MIT secretly took millions in donations connected to Jeffrey Epstein

New documents found by reporter Ronan Farrow show that the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concealed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as it secretly pocketed at least $1.7 million in his donations — far more than the school has admitted publicly.

The Media Lab knew the disgraced financier was a convicted sex offender, but still took his gifts and used him as an intermediary with other wealthy donors, including Bill Gates and investor Leon Black, Farrow reported for The New Yorker.

Epstein helped secure at least $7.5 million from well-heeled donors for the school, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, Farrow wrote, citing interviews and dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents from the school.

The documents show that while Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to pocket his cash in secret — by marking his contributions as “anonymous.”

The donations were kept a secret even within the university, the documents show.

“The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, called Epstein ‘Voldemort,’ or ‘he who must not be named,’” Farrow wrote.

Ito, a New York Times board member, apologized last month for taking $800,000 from Epstein’s foundations over the past 20 years, and promised to donate the money to charity.

But on Wednesday, the university’s president, L. Rafael Reif, admitted that Epstein had contributed $1.2 million to M.I.T.-related investment funds and another $525,000 to the Media Lab, Farrow reported.

Gates, through a spokesperson, denied that Epstein had anything to do with his donations — despite an Oct. 2014 e-mail, uncovered by Farrow, in which Ito wrote to Media Lab development director Peter Cohen, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.”

“Great!” Cohen responds.

“For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey’s name as the impetus for this gift.”

Farrow’s piece will likely fuel the ongoing backlash over the school’s links to Epstein.

Last month, Media Lab director Ethan Zuckerman resigned in shame over the connection.

Credit: Source link

The post MIT secretly took millions in donations connected to Jeffrey Epstein appeared first on Fox USA Live.

from Fox USA Live https://ift.tt/2PRImSl