Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig is suing the New York Times, accusing the newspaper of misrepresenting his views of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial support for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Lessig announced the lawsuit in a post on his Medium page on Monday. The 58-year-old academic sued the New York Times over a story it published on Sept. 14, 2019, titled, “A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein’s Money, Do It in Secret.”
The lawsuit takes aim at the article’s headline and opening sentences, which say: “It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying.”
“This title and lede are false,” Lessig wrote, calling the New York Times’s description of his views “clickbait defamation.”
“Senior editors reviewed the story after Professor Lessig complained and were satisfied that the story accurately reflected his statements,” a New York Times representative told the Washington Examiner in a statement. “We plan to defend against the claim vigorously.”
Lessig wrote a Medium post on Sept. 8, 2019, accusing journalist Ronan Farrow and MIT administration officials of “scapegoating” former director of MIT’s Media Lab Joichi Ito for accepting multiple anonymous donations from Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died by suicide last year.
In the post, Lessig said that he and Ito are friends and admitted that he had advised Ito on taking the donations long before the information was known publicly. Lessig said he and Ito wrongly thought that accepting donations from Epstein, who Ito believed had stopped sexually abusing children at the time, was acceptable as long as the donations were kept anonymous and did not allow Epstein to “launder” Epstein’s reputation as a pedophile.
His post spurred New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles to ask to interview Lessig about Epstein’s donations. In the interview, he restated that Ito and MIT never should have accepted the Epstein donations because “when [the donations were] discovered, it would do real and substantial pain to the people within the Media Lab who would come to see that they were supported in part by the gift of a pedophile.”
The law professor asserted that Ito should not take all the blame for accepting the donations because members of MIT’s administration, including MIT President L. Rafael Reif, knew about and gave their approval to Ito to accept the donations. If the university was set on accepting the money, Lessig said, it “damn well better make it anonymous.”
Lessig was a Democratic presidential primary candidate in 2016, jumping into the race that was dominated by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. His campaign lasted a couple months, and he dropped out after missing the first primary debate.
An independent report recently revealed that Epstein donated $525,000 to the MIT Media Lab after his conviction.
