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takyon writes:

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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