Goodwin Procter

Goodwin Procter LLP is an American law firm founded in Boston on July 1, 1912 by two former Harvard classmates, Robert Eliot Goodwin and Joseph Osborne Procter Jr., and now employing more than 1,800 lawyers. After Joi Ito resigned as director of the MIT Media Lab on September 7, 2019, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology engaged the firm to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's interactions with the institute. Its report of January 10, 2020 found that Epstein had made ten donations to MIT totaling 850,000 dollars between 2002 and 2017, nine of them after his 2008 conviction, that three members of MIT's senior team had approved the post-conviction gifts in 2013 knowing of his record, and that the physicist Seth Lloyd had "purposefully failed to inform MIT" that Epstein was the source of his 2012 gifts.¹²³

The MIT Engagement

Ito resigned one day after Ronan Farrow reported in the New Yorker that the lab had concealed Epstein's donations. Goodwin Procter conducted 73 interviews and, with Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, retained separately by MIT's Executive Committee, reviewed more than 610,000 emails and documents. The committee's chairman, Robert Millard, whom Ito had asked in 2016 for help getting "money from JE," recused himself from oversight of the investigation.³⁴⁵

Findings

The first donation, 100,000 dollars from Epstein's C.O.U.Q. Foundation in 2002, supported the research of Marvin Minsky; the report quoted a March 2013 email in which the Media Lab co-founder Nicholas Negroponte described Minsky as Epstein's closest friend at MIT, who had "even visited him in jail." The nine gifts after the conviction went to the Media Lab (525,000 dollars) or to Lloyd (225,000 dollars), including two donations of 50,000 dollars in 2012 and one of 125,000 dollars in 2017. The report found that the post-conviction visits and gifts were driven by Ito or by Lloyd, and that the 2012 gifts served Epstein as "a trial balloon" to test MIT's willingness to take his money.³⁶

Lloyd, who had known Epstein since a 2004 dinner organized by the literary agent John Brockman, had personally received a 60,000 dollar gift from him in about 2005 or 2006 that MIT never recorded, and visited him at his office during his work release. On June 7, 2012 he told MIT staff to expect a donation without naming the donor, giving only the name of Epstein's assistant Lesley Groff as the person "taking care of the donation from the donor's end." The 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 the signature of L. Rafael Reif and dated August 16, 2012 thanked Epstein for the gift. MIT placed Lloyd on paid administrative leave the day the report was released and imposed five years of restrictions on him in December 2020.³⁷

The report confirmed that MIT's senior team, General Counsel R. Gregory Morgan, Vice President Jeffrey Newton and Treasurer Israel Ruiz, approved a framework for anonymous Epstein gifts in June 2013: "We do not want his name appearing on any list of supporters or donors in any form." It found that they "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."³⁸

Gates, Black and the "Disqualified" Code

Epstein claimed in 2014, according to the report, 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; the investigators found no evidence that the money of either man was Epstein's.³⁹

Farrow had reported that Epstein was listed as "disqualified" in MIT's donor database. The report 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."⁸¹⁰

Other Clients

In September 2018 Goodwin Procter, with BDT & Company, advised Marc Benioff and Lynne Benioff on their 190 million dollar purchase of Time from the Meredith Corporation.¹¹