Toppling Epstein's intellectuals network

While there have been no other high-profile exits from the MIT Media Lab after Ethan Zuckerman and J. Nathan Matias submitted their resignations, the lab’s students had been demanding its director Joi Ito to resign over his ties with Epstein. While it is ridiculous that Ito pled ignorance in his August 15 note where he admitted he had received money from Epstein for the lab as well as as investments in his personal projects, tweets by Xeni Jardan and others only made his ignorance more implausible.

Peter Aldhous and his colleagues at BuzzFeed subsequently used tax filings to track down many of his elusive grantees in one frighteningly long list that includes biologists Martin Nowak and Robert Trivers as well as the publisher of Nautilus magazine.

According to a new set of updates that hit the news over the weekend, Ito had been letting on less than he knew, and he knew that Epstein was a convicted sexual offender who had preyed upon young, vulnerable women for his sexual pleasure as well as that of a bevy of celebrities (including Marvin Minsky, the cofounder of the Media Lab). The following articles – led by Ronan Farrow of The New Yorker, who apparently published the first article based on whistleblowers at MIT who had known of Ito's and others's (non-ignorant) ties with Epstein but whose notes the New York Times had turned down, possibly because Ito is on the Times's board of directors – have all the details:

1. Jeffrey Epstein’s Donations Create a Schism at M.I.T.’s Revered Media Lab (NYT)
2. How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (NYer)
3. Director of M.I.T.'s Media Lab Resigns After Taking Money From Jeffrey Epstein (NYT)
4. The Epstein scandal at MIT shows the moral bankruptcy of techno-elites (The Guardian)

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