New MIT Report Details University’s Deeper Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who reportedly committed suicide in jail last year while facing further charges that he had trafficked and sexually abused young girls, had a closer relationship with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology than was previously public, according to a 61-page report released on Friday by the university.

Epstein visited MIT’s campus nine times, the report says, from 2013 to 2017 — well after his 2008 conviction. He donated a total of $850,000 to MIT over a 15-year period, including $525,000 to its Media Lab and $225,000 to Seth Lloyd, a tenured mechanical-engineering professor. MIT put Lloyd on paid administrative leave on Friday, and Joi Ito resigned in September as director of the Media Lab after a New Yorker article made public details about Epstein’s relationship with the lab.

The report was prepared by Goodwin Procter, a law firm that the university hired last September while it was facing intense scrutiny for its relationship with Epstein. New revelations about his alleged crimes had come to light, most notably in the Miami Herald, as had his connections to famous scientists, who had visited him in his homes and accepted his money for their research. Harvard University said it had accepted about $9 million from Epstein before his conviction, and that university is also investigating the extent of its relationship with him.

MIT does not have a policy on accepting controversial donations, according to the report. MIT’s president, L. Rafael Reif, “was not involved” in the decision to accept donations from Epstein, the report says, though he signed a letter to Epstein acknowledging a 2012 donation.

Three MIT vice presidents — R. Gregory Morgan, Jeffrey Newton, and Israel Ruiz — did discuss the donations, and though they knew about Epstein’s conviction and prison sentence, decided to accept the gifts. They did so on the condition that the donations would be “relatively small and unpublicized, so that they could not be used by Epstein to launder or ‘whitewash’ his reputation,” the report says. That decision did not break the law, according to the report, but showed “significant mistakes of judgment.”

The report says the three leaders “believed that they were doing their best to address the competing interests of obtaining funding for Media Lab programs, while denying Epstein any personal benefit from his association with MIT and protecting MIT’s reputation.” It says that Ruiz, who stepped down as executive vice president and treasurer in December, “has expressed deep regret, which we believe is sincere, for what he believes was a collective and continued error of judgment.”

Secret Giving

Lloyd first met Epstein in 2004 and received a $60,000 gift from him in 2005 or 2006 that was not shared with the university, the report says. That donation was deposited in a personal bank account and was not counted as part of the overall $850,000. In 2012, after other universities had turned him down because of his conviction, Epstein gave Lloyd two $50,000 donations as a way to test whether MIT would accept his money despite his criminal record, the report says. Lloyd purposely did not tell the university where he had gotten those gifts, according to the report. He did not respond to a request for comment.

Epstein met with Ito, then the Media Lab’s director, during every one of the MIT visits that the report recounts. During each visit he also met with other researchers, and once with two MIT students, according to the report. In 2016, after some discussion among Media Lab leaders, he was allowed on the campus during a memorial service for Marvin Minsky, a professor whom Epstein had supported. But Epstein was not permitted to attend the event or a reception that followed. Instead he stayed in Ito’s office.

During Epstein’s last visit, in 2017, he met with Caleb Harper, the principal research scientist of the Open Agriculture Initiative. Ito was courting Epstein for a $1.5-million gift for Harper’s work as recently as 2018, according to the report, though that donation never materialized. MIT “halted” the initiative, “pending completion of ongoing assessments,” after reports in The Chronicle and elsewhere that Harper’s claims about his research were exaggerated. Neither Ito nor Harper responded to requests for comment in time for publication.

Some staff members and professors voiced concerns about Epstein’s visits to MIT. When Ito told professors and administrators that Epstein wanted to “come brainstorm a big idea” in December 2017 — after news reports emerged about additional accusations of sexual abuse — a Media Lab assistant wrote to Ito to tell him another staff member had raised concerns in an earlier meeting.

“She should talk to me about her concerns,” Ito responded. He wrote in a later email to the assistant that “there definitely is a lot of risk, and I think about it a lot, but we have made some decisions about this in consultation with key people so [the Media Lab staff member] can have input, but she shouldn’t be deciding.”

MIT said it planned to adopt several changes in response to the report’s findings. The university will review its processes for accepting gifts, and create a procedure for making decisions about controversial donations. The university also plans to make it easier and safer for whistle-blowers to raise concerns, and will donate $850,000 to charities that benefit survivors of sexual abuse.

Nell Gluckman is a senior reporter who writes about research, ethics, funding issues, affirmative action, and other higher-education topics. You can follow her on Twitter @nellgluckman, or email her at nell.gluckman@chronicle.com.