How an Elite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein

[Devil Child]

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

The financial entanglement revealed in the documents goes well beyond what has been described in public statements by M.I.T. and by Ito. The University has said that it received eight hundred thousand dollars from Epstein’s foundations, in the course of twenty years, and has apologized for accepting that amount. In a statement last month, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote, “with hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts. No apology can undo that.” Reif pledged to donate the funds to a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, Ito disclosed that he had separately received $1.2 million from Epstein for investment funds under his control, in addition to five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that he acknowledged Epstein had donated to the lab. A spokesperson for M.I.T. said that the university “is looking at the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts to the institute.”

The documents and sources suggest that there was more to the story. They show that the lab was aware of Epstein’s history—in 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution—and of his disqualified status as a donor. They also show that Ito and other lab employees took numerous steps to keep Epstein’s name from being associated with the donations he made or solicited. On Ito’s calendar, which typically listed the full names of participants in meetings, Epstein was identified only by his initials. Epstein’s direct contributions to the lab were recorded as anonymous. 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.”

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-university-research-center-concealed-its-relationship-with-jeffrey-epstein

[PoliticAverse]

1. The director of the Media Lab resigned today as a result of that expose...

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100212446071

[Igel]

2. Yeah, you see, that wouldn't have bothered me.

Unless I was told to resign.

There seems to be an attempt to deplatform people we think of as bad, lest they be seen to have any good traits. Good guys must be 100% pure, and bad guys 100% evil.

It's not so, but that's the simple-minded view.

Even if somebody does good things and then turns out rotten, we have to go back and show that those "good things" weren't really good things. It's not like they changed their good/bad polarity; it's our evaluation that must change.

It works in a really pernicious way, too. If somebody's good, then we go to extreme lengths to undercut any attempt to paint anything they did as bad. Because if you're good, you're pure good; and if you're bad, you're pure bad. (I mean, kids in early elementary school outgrow this. Or I hope they do.)

It does the OT god one step further: If you do good, he said, the bad things you did will be forgotten; if you did good and then do bad, even the good you did will be forgotten. (At least in 600 BC the scribe could say that his god was just going to forget the good or bad, instead of moving heaven and earth to say why the old "bad" things really were okay and good, and the old "good" things were still deceitfully bad.)

In other words, if Epstein did something to help people, wonderful; doesn't make up for what bad he did, but he did something good. If Mr. X did something bad while doing lots of good things, well, that bad thing should just be called "bad" with the caveat that perfection probably isn't a really human trait.

I've known people--typically fundies--who really insisted that the pure must have no contact with the impure. Just not something I can do.