The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a fascinating story about a young woman who worked in the development office at MIT when the institution was seeking Jeffrey Epstein’s money. She knew it was wrong, but she was young, a newcomer, and who would care what she thought.
Development support staff are rarely in the limelight, even within their own organizations. But Signe Swenson has had a whirlwind of a week. The former development associate at the MIT Media Lab helped inform New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow’s exposé about the center’s financial ties with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender.
In previous interviews, Swenson recalled her and her colleagues’ concern that young women who accompanied Epstein on a campus visit and looked like models may have been victims of trafficking. “We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them,” she told NPR. Employees even checked the trash for any pleas for help scribbled on napkins and discarded. Among the lab’s staff, she told Farrow, “All of us women made it a point to be super nice to them.”
Swenson was in her mid-20s at the time and left the lab in 2016. Now director of marketing and operations at an education nonprofit, she spoke with me about what happened when she initially raised concerns to leaders and why she felt like she was one of the only people who could blow the whistle on Epstein’s relationship with the institution. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
What follows is a Q and A. Here is one answer:
I expressed that I was aware of Epstein’s conviction and that I thought working with him was a terrible idea. I remember learning that if I chose to take the job, this was not going to be my choice, or necessarily Peter’s [Peter Cohen, director of development and strategy]. I did say that I guess it would be OK as long as I’m never in a room with Epstein. I sort of was drawing a line in that moment, but it’s interesting looking back. Clearly, I wanted the job very badly and did speak up, but it does feel as if I was just tested to see how confidential I could be. This was five years ago, and I was less confident than I should have been about my beliefs of what was unethical.
When it comes to fund-raising, there are no ethical standards in higher education or in the museum or library sectors. When robber barons or pedophiles have millions to cleanse their reputation, the institutions will take their money.
” Thousands More Jeffrey Epsteins Are Still Out There” – Today, Sunday, in The New York Times, by Frank Bruni https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/14/opinion/sunday/human-trafficking-jeffrey-epstein.html
“They operate with impunity, continuing to sexually exploit children…Or, as Yiota Souras of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children put it: “Epstein is the tip of a very large iceberg.”
Uh….is Swenson’s “education nonprofit” funded by the usual suspect, Bill Gates?
Clearer to say- “working for the oligarchs” unless the richest 0.1% aren’t writing the paychecks as they were at MIT’s Media Lab.
When and why did Epstein switch from American girls to eastern bloc girls? Did Putin play a role?
Wouldn’t be surprised.
We do know that Putin is pulling the strings.
Remember, Putin hates America and dump is his go-fer.
Swenson can’t be blamed.
The blame lies squarely with her bosses, Ito, Cohen and the University President, Reif, all of whom not only knew about Epstein, but were quite purposefully trying to hide the fact that he was a donor.
And make no mistake. They were NOT keeping the “secret” to prevent Epstein from laundering his bad reputation, as Harvards Lawrence Lessig has suggested. They were keeping the “secret” so that no one would know that they were taking money from a convicted sex offender who preyed on young girls. Swenson even indicates as much when she talks about how Ito and others went into panic mode on one occasion when Epstein bragged about one of his donations in one of his own press releases. They were panicking not out of fear that Epstein would gain some credibility, but out of fear that MIT would lose its own.
MIT did not need the money. They have a $16 billion endowment and get hundreds of millions every year from the Federal government, along with untold millions from foundations and private donors who have not raped and trafficked young girls.
But MIT was so greedy and brazen that they thought they could take the money and hide it’s source.
MIT got 491 million from the Federal government in 2017.
They certainly did not need “Epstein money”.
Come to think of it, if they are going to take money from people like Epstein and Koch, why should we the taxpayers give them all those hundreds of millions of our dollars?
Maybe we should ask our Congress members to yank their Federal funds.
“hide its stench”
Ito didn’t take a nano second to decide to abandon his reputation rather than salvage it- more to come?
Dark Money, Jane Meyer.
Not incidentally, one computer “science” (sic and sick) professor at MIT — Richard Stallman — in an attempt to defend his former CS colleague, Marvin Minsky, who has been accused of having sex with one of Epstein’s underage victims, claimed that the most plausible scenario was that the girls were “entirely willing”.
The University President, who signed a letter to Epstein in 2012 (after Epstein’s conviction) thanking him for his donation, is also a member of the CS department.
They have some real winners in that department.
Outputs, e.g. research, students, prototype ideas,… are suspect when they come from the following think tanks (with students), MIT, harvard, Stanford and, the University of Southern California. IMO, the institutions are, first, the billionaires’ functionaries.
The disgraced, pension alarmist professor is now at the Stanford Institute for the Evisceration of People’s Retirement (SIEPRE). The Gates/Z-berg school chain, Bridge International Academies, was the brain child of a MIT and two harvard students. Theranos, a dud financed by DeVos and Walton heirs, was the product of a Stanford student, Facebook’s morality reflects its founder’s values presumably learned at harvard, and there’s the scandal ridden USC…..
Stallman is now gone.
Two down (Ito and Stallman) and several to go.
Swenson is in the photo array of employees at EdVisions. Plucked from the organization’s mission statement- supports transformation to create personalized learning, student centered project based learning, highly personalized learning. In no small irony, accompanying the mission statement, there’s a photo of students clustered together.
EdVisions Inc received $4.5 mil. from the Gates Foundation