MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito has faced pressure to resign after revealing that he took research funding from financier and alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. But today Nicholas Negroponte, who cofounded the Media Lab in 1985 and was its director for 20 years, said he had recommended that Ito take Epstein’s money. “If you wind back the clock,” he added, “I would still say, ‘Take it.’” And he repeated, more emphatically, “‘Take it.’”
Negroponte’s comments, made at the end of an all-hands Media Lab meeting this afternoon (September 4), shocked many people in the audience. At least some in the room understood him to be saying that he would have supported taking the money even if he had known then that Epstein was a suspected sex trafficker.
In an earlier version of this story, that is how we reported his remarks. Negroponte has not responded to the request for comment we made before publishing the story, but in a subsequent statement to the Boston Globe, he appeared to say otherwise—namely, that he defended the original decision to take money from Epstein, who at the time had already been convicted of and served time for a sexual offense involving a minor, but wouldn’t have defended it in light of the more recent charges.
Regardless, Negroponte’s comments may also shift a narrative that, at least in public, has primarily blamed Ito for working with Epstein. Though Negroponte is no longer director, his justifications help explain the mindset that led so many intellectual luminaries to associate with Epstein. – READ MORE