Joi Ito Resigns from M.I.T. Media Lab After Outcry over Jeffrey Epstein Ties

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.

Sincerely,

L. Rafael Reif

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

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.

The gossip I’ve heard is confirmed by those who knew him - https://www.salon.com/2019/07/09/i-was-a-friend-of-jeffrey-e... ;

> 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.

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.

Truly despicable.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-an-elite-univer...

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.

https://www.miamiherald.com/topics/jeffrey-epstein

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)

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/neoteny#section-over...

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.

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.

Someone who was asked by Ito to be on the MIT Disobedience Award jury wrote a long tweet thread yesterday calling out Reid Hoffman for his defense of Ito: https://twitter.com/anandwrites/status/1169952673988300800

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.

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.

"reminder to self: don't invest with or take money from assholes" -Joi Ito, Mar 12, 2008

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.

Jesus. Who lets a guy get away with that for so freaking long?

“Ronan Farrow is here”, has got to send chills down the spine of powerful people the way “Mike Wallace is here”, used to in the days of yesteryear.

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.

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?

>'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.

"Resigning to spend more time with my guild."

Joi Ito: What World of Warcraft taught me about being a better leader (chronicle.com) - 32 points by yarapavan on Apr 28, 2011

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2493209

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/new-director-of-...

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olGSOydtOgY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olGSOydtOgY

This is just one of sooo many.. the others truly need to be held responsible as well.

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.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/50295603@N02/48589712471/ https://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2011/10/487685.html

New internal email from President Reif:

To the members of the MIT community,

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.

Sincerely,

L. Rafael Reif

I feel bad for the students, professors, and other people affiliated with the MIT Media Lab who will likely actually pay the price for all of this.

Ito will be fine.

I don't understand the outrage.

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?

>"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

Would that help?

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.

MacArthur Foundation @macfound

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.

https://twitter.com/macfound/status/1170443088055144448

Good god, did they really have to thank Joi 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?

Total hipocrisy

    > I don't get it.

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.

> This is well-known now.

Please avoid this.

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.

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.

Edit: Removing my comment after reading the detailed New Yorker article linked from The NY Times.

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?

that is why Satoshi Nakamoto the inventor of BitCoin is Craig S Wright!

makes sense now

“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.

This article is filled with strangely matter-of-fact language regarding matters which are still unsolved:

For example:

> Mr. Epstein — who killed himself in jail last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges

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.

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.

Those in glass houses...

“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.