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." 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 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.⁴⁵

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."⁶

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.⁷