Administrators at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology accepted more than $800,000 in donations from Jeffrey Epstein despite knowing that he was a registered sex offender and had been accused of trafficking and preying on underage girls, according to a new report released Friday.
Multiple administrators at the Cambridge, Mass., school knew Epstein was suspected of trafficking teenage girls and convicted in 2008 of soliciting underage prostitutes, yet still accepted $850,000 from Epstein in 10 different donations between 2002 and 2017 and allowed him to visit the university nine times between 2013 and 2017, the document said.
The report, conducted by law firm Goodwin Procter, said current MIT President Leo Rafael Reif had no knowledge of any Epstein donations or campus visits.
Instead, the report laid the blame for Epstein's post-conviction donations and visits at the feet of two men: former MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito and engineering professor Seth Lloyd. Ito resigned in September over his connections to Epstein, and Lloyd has been placed on paid administrative leave.
Ito and Lloyd, however, were only two of several fall guys. Vice Presidents R. Gregory Morgan, Jeffrey Newton and Israel Ruiz were the top administrators who approved the unconventional framework for accepting Epstein donations, the report found. None of them work at MIT anymore; Newton retired in 2013, Morgan joined him in retirement at the end of 2018, and Ruiz announced in December 2019 that he would be "stepping down."
The New Yorker reported extensively on the Epstein-MIT connection in September 2019, leading to Ito's resignation.
Epstein was facing federal sex trafficking charges when he died by suicide in August in a Manhattan jail. Investigations into Epstein's death have revealed a series of mishaps and mismanagement at Metropolitan Correctional Center.
