MIT Media Lab

The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Nicholas Negroponte was its co-founder, and Marvin Minsky held its Toshiba Professorship of Media Arts and Sciences until his death in 2016.¹² Joi Ito was its director from 2011 until he resigned on September 7, 2019.¹³

Epstein's Donations

The law firm Goodwin Procter, engaged by MIT after Ito's resignation, found that Jeffrey Epstein made ten donations to MIT totaling 850,000 dollars between 2002 and 2017. The first, 100,000 dollars from his C.O.U.Q. Foundation in 2002, supported Minsky's research. The nine after his 2008 conviction went either to the Media Lab (525,000 dollars) or to the mechanical engineering professor Seth Lloyd (225,000 dollars).¹

Ito was introduced to Epstein by Linda Stone, a former member of the lab's advisory council, at the TED conference in Long Beach in February 2013. For "due diligence" he ran a Google search and consulted, among others, Negroponte, who replied: "I know him quite well. The person who is his closest friend is Marvin Minsky, who even visited him in jail. I would take Berlusconi's money, so why not Jeff." Epstein's first Media Lab gift, 100,000 dollars in May 2013, was for Ito's discretion. Three more, totaling 300,000 dollars, supported Joscha Bach, a German researcher whom Epstein had introduced to Ito; the lab "hired Bach in large part because Epstein subsidized the cost." From 2014 Bach also kept an office at Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, where Epstein had introduced him to Martin Nowak.⁴ Gifts in 2015 and 2017, totaling 125,000 dollars, supported Professor Neri Oxman, whom Ito introduced to Epstein on the campus in October 2015.¹

Three members of MIT's senior team, the general counsel R. Gregory Morgan, the vice president for resource development Jeffrey Newton and the treasurer Israel Ruiz, knew of Epstein's sex-offense record and in 2013 set up the informal framework under which all his later gifts were accepted. On June 26, 2013, Newton wrote to Ito: "We will keep the money, but it will be listed as anonymous," and instructed the recording secretary: "Please mark all of Epstein's gifts as anonymous. We do not want his name appearing on any list of supporters or donors in any form." MIT's records were altered accordingly. In November 2016 Ito asked the chairman of the MIT Corporation, Robert Millard: "Can you help me figure out how to get money from JE?" Millard declined Epstein's dinner invitation.¹

Epstein also claimed in 2014, according to Goodwin Procter, to have arranged an anonymous 2 million dollar gift to the lab from Bill Gates and a 5 million dollar anonymous gift from Leon Black. Gates's representatives told the investigators that he "flatly denies" Epstein had anything to do with his donation; Black had publicly acknowledged giving to charities "affiliated" with Epstein but had not said whether Epstein asked him to give to MIT. The investigators found no evidence that the money of either was Epstein's.¹ In August 2015 Reid Hoffman hosted a dinner in Palo Alto, presented as a fundraiser for the lab, attended by Ito, Epstein, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg; Hoffman apologized in September 2019 for his part in the Epstein-linked donations.⁵⁶

On September 6, 2019, Ronan Farrow reported in The New Yorker that the lab had concealed the relationship and referred to Epstein internally as "Voldemort." Ito resigned the next day, despite a petition supporting him signed by hundreds of faculty, students and alumni.¹³ A staff member later circulated photographs from Minsky's memorial with the request that they be posted only "as long as Jeffrey Epstein does not appear in any of the photos."⁷

The Bin Sulayem Visit

On November 29, 2016, the lab's director's office coordinated with Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff and the chairman's office of DP World a visit, scheduled for November 30 and December 1, 2016, by DP World's chairman, Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, which Epstein had arranged. Ito wrote that "Sultan will be with me at the Media Lab," that he was "locking in a bunch of meetings for Sultan at the Media Lab from 9:30AM-11AM," and that Epstein "was going to drop by the Media Lab at 11AM"; the party was then to go to Martin Nowak's office at 1 Brattle Square, Harvard's Program for Evolutionary Dynamics. The assistant to the director wrote to Groff that "Joi is planning to leave here with them around 11am to head to the Harvard."⁸ The visit came four weeks after Ito's November 3, 2016 email to Millard asking how "to get money from JE."⁹

Other Research

From October 2020 to June 2023 the lab ran a project applying topic modeling and network analysis to the leaked forums of the neo-fascist site Iron March.¹⁰

The Anonymity Framework

MIT's first post-conviction Epstein money came through the physicist Seth Lloyd, who had known Epstein for years, visited him at his office during his work release, and had personally received a 60,000 dollar gift from him in about 2005 or 2006 that MIT never recorded. On June 7, 2012, Lloyd told MIT staff to expect a donation without naming the donor, giving only the name of Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff, later named as a co-conspirator defendant in civil suits against Epstein's estate, as the person "taking care of the donation from the donor's end." The Goodwin Procter investigators concluded that "the only reasonable inference is that Professor Lloyd did this to obscure the fact that Epstein was the donor." A presidential acknowledgment letter bearing L. Rafael Reif's signature and dated August 16, 2012 thanked Epstein for the gift; Reif signed about 500 such letters a year.¹¹

When Epstein's unsolicited 100,000 dollar gift to Ito's discretionary account arrived in May 2013, Vice President Jeffrey Newton told Ito that Epstein should be asked "not to publicize his support of MIT, as we are handling these funds as anonymous," and instructed the recording secretary: "Mark his file with a message that there is to be no contact with him without contacting me first. No acknowledgment letters from the president. I think this is the best we can do right now." MIT's records of Epstein's post-conviction gifts were altered to read "anonymous"; the 2002 C.O.U.Q. Foundation gift to Minsky was left unchanged. Alerts added to the donor files of Epstein's foundations Epstein Interests and Enhanced Education read: "There is to be [no] contact with Epstein without contacting VP Jeff Newton first. Sensitive situation, no presidential acknowledgement." No one interviewed could recall another donor made anonymous at MIT's own initiative rather than the donor's request. Epstein's websites continued to advertise support for "Marvin Minsky and MIT's AI and Media Labs," and one 2014 foundation press release claimed a gift to MIT for art restoration that he never made.¹²

In January 2015, weighing a proposal that Epstein give millions, Treasurer Israel Ruiz set the terms under which further gifts would be accepted: "We determined that number to be below $5M a year and we would be much more comfortable with anonymous and no publicity at $1 or $2 million levels." In September 2018 Ruiz approved a proposed 500,000 dollar Epstein gift because it "meets the criteria"; that gift never arrived.¹³

The Directed Gifts

Ronan Farrow, drawing on dozens of pages of internal emails, reported that Epstein was credited with securing at least 7.5 million dollars for the lab from others, including 2 million dollars from Bill Gates and 5.5 million dollars from Leon Black, gifts the emails describe as "directed" by Epstein or made at his behest. In October 2014 Ito wrote internally: "This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein." The lab's development director, Peter Cohen, replied: "For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey's name as the impetus for this gift." The mandatory gift record stated only that "Gates is making this gift at the recommendation of a friend of his who wishes to remain anonymous." When it circulated widely, Cohen wrote that future Epstein-related filings should go forward only "if there is a way to do it quietly." An agent for Gates asked the lab to keep Gates's name out of any public discussion. A Gates spokesperson said that "any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false."³

Of the Black gift, Cohen asked Ito, "Can you ask Jeffrey to ask Leon that? . . . We can make it anonymous easily, unless Leon would like the credit. If Jeffrey tells you that Leon would like a little love from MIT, we can arrange that too." A person close to Black said he had not intended the gift to be anonymous. Farrow reported that several years after Epstein's conviction, Black, his children and Epstein jointly invested in a company making emission-control products. Between 2012 and 2017 Black paid Epstein about 158 million dollars for tax and estate advice. In late 2014 Ito also asked Epstein to make an initial donation of up to 5 million dollars to trigger a matching gift that Ito said the John Templeton Foundation had discussed; the foundation told Farrow it had "no records related to any such plan," and no such gift was made.³¹³¹⁴

The Disqualified Code

Farrow reported that Epstein was listed as "disqualified" in MIT's central donor database and that the lab worked around the listing. Goodwin Procter disputed this: "Contrary to certain media reports, neither Epstein nor his foundations was ever coded as 'disqualified' in MIT's donor systems. Further, the code 'disqualified' does not mean that a person or entity is 'blacklisted' or prohibited from donating to the Institute. Rather, the term 'disqualified' is a database code for any donor who previously donated to MIT but presently is dormant or is no longer interested in giving to MIT."³¹²

Staff Objections

Staff in Ito's office referred to Epstein as "Voldemort" or "he who must not be named," and Ito told Linda Stone that "[p]eople in my office are a bit weirded out by him." Ethan Zuckerman, director of the lab's Center for Civic Media, pulled Ito aside in 2013 over calendar entries marked "J.E.": "I heard you're meeting with Epstein. I don't think that's a good idea." Ito answered, "You know, he's really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?" On Ito's calendar Epstein appeared only by his initials.³¹⁵

The former development associate Signe Swenson told Farrow that at her 2014 job interview Cohen said the lab was "currently working with Epstein," although she had seen him listed as disqualified: "I knew he was a pedophile and pointed that out." At a later meeting on how to take Epstein's money without reporting it within the university, she said, Ito told Cohen, "we can take small gifts anonymously." For a 2015 campus visit, staff were told to keep Zuckerman away from the glass-walled office where Epstein would meet faculty, and, according to Swenson, Ito relayed that Epstein "never goes into any room without his two female 'assistants'"; the women were made to wait outside. The visit was entered on Ito's calendar without Epstein's name: "It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit." Swenson resigned in 2016 and said in 2019, "I was a participant in covering up for Epstein in 2014." In late 2017 Professor Neri Oxman had a Media Lab "orb" sent to Epstein as thanks, at Ito's direction, she told investigators; a student who helped prepare it objected once she learned the recipient.³¹⁵

Disclosure and Findings

On August 22, 2019, after declining to comment, MIT acknowledged 800,000 dollars from Epstein, all to Lloyd or the Media Lab. Reif wrote to staff that "despite following the processes that have served MIT well for many years, in this instance we made a mistake of judgment," and pledged an equal sum to a charity for victims. Zuckerman and Nathan Matias announced they were cutting ties with the lab. Goodwin Procter, with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison retained separately by the Executive Committee, reviewed more than 610,000 documents and raised the figure to 850,000 dollars in its January 10, 2020 report. It found that Morgan, Newton and Ruiz "made significant mistakes of judgment" but that "no Senior Team member violated any law, breached any MIT policy, or acted in pursuit of personal gain," and that Reif "was not contemporaneously aware of Epstein's donations." Executive Committee chairman Robert Millard, whom Ito had asked in 2016 for help getting "money from JE," recused himself from oversight of the investigation.⁹¹¹¹⁶