Director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab Resigns After Taking Money From Jeffrey Epstein

Nearly a month after his death, Jeffrey Epstein continues to haunt some of America’s most prestigious institutions.

On Saturday, a prominent figure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stepped down after the disclosure of his efforts to conceal his financial connections to Mr. Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

Almost immediately, the M.I.T. official, Joichi Ito, left the boards of three other organizations: the MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and The New York Times Company, where he had been a board member since 2012. He also left a visiting professorship at Harvard.

Mr. Ito, the tech evangelist and master networker who led the M.I.T. Media Lab — a program that prides itself on contrarian thinking — acknowledged last week that he had received $1.7 million from Mr. Epstein, including $1.2 million for his own outside investment funds.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” Mr. Ito wrote in an email on Saturday to M.I.T.’s provost, Martin A. Schmidt.

Mr. Ito’s resignation came less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures that he and other media lab officials took to conceal its relationship with Mr. Epstein. The internal emails, which a former media lab employee shared with The New York Times, described the handling of donations that Mr. Epstein made and apparently solicited from the rich and powerful over the years, including a $2 million gift from the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.