA, life expectancy is going down, infrastructure is aging without replacement, worker and consumer protections have eroded, children’s lives are increasingly regimented and controlled, 40% of adults are obese, loneliness is rampant, young people are deeply indebted, almost nobody has enough savings to comfortably retire, many ecosystems are facing collapse and many species are facing extinction, ...
Listen, I know you have your pet loves: American obesity, loneliness, debt, etc. etc. I have mine. And it is possible that if I allocated all labour I wouldn't do it like you would. In fact, I suspect no two people would have the exact same allocation.
Fortunately, because we are free people, we have proposed a mechanism. You make something valuable to me and you get a sort of exchangeable vote from me that you can use to get someone (perhaps even me) to make something valuable for you. This is a nice mechanism because that way useful people can be rewarded for their usefulness by letting them choose the next thing for labour to be allocated to.
This system is distributed, everyone trusts the vote, and you can't make me do something against my will. This system of free and fair collaboration and competition has produced the current allocation as the current consolidated view of what people want. It's not what you want, true. It's not even what I want. But it's what we (all of us) want as independent agents collaborating and competing with each other.
But what if they don't want to? Or are unable to (too stupid, not too poor)? Why work a 9-5 job, when you can spread your legs every now and then get Louboutin shoes for a present, and a (real) Louis Vuitton handbag, and so on.
And the differences between the countries are not a local power imbalance problem, it's just the amount of benefits (=money) you get for spreading your legs. In a rich 1st world country, the "sponsor" has to earn a lot to make it worth it... but in a poor country, even a freelance coder working for foreign companies can earn enough to sponsor a girl like that, and also have a new-ish BMW (so her friends see her in it) and so on.
But when we get to higher class people, especially older, you suddenly stop calling the rich guy a scummy elite, but call her a trophy wife, especially if the guy is really really old and close to death.
When you reach a certain level of education and class, those "gold digger girlfriends" become "a wife", that others call "a trophy wife". I think MIT had many of those there.
Here's [1] an example of using the word "boys" to refer to young men on a college football team in a way that I don't think fits either category. I used a northwestern fan site given the email address in your profile, but I found similar examples across lots of different sites.
I think the lesson here is, leave your sex trafficked models at home when conducting business. It is telling how common this must have been for the thousands of years before the internet. What was Charlemagnes wife, like 13 when she started getting pregnant?
I mentioned this to a similar comment elsewhere in the thread, but this is a weird horse to hitch your wagon to. Even if these particular women weren’t trafficked, the Media Lab staff’s general suspicions about Epstein were obviously correct.
They were suspicious because he was a known pedophile. That doesn't mean that anyone under his employ was being exploited.
> this is a weird horse to hitch your wagon to.
I'm not hitching my wagon to anything. This is basically arguing that as long as someone was bad enough, you can just make up or assume anything also bad about them, including the extent of their crimes. Did you know Hitler was a pedophile and necrophiliac? Now, don't you go trying to defend Hitler by saying there's no evidence of this!
They were suspicious because he was a known pedophile who prostituted young girls from Eastern Europe, who showed up with two young-looking girls from Eastern Europe. That’s not evidence, but it’s enough to arouse suspicion, which is the point.
The Hitler thing is a straw man; Hitler was not known for pedophilia or necrophilia. Epstein was already known for soliciting prostitution from underage girls who matched the profile of the ones he brought to the MIT Media Lab offices.
If this sort of scenario seems normal to you, maybe you live in the wrong neighborhood.
I see a lot of shit when I go outside, but old geezers with entourages of very young eastern european women is not something I can claim to have witnessed.
You probably have not spent time in Midtown, UES, UWS, Chelsea, West Village, SoHo and TriBeCa in Manhattan, or Vegas, or LA, or Miami. I live in Manhattan and see this at every upscale establishment I go to. The old dude-young lady combos are everywhere in these places, part of the normal.
Old dude with a single young lady (possibly daughter or grand daughter) is something I've certainly seen. But a veritable entourage of young women? That's something I can't say I've seen.
If that is common in those locations, I'll be avoiding them.
Really? My wife and I see it often enough that we've even labeled it: "the wife or daughter game". You observe such a constellation and try to figure out which one it is. Less often the answer is "escort".
I play this game as well but call it “daughter or prostitute.”
It’s pretty common to see old dudes with young women. I’ve rarely been able to actually find the answer.
The few times I’ve gone to fancy resorts or expensive areas, I’ve always seen couples like this. Only a few times did I see more than one woman.
I worked for a ceo once who always had a much younger (25 vs 65) assistant in the building.
I don’t think I would change my behavior if some rich guy had two models in tow for business meetings. I might assume they are prostitutes, but as long as they aren’t children I don’t know what action I would take.
I’m not sure how it’s misogynist. It’s a people watching activity that’s just a pastime. Similar to trying to tell narratives about people sitting near us in a cafe. Just because I’ll never know if someone really is a traveling archaeologist smuggling artifacts doesn’t mean I don’t derive pleasure in thinking through the thought.
In the particular game of “prostitute or daughter” (also sometimes prostitute or son, although much less common) we try to pick apart clues that might inform the guess. Places we’ve seen them. Actions toward each other. Actions when apart. Etc etc.
I certainly don’t see that those are the only roles for women. But in a situation there it’s a 70 year old man/woman with a 25 year old who is not their spouse, I think those are the most likely options. The game also includes being able to rule out other relationship types just based on observation.
It’s also worth noting that these aren’t absolute characterizations but probabilistic. In no part of the game am I making some belief that the young women must be one or the other. But sadly/comically usually old rich dudes with young women who aren’t their daughter and they are acting romantically, it’s usually a prostitute, hopefully a consenting one.
It’s quite possible that I’m wrong in that maybe they’re married without rings or whatnot, but there’s no harm as they don’t know I’m going through this thought exercise, and I’ll rarely know if I guess right.
> But in a situation there it’s a 70 year old man/woman with a 25 year old who is not their spouse, I think those are the most likely options.
Sure you do, and while it is not particularly plausible that those would be the most probable—even from the categories of “family members” and “people doing their job by being there”—it is a perfect example of the Virgin-Whore mindset.
The game is daughter or prostitute so “family members” is half the game. Determining whether they are platonic, non-family acquaintances is part of the fun.
Different levels of physical affection often make it clear. Put another way: you can't always rule out wife. You can often rule out daughter. But we also don't particularly care about being accurate all the time.
Let me preface this by saying that I have no idea who Epstein is except that he's some rich, white guy that got caught up in some kind of sex scandal, was arrested and is now dead. I'm not belittling his acts nor ignoring his accusers, I'm saying that I did not know. Now let me explain why.
Over the past couple of years, there have been non-stop stories of one powerful white man after another being revealed doing heinous sexual things to women. The reports are non-stop and it has come to the point that I have tuned them out. A good number of us here are in the tech industry, we're busy enough as it is. Whatever free time we have is focused on things that are more immediate. A large number of people in my immediate bubble have no idea who Epstein is. I'm not even sure if his first name is Jeff or James, except that it starts with J.
I'm likely not the only one.
So according to the HN guidelines, please assume good faith when people ask why.
> A good number of us here are in the tech industry, we're busy enough as it is.
Might want to tune back in a bit; the demise of Epstein is one of the most kelptocratic things that's ever happened in the US. It doesn't even matter exactly how he died; there is no 'fact pattern' you can subscribe to that isn't a consequence of in-your-face public corruption.
To be fair, remember also that this happened in the US, and there are plenty of people who are tuned into what is going on closer to home.
We're not all Americans here.
Although if I was going to comment on something very specific to the US and wasn't quite sure what it was about, I'd probably do some fact-finding beforehand.
There are some international implications in the Epstein case. Prince Andrew is not American either, for example. And apparently the British media had some inkling, or he likely wouldn't have had the nickname 'Randy Andy' when he was younger.
Saying "This is well-known now" is fine, because he/she is indicating that it is well known by people following the Epstein case. On a side note, everybody should keep the minimum level of effort to stay up to date on politics and news, especially when it is the case of high level corruption. Saying "we're busy", is not a good enough excuse, and we have more responsibilities working in tech than to take care of stuff that is simply immediate to us.
How can we expect the republic to survive if some of the most capable people try so actively to not pay attention to what's going on outside their bubble?
This might surprise you, but I'd prefer people be up to speed on matters of public policy (school funding, environmental regulation, labor laws, etc.)
I can't imagine what relevance you think this case has to the lives of most people on this forum, or even to most people living in the USA. It doesn't impact their future, their well-being, the well-being of people they know or are likely to know, or have (any? much?) lasting meaning for rational policy decisions.
The survival of the republic is most assuredly not dependent upon everyone on the internet clinging to the details of every morbidly awful high-profile sexual misconduct case.
Epstein wasn't just gossip or a one-off terrible person. He was a network, he provided services, and his clients/friends/co-conspirators were some of the most prominent people in the country. Not because they were popular but because they were powerful.
Corruption at the highest level that goes far and wide. You shouldn't ignore it because it's "just" sex abuse and not anything important. When you shine light on any kind of high level corruption, you get corrupt people out of their positions. The collateral damage is that the other corrupt things they do which might be more "important" and honest people who don't do those sorts of things get promoted into the spots vacated.
Not to mention validating the many victims of similar abuse around the country who are most often the prey of powerful people.
If you don't care and think there are more important things than that... well ok, but I think that not caring about that kind of corruption and ignoring it is a real threat to the stability and longevity of the republic.
Because they’re too busy counting their money. We’re the lackeys of the mighty and powerful and when the “common people” sometime try to react to the visible power imbalances some of us feel the need to obey and defend our masters. Source: me, a desilusioned programmer approaching my 40s
Or lack of money. The current economy, even for those in the professional class (given the absurd costs of living in tech cities), is designed to maximize precarity and force people into such a hustle mentality that they can barely pay attention to the world around them. It is truly the billionaire class vs the rest of us. We're all in this together.
You would think so from the outside but given the current level of technological development today's billionaires would be nothing without us, IT people (I include here everything from devops, to programmers to QA etc etc), without some lawyers and some medical professionals. Even the billionaires' goons are almost nothing without the technological-heavy guns they employ to potentially carry out their goon-related stuff, and said technology depends, like I said, on us, IT people.
What makes you think anyone with billionaire status thinks about anyone of lesser status as anything but cogs in their personal machine? So their existence depends on others, in reality... when did they last have any contact with reality in any meaningful way?
If you can be bought and sold, you are a pawn, not a player.
I am there with you. Part of me worries about overreactions, but the other part is glad this is happening, because, at one point, people have to figure out that those narcissistic douche bag are the bane of humanity, and that we should avoid them and socially isolate them, and that there are consequences to enabling them.
There are definitely participants in these discussions with a very specific agenda. Some accounts, like nf8nnfufuu, are going really far out of their way to defend Epstein. Just search for how many responses they've written throughout this thread to see what I mean.
that account in particular eventually admits to not having read much about the case.
i honestly am pretty sure the vast majority of the contrarians really are just not familiar with the whole Epstein story, and may only be hearing about it as it intersects with the tech world.
I went on vacation to St Maarten around 2010 and when we were getting off of the plane Epstein's private jet landed. We were wondering who it was so we asked a group of people who were working at the airport and they told us that it's Epstein, a pedophile billionaire who keeps flying in to have sex with underage girls on his private island. Given their nonchalant response it seemed like it was common knowledge on the islands.
We asked our taxi driver about it on the way to the hotel and he knew about it too.
This is about continuing to maintain ties with Epstein long after how problematic he was was known, to the point that the university had banned having any involvement with him because of his pedophilia conviction and Joichi Ito still associated with him and took his money, while lying to the greater university and covering up that he was still involving himself with him.
No, this definitely could not have happened to 90% of us.
People, happily do things like honor a holiday made by a man who sticks women's toes into vices, Think OJ is an innocent victim of systematic racism, and freely do business with some of the most repressive regimes. Just a few months back some of the same talking heads acting all high and mighty now were whining how Drumpf was hurting business with China. The same china which massacred a bunch of people in fairly recent events as tiananman square and memoryholed it to the point where even most americans aren't aware of it.
If people regularly overlook stuff like this without any shame, maybe possibly getting a massage seems pretty easy to overlook as well especially if you're getting a fat stack of cash.
I'm not going to argue what others would do with respect to the moral quandary of taking Epstein's money (indeed, Nicholas Negroponte argued 2 days ago he would still have counseled to take the money).
However, saying "hindsight and all" is a misrepresentation of the facts. Epstein was convicted of 2 felony prostitution charges (one involving a minor) in 2008 and was a registered sex offender. To try to portray this as just some "he said-she said" between a "rich playboy" and accusers is complete bullshit.
Also, Prince Andrew was widely criticized in 2011 for his tied to Epstein, and all of this stuff was after that. The "hindsight" was already well known by the time Ito accepted this money.
These folks knew what they were doing and made the calculation that the money was worth it.
It's hard to read your position here. I agree that many people would let greed overcome them, but you seem to actually be saying that's not a problem, and even going as far as saying that allegations of rape are being manufactured for drama. Not good
> Joi shouldn’t be hung for giving someone the benefit of doubt.
Epstein had already been convicted and banned from MIT donations.
In a position of leadership you are responsible to keep a healthy and safe workplace. That’s part of the job of running a lab. If you are unable or unwilling to do that, you should not be in a leadership role.
And took donations after Epstein was disqualified as a funder (after his 2008 conviction), and deliberately manipulated things to make them anonymous. It's blatant, done with full understanding, and (stupidly) with an email trail of evidence.
'In September, 2014, Ito wrote to Epstein soliciting a cash infusion to fund a certain researcher, asking, “Could you re-up/top-off with another $100K so we can extend his contract another year?” Epstein replied, “yes.” Forwarding the response to a member of his staff, Ito wrote, “Make sure this gets accounted for as anonymous.” Peter Cohen, the M.I.T. Media Lab’s Director of Development and Strategy at the time, reiterated, “Jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous. Thanks.”'
and
' But the e-mails show that Ito consulted closely with Epstein and actively sought the various donations. At one point, Cohen reached out to Ito for advice about a donor, writing, “you or Jeffrey would know best.”'
and so on, and so forth. The article is worth a read.
> And took donations after Epstein was disqualified as a funder (after his 2008 conviction)
Can you point me to where it's described exactly when Epstein was blacklisted by MIT and why? If it's in the newyorker article, I'm missing it.
It points out that Epstein's donations were anonymous and that he was blacklisted but doesn't appear to order the events. It looks like Epstein was anonymously donating back around 2002 also, so was he also blacklisted then? Why?
It’s in the New Yorker article linked from the nytimes article. But correct there is no timeline. But the references to emails that show leadership trying to hide the source of donations sounds bad.
To any Asian Americans reading this, I’m sorry for how the media discriminates against your identity. Out of all the affiliations with Epstein, why do they focus on this one?
“The trouble with tainted money is t’aint enough of it.” - William Booth.
Playing devil’s advocate here: Accepting tainted money as charity is not the problem. Promoting the donors, giving them prestige, contacts, access or some other benefits as a result of donations is the problem.
It is absolutely, very much a problem to take money from an unrepentant abuser and predator who is still publicly flaunting his abusive and predatory ways. You could argue that, perhaps, such institutions should also not cater to the merely wealthy and vain. But you can enable vanity without enabling sex trafficking.
What if the money could be accepted in a way that could not possibly convey any status or glory back to the donor - something permanently anonymous - and also did not allow the donor any guidance over the use of the money? I’m asking as a philosophical question, not suggesting that Ito’s actions might be justified.
It's certainly a complex and worthy philosophical question but what does it have to do with a child rapist contributing to MIT? My take is 'nothing'. Like, you shouldn't have child rapists contributing to your institution. It seems morally and philosophically trivial.
Of course if they had an 'active' indicator, them failing could have been the impetus for him knowing he had a window of opportunity. Rather than 'pure coincidence'.
Good. These were in no way innocent ties. He knew who Epstein was and misled people. Ito could be on the hook for civil fraud. The elements of fraud are:
a purposeful misrepresentation of a fact
with knowledge that it is false
to a victim who justifiably relies on the misrepresentation
who suffers actual loss as a result.
That's reaching, a whole lot. Ito knew who Epstein was, as did everyone else - Epstein's conviction wasn't a secret. That harms Ito through his poor decision making, but other people were just as capable of knowing who Epstein was.
Who suffered an actual loss as a result of these donations? Civil fraud is grasping, some.
Other donors who may not have been as willing to contribute to the lab if they knew the lab accepted monies from Epstein. That's why his donations were recategorized as anonymous even though the recipients know who they came from.
(1) a purposeful misrepresentation of a fact
(2) with knowledge that it is false
(3) to a victim who justifiably relies on the misrepresentation
(4) who suffers actual loss as a result.
(1) If I lie to you (2) knowingly, and (3) you are convinced by my lies (4) to part ways with your money, then I have defrauded you. That you nobly donated to MIT doesn't matter.
With regards to (3) and (4), who are you describing? Epstein gave the money to the Media Lab, or brokered the delivery of the money to the Media Lab from people who knew who he was.
If you read the article, you'll see that MIT specifically blacklisted Epstein from making donations as a result of his conviction, and Ito went behind their backs to keep getting money from him anyway. That's fraud, and MIT could definitely argue loss of reputation. I don't know if they'll go after Ito, but if they do, they'll have a pretty good case.
Out of curiosity, do you say this from firsthand knowledge as an expert in civil fraud law, or just in the message board sense of "it seems like they might have a pretty good case"?
Essentially any argument that donated money accepted in good faith is stripped of its criminal origins is wholly wrong.
If I steal a TV and donate it to a school, the police can recover the TV and return it to its owner. The fact that the school didn't know it was stolen is irrelevant.
Donations sourced from criminal profits are a more complex example of the same long-established legal and moral principle.
This is why the Sacklers are having such a time of it - the jury is still out on whether pushing opiates was actually criminal, but it's certainly not simply a civil case. And it's also why anyone who had any kind of association with Epstein is trying very hard to distance themselves from him.
Which is why Ito's actions weren't just stupid, but could be considered criminal in their own right.
There's no doubt Epstein was involved in some very nasty things. If profits from the nasty things were accepted unknowingly, then there's no criminal liability. But anyone who knowingly benefits from criminal acts risks being accused of being an accessory to them, even if the connection is purely financial.
If the point of comments is for them to be read, then there’s no negotiating on this point. If you’re just posting for fun and don’t care if people can read what you’re quoting and writing about, then why are you posting at all?
HN is a place for discussion. Using code blocks for non-code citations hinders discussion. Now that you know this, willfully using them for that purpose is antithetical to good discussion.
I’d love to hear a case otherwise, but I can’t see how to construct one for you.
Contrarian view: as long as the person in question was not compromised by e.g. flights to the pedo island (like Bubba Clinton, who took dozens of flights, dismissing USSS on a number of them for some reason, hmm), and as long as the integrity of the lab was not affected by Epstein's involvement, I see nothing wrong with taking his money. He's despicable, sure, but if he's not buying influence, I'm OK with him supporting science rather than blowing that money on satisfying wealthy pedophiles.
Buying influence is exactly what Epstein did his whole life, somebody like that doesn't donate money because hes a swell guy after all.
He donated for access to famous and future famous people, so he could implicate them in sexual crimes and compromising relationships and extract money and favors from them.
That's what the guy did, its not some kind of secret now, or then.
And you can bet your top dollar Joi Ito was compromised too, which is exactly why he broke the rules around the MIT blacklist banning Epstein's donations and kept everything secret.
"The departure of Mr. Ito from the media lab came after he spent days trying to make amends. At Wednesday’s meeting, which was organized by professors at the program, he reiterated his apology. He described for the first time the amount of money he had received from Mr. Epstein, and said he had twice traveled to Mr. Epstein’s island home in the Caribbean to seek donations."
“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.”
And what did these people go home and start doing for Eastern European models since then? I find this pretty condescending. I know a few Eastern European models who are incredibly smart, and perhaps dated some folks who they wouldn't have dated if they were born in the U.S., but used those relationships to get themselves out of possible hellish, abusive, misogynistic situations back home (this is somewhat speculation, but our current First Lady seems to fall in this category). They were young but had been through hard times like the disintegration of the Soviet Union and starvation, and aren't so naive. They were honest about things, and weren't living in delusion. Some of the toughest and smartest people I've ever met in fact. There just seems to be a lot of phony moral outrage here.
The context here is that Epstein was a convicted sex offender who was widely believed to traffic women into sexual slavery, and sexual slavery is a serious problem in Eastern Europe [1].
The implication is the staff were concerned that Epstein was bringing literal slaves into the office.
Gotcha, I don't know the details of the allegations, and whether it was sex slavery or not. I was just giving another data point with a somewhat contrarian view. Thanks for sharing.
One nit about the OP, is when any press outlet reports this as a "suicide". At the very least, this should be reported as an "assisted suicide". My infant can't poop without us having video evidence. The odds of this being an individual act given where and who he was are maybe .1%? Only problem is so many people wanted him gone, hard to figure out who helped him.
Well one of my best friends and mentors was an “Eastern European model” who I think would be offended by this quote, which can come across as a patronizing attitude. She would say not to judge by appearance, and that perhaps Epstein is helping these women more than these women would. Don’t just a book by its cover.
Again, we're not talking here about a blanket judgment of "attractive Eastern European women" or even "attractive Eastern European women with a much older man." We're talking about this in the context of them showing up with a man who was a confessed and convicted pedophilic sex trafficker. That's why people were entirely in the right to assume that perhaps they didn't have their full agency in the situation. As a matter of fact one of Epstein's & Ghislaine Maxwell's tactics was to confiscate passports, which could very well have been the case with these women Epstein brought to MIT.
I read the article. These "concerned" staff "decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room." So they didn't allow these two women to participate in the conversation about science! From the facts in the article, it seemed to me they made a judgement about who these 2 women were based upon their appearance.
I'm saying read this article with a grain of salt. There's a lot of B.S. in here. Instead of throwing stones at everyone, let's think about what the bigger pictures problem with the system are.
It's a fair point. I wasn't in the room and never met Epstein. I just wanted to provide a counterargument, because I think people are quick to pile on.
In Tokyo you could walk into a nightclub at 2am on a wednesday night and the place was filled with eastern european models (bored and in town for photo shoots), and mostly western english teachers. Ok that was kind of bizarre, but if you live in a major city yes there will be models. They don’t just exist in advertising.
I'm sorry you distrust me, but I do my best to speak the truth as I see it. My name is Breck Yunits, I've been on this site for 12 years. You can find more about me at breckyunits.com. You can see over a decade of commits in just one of my GitHub accounts at github.com/breck7. You can find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. You are free to post your opinions and criticisms of me, I really am grateful for it and often learn a lot from criticism.
> a habit of speaking with the "royal we" for instance.
This is a fair point. I'll explain. My Tree Notation ideas are simple, bold, and have very big implications if I'm right. I have gotten tremendous help from hundreds of people, and have had thousands of conversations about it. My initial paper had initials of many people who read the initial drafts and helped me publish it. I got a lot of negative comments when I posted it, with the most common that it was nothing original and/or that I was some crazy nut detached from reality. Instead of subject my friends and collaborators to that, I've just decided to be the shield that takes the heat, while everyone else does the hard job of pushing these ideas forward. I think it's now pretty close to the point where people see that we were right after all, and Tree Notation may indeed eat the software world, and you will set a lot of new names, and mine will fade out.
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