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Lawrence Lessig sues New York Times over MIT and Jeffrey Epstein interview
Harvard Law professor Lawrence Lessig is suing The New York Times over an interview about the MIT Media Lab accepting money from sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Lessig's defamation suit covers a September 2019 article titled "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret." He claims the headline misrepresents his interview, where he condemns the donation, but says that "if you're going to take the money, you damn well better make it anonymous."
Lessig is the founder of Creative Commons and a longtime policy activist; he once ran for president on the promise to pass a single anti-corruption law and then resign. He's also a friend of former MIT Media Lab president Joichi Ito. When Ito admitted last year to secretly receiving around $800,000 from Epstein, Lessig signed a supportive letter and argued that accepting secret donations was better than publicly laundering a criminal's reputation — although he said taking Epstein's money at all was wrong in retrospect.
Times reporter Nellie Bowles interviewed Lessig about the donations and appeared unimpressed by his reasoning. "It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying," she wrote in the article's opening paragraph. Lessig quickly dubbed the piece "clickbait defamation" by the Times. Now, he's turned that accusation into an actual defamation complaint and launched it with a full-fledged multimedia campaign, including a website called "Lessig v. Clickbait Defamation" and a related podcast.
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(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday January 16 2020, @05:08PM (7 children)
There are a number of good points in the comment. But Lessig is both defending his friend Ito and saying that what Ito did was wrong. In a few places he writes that Ito was just following MIT rules and using Ito's best judgment at the time and taking the money was really bad in hindsight, but less so at the time.
Condemning and defending are contradictory. I guess you're saying the NYT should accept Lessig's convoluted thinking.
They published the interview text and preceded it with true statements. That's reasonable.
BTW, what I wrote had an error. Lessig doesn't claim to have advised Ito not to take the money.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 16 2020, @06:24PM (6 children)
Do you realize that we are in fact having a discussion about the exact topic that Lessig brought up which is the inability to engage in nuanced conversation where things are not clear cut and actually come out of that with any semblance of reasonableness or sanity?
I think we do agree here in as much as Lessig isn't holding his friend accountable enough, perhaps. How is Lessig defending his friend? When Lessig says something like MIT never should have accepted the money and Ito made a mistake on his risk analysis I'm having a hard time finding where it's being defended. I can't even see how he would be defending MIT which apparently is where the pressure to accept the money came from. He doesn't appear to be defending very much at all to me at least in the NYT article. I have not read his 3,500 page essay on the topic though I did re-read the NYT article and the interviewer is at least hinting towards defenses existing in there. Lessig also explicitly states he is defending something in a very specific context.
Well no not necessarily so. Can one not condemn an action yet defend the person that did the act? Is there absolutely no thing at all that can be done that is wrong in general but right given a specific context? It's not a mater of in this specific case it's a mater of does that exist at all. And I would say yes it does. For instance:
Person 1> That guy shot a guy's pet in the face after they got into an argument over a parking spot! What a fucking monster!
Person 2> Holy crap that guy is evil.
versus
Person 1> That guy shot a guy's pet in the face after they got into an argument over a parking spot! What a fucking monster!
Person 2> Oh god that's ugly. Why the hell did that happen?
Person 1> Oh it was running at him, growling, and bearing it's teeth.
If you have read the larger essay then could you provide some quotes or information from it? That's quite the big read and the NYT article doesn't seem to handle this well. Perhaps you can fill in their gap.
After re-reading the NYT article my take away is that the article author is looking for something to exist along the lines of MIT is governed by evil people who hate women and want to misogynist all over them and also Lessig is evil because he has an opinion that is possibly clouded by a relationship with someone and he hasn't said what we think he should have said. Maybe that is a true statement but I don't see how Epstein being a donor or not would have much to do with it. I'm not convinced this is some kind of sexist "bros stay together" like the author of the article says either. It seems you have to bring some per-conceived notions to the table to form these conclusions at least in relation to this specific article.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday January 16 2020, @07:29PM (5 children)
To answer your message title, Lessig could have said nothing.
Where you see nuance, I see muddled thinking. There was plenty of defense in the 3500 word essay:
I don't think the world is better if lab directors get to close their eyes to wrongdoing and use procedure-following and institutional greed as an excuse.
You wrote:
I didn't read it that way at all. The story seemed factual and what you read between the lines is up to you.
The original New Yorker piece [newyorker.com] that spurred the developments we are talking about is also interesting.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:09PM (4 children)
That's a good point and initially I agreed with you. However that was quite fleeting because Lessig is an expert regarding organizational corruption as the NYT article mentions. Perhaps the right thing to do is recuse himself because of the conflict of interest and we can fault him for that. Especially because he is a lawyer. Yep you are right again: he should have said nothing.
That's why I often talked about the confusion in relation to the article standing by itself and mentioned preconceived notions. You brought them with you when you read the NYT article because of the (inconvinient for Lessig) content of the essay the article mentions. It's also why I asked for info from it from you. Now did I miss the part of the NYT article where they talk about exactly what he defended in detail? Because I didn't have a clear understanding that Ito knew crimes had been committed beyond just a rumor. If my eyeballs didn't fail me the author of the NYT article screwed up and this is a preaching to the choir piece.
In my eyes the credibility of NYT is suffering badly lately - basically all of the mass media is at least what ever bubbles up onto my radar. I still see segments from local television stations around the US running their nightly news that isn't entirely drama enhanced maximum outrage click enhanced but they aren't trying to market to the Internet either.
Well do you understand why I would form an opinion like that with out the prior knowledge of the referenced essay? I ask again if my eyeballs failed me and I just did not notice that this was covered in the NYT article. There seems to be an absolute lack of supporting stuff here besides this little nugget where Lessig hints at previous criminal misconduct:
I missed it before because it's subtle. In terms of "bros helping bros" and the missognyst comment I went back to find where that was in the NYT article and those phrases aren't in there; I must have incorrectly attributed it to NYT from another article I read while digging a bit here.
It is difficult to stay objective and actually do it correctly with stuff like this. And we've got to do it while there is a total crisis of faith in the media. Additionally there has been way too much assumption of guilt with out sufficient evidence to back it up both from the larger population and the elected politicians.
Is it wrong to conclude that an article like the NYT one is best served by packing it all up so it's in one self consistent and justified package with out requiring external resources? My bar for conviction is high and for most things I'm not going to just take people's word. And while I'll dig there are also resource constraints on time.
Thank you for the discussion and the information. Given what you have shared yes the author is demonstrating muddled thinking. I didn't expect to find Lessig defend a person who knew that criminal activity had stopped. Depending on what type of criminal activity there's a serious obligation to report it.
I don't think we are better off for that either. Is Lessig advocating for that? Where did that one come from? It seems that statements like "they should never have gotten his money" aren't consistent with that either.
Lessig did not give a pass to the behavior, right? He is essentially saying that his friend was just doing what is normal in this space and got caught doing it. What are you looking for? Actual prosecution of Ito? What would the crime be? Do you want him socially ostracized? Perhaps MIT admitting they are funded by horrible people?
It sounds like Lessig is setting himself up for a spectacular popcorn moment if he actually tries to push this all the way to trial. Either I am/was way off base or he is really wrapped up in his friend Ito.
(Score: 2) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday January 16 2020, @08:54PM (3 children)
The NYT piece has this from the interview:
Ascribing a "genuine belie[f], after doing really extensive due diligence" to someone is a defense. Describing their behavior with the word "virtue" is also a defense.
Lessig's defense of Ito amounts to that, yes. Ito closed his eyes to wrongdoing and Lessig is trotting out procedure-following and institutional greed as excuses. That Lessig also condemned the money-grubbing amounts to trying to have it both ways.
Lessig is a lawyer and used to advocating for clients professionally. If it's a job, I guess their shit doesn't stick to him. If he volunteers to defend them outside the courtroom, it does.
I stopped reading the NYT uncritically after they convinced me in 2003 to support the Iraq war, but WMDs were never found. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. However, beggars can't be choosers.
(Score: 2) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:00PM (2 children)
That's a really interesting way to look at the situation. I had not pondered something like that. I definitely see layering along the lines of legal fiction being used by Lessig and as you say it is his job to do stuff like that. I do appreciate the discussion. We have a meeting of the minds for sure that Lessig should have said nothing at all. It sure is sad when people sink themselves like this - he should know better. I wonder if he is so wrapped up in this that he'll ignore legal council telling him to drop it then go and represent himself.
It breached a topic that is new to me though I really should have known better. There is likely tons of dirty money all over institutions like MIT because of people making poor decisions like Ito.
So what do we do then? You originally wondered where the slander is and it doesn't look like he's got much of a case. The assertion was made that if the donations are going to happen that it should be done so anonymously. Is that not the lesser of two evils? Do we open it up so everyone can see what the evil is doing instead?
I was raised being taught to question the media so I've always been skeptical. But what I was not prepared for was utterly false information being distributed by seemingly reputable places. I got interested in detail regarding gun control as it's become a big ass topic lately. Regardless of a pro or con position on gun control and quite objectively it is easy to prove the media is disseminating completely false information. I have seen many reports from many different news outlets on this larger topic. I care enough about this space to actually go and read proposed and passed legislation in this space. A common theme is reporters saying something like "this is only about registration" or "this only applies to assault rifles" or "no one is banning any kind of gun" when the bills they are discussing do exactly those things. I've seen one guy in Virginia go on a rant about how all those counties are making a big deal over very little just basic things like stronger background investigations. In reality, at the time (this bill has since been withdrawn, to the best of my knowledge) they were talking about banning all sales of all rifles and making possession of them a crime with out any kind of grandfather clause for current owners.
I read a Reuters article that gets details like this wrong as well with a gun ban near me. Reuters. I did not expect that. I don't know if they are lazy or what but it is causing an uninformed populace.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Coward, Anonymous on Thursday January 16 2020, @10:33PM (1 child)
I wish MIT would keep its nose clean and focus on academic excellence. If they need to cut the budget, its ok to slim down. Media Lab has always been a sketchy place. Bulldoze it for all I care. There is an upside to being more selective and the funny money can go to universities with lower standards.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Knowledge Troll on Thursday January 16 2020, @11:33PM
I'm really glad I engaged with you - I don't know why I got caught in the trap of more money because I already know better.
Thank you, sincerely, I really enjoyed the discussion.