© MIT
MIT Media Lab
On Saturday, less than a day after the publication of this story,
Joi Ito, the director of the M.I.T. Media Lab, resigned from his position. "After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately," Ito wrote in an internal e-mail. In
a message to the M.I.T. community,
L. Rafael Reif, the president of M.I.T., wrote, "Because the accusations in the story are extremely serious, they demand an immediate, thorough and independent investigation," and announced that M.I.T.'s general counsel would engage an outside law firm to oversee that investigation.
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.
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