Two years ago, the actor Jeremy Renner launched a mobile app called Jeremy Renner Official. A press release described it as “groundbreaking” and promised users the “ultimate bird’s eye view into Jeremy’s world.” There would be contests, exclusive photos, breaking news, and the chance to purchase “stars,” a mysterious currency that allows fans to propel themselves to the top of a scroll of Renner’s most devoted acolytes. “Users swap uplifting memes, selfies, and diet tips, and wish each other ‘Happy Rennsday’ en masse on Wednesdays,” Kate Knibbs wrote, at the time, for The Ringer. A modest, cheerful digital community dedicated to celebrating Jeremy Renner and lovers of Jeremy Renner. “My God, a moment of bliss. Why, isn’t that enough for a whole lifetime?” Dostoyevsky once wrote.

Earlier this week, the app was abruptly shut down. Renner had grown deeply disgusted by the tenor of his community. “What was supposed to be a place for fans to connect with each other has turned into a place that is everything I detest and can’t or won’t condone,” he wrote. You really hate to see it. The app had been flooded with trolls, who were now mercilessly dunking on the dude (most were inspired by Stefan Heck, who explained, in a post for Deadspin, that a person could fairly easily impersonate Renner from within the app). Yet there had long been rancor within Jeremy Renner Official. Back in 2017, Knibbs recounted accusations of monkeying with the star system, of rigged contests (and changed prizes), and of moderators scrubbing any unflattering comments about Renner.

I do not wish to be judgmental about how other people spend their time or money. These sorts of vaguely lucrative, celebrity-oriented apps are not particularly unusual. (Nicki Minaj has one; so does Ellen Degeneres. Tom Hanks has a branded app that approximates an old typewriter.) Yet I’ll admit that it did seem weird that Renner would be into this sort of thing. Historically, the fan-focussed app is the more instinctive terrain of boy bands and ingénues—stars with very young and excitable tech-savvy fan bases—than of a forty-eight-year-old man who has been nominated for two Academy Awards.

But this summer has revealed many new and surprising things about Renner, who first came to our collective attention in 2009, when he starred in “The Hurt Locker,” a troubling and suspenseful film about a team of American soldiers tasked with disarming explosives in Iraq. The film earned Renner his first Oscar nomination, for Best Actor. He was excellent in the movie. Renner has narrow blue-green eyes and a face that can crumple—from playful to weary, vengeful to calm—at will. (He also has a house-flipping business and a lucrative recurring role in the Avengers franchise.)

Lately, he has been starring in a series of commercials for Jeep that afford equal reverence to Jeeps and Renner’s budding musical career. At a press event at Renner’s Hollywood Hills home, announcing the collaboration, the chief marketing officer of Fiat-Chrysler said, “I’m not sure if I’m speaking about Jeremy or Jeep when I say things like cool, rugged, immensely capable, iconic, famous, doesn’t need any introduction.” I cannot tell you with any accuracy how many of these commercials exist. There might be two; there might several dozen. My favorite is a spot called “Ride Swap.” It opens with a brief shot of Renner, in a long, black Johnny Cash-style coat, kicking sand. Then he is striding confidently out of a large green diner in the middle of a desert. His tour bus, which has the words “JEREMY RENNER ROADHOUSE TOUR” painted in enormous letters on the side, is parked right out front. A Jeep pulls up, and Renner is instantly captivated by its majesty. He jogs over to it, but his bandmates are ready to go. “Yo, Jer!” one of them yells. But no! He’s chatting up a lass. Her man is there, too. It’s hard to say precisely what happens next. I think he steals their Jeep. He does some light off-roading and more kicking of sand. In the next scene, he arrives at his concert, tosses the keys in the air, and grins sheepishly, as if to say, “What can you do?” Then he leaps onstage and begins performing a new song—a sort of rubbery, neo-soul thing about trying to conquer the world.

The tagline for the spot is “Jeep: The Freedom to Do It All,” which feels germane, I suppose, to Renner’s many creative interests, and also to something odious about the late capitalist work machine. Just as it is not terribly strange for a celebrity to have a promotional app, it is also not terribly strange for an actor to begin a musical career, or vice versa. Perhaps when a celebrity achieves one kind of fame and finds it lacking, it’s only normal to think “Maybe this is the wrong kind?” and then attempt to achieve adulation through some other medium. Renner reminds us that our quest for satisfaction is truly endless. Although the Internet has delighted in his travails—Renner exists in the same unsympathetic demographic as Sad Ben Affleck—I wish him nothing but peace on his journey. If the sand-kicking is any indication, he seems to be savoring it.

Jim Mattis has been everywhere this week, and nowhere at all. Over the past several days, President Trump’s former Secretary of Defense has appeared on CBS, CNN, Fox, MSNBC (twice), PBS (twice), NPR, and various podcasts to hawk his new, sort-of memoir, “Call Sign Chaos,” co-authored with a fellow former marine, Bing West. He has been live-streaming from the Council on Foreign Relations and fielding questions at bookstores. The famously austere retired four-star general even agreed to a swank Washington party in his honor on Thursday night, at the home of The Atlantic’s chairman, David Bradley, and to a celebration in New York, hosted by the former mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Yet never in this long and growing list of interviews, lectures, book signings, and conversations with Mattis has the former Secretary of Defense actually answered the questions put to him about the President whose Cabinet he quit, in December. Instead, Mattis has deflected and demurred, referring back to his resignation letter, which warned about the perilous fate that awaits nations that fail to treat “allies with respect,” although it avoided so much as mentioning Trump’s name or citing a single Trump action that troubled him, beyond the abrupt decision to withdraw from Syria, which was the proximate cause for Mattis’s exit. When interviewers have pressed him about Trump, Mattis has recycled the same lines about his desire not to be a critic trashing his former colleagues from “the cheap seats,” and he has insisted that, although he was a Trump political appointee, he owes the President a military man’s “duty of silence” while Trump remains in office. In the book itself, Trump’s name is never mentioned after the first two pages. “I realize how much I am disappointing people when I don’t say, ‘Let’s go torch the White House,’ ” Mattis joked at the Bradleys’ party, on Thursday night, as journalists who had tried to pry an answer out of him looked on.

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CNN’s Christiane Amanpour mounted a particularly pointed effort to get Mattis to talk about Trump. In an interview on Tuesday, on her PBS show, Amanpour forced a visibly uncomfortable Mattis to watch a series of clips of the President at his most outrageous. Her highlights reel included footage of the announcement of the “extreme vetting” Muslim ban, which Trump made in the early days of his Administration, with Mattis at his side; of Trump praising the Russian President, Vladimir Putin; of Trump announcing he “fell in love” with North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un; and of Trump insisting there were “very fine people on both sides” of the deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville. None of those events caused Mattis to quit, Amanpour pointed out, before asking whether he had a “duty” not only to Trump but to the American people, to speak out about the President before the next election. Mattis hemmed and hawed. “I don’t think right now, for a person steeped in the military tradition in the Defense Department,” he said, “I should be speaking up on things that are political assessments.” When she persisted, Mattis insisted that he was following “long-standing tradition” not to offer his “political assessments.” Once you do that, he said, “then, Katy, bar the door.”

Mattis has, in fact, been more than willing to offer harsh political judgments on issues that remain hotly contested today. The difference is that they concern decisions made by Trump’s two immediate predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, about whom he has been scathing, both in the book and at his various appearances around Washington this week. He criticized Bush’s lack of preparation for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and his order to launch a retaliatory battle in Fallujah, over Mattis’s objections. As for Obama, Mattis pointed to his “catastrophic decisions” in Iraq (in a chapter titled “Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory”), his nuclear deal with Iran (“I did not think it was a sound idea,” Mattis told the Council on Foreign Relations), and his general lack of strategic thinking about great-power competitors, such as China and Russia. At the book party on Thursday, Mattis was particularly scathing on the last point, telling Washington notables including Obama’s former Pentagon policy chief, Michèle Flournoy (whom Mattis had tried to recruit to serve as his deputy), that, under Obama, “We did not have a strategy. It’s that simple. Eight years, we had not had a strategy.” Listening to Mattis drop scorn on Obama, who pushed him out as Centcom chief, it was hard to see the justification for the distinction Mattis has been making between his willingness to bash the previous Administration and his refusal to bash this one. When Trump runs for reëlection, in 2020, his opponent may well be Obama’s Vice-President, Joe Biden, a key figure in all the foreign-policy decisions Mattis has no problem firing away at.

The Mattis book tour instantly drew comparisons with Robert Mueller’s painful-to-watch testimony on Capitol Hill this summer, in which the former special counsel, another pillar of the Washington establishment, refused to offer any criticism of Trump beyond the exact language contained in his four-hundred-and-forty-eight-page report outlining ten different possible acts of obstruction of justice. But Mattis has taken the no-comment approach even further, into the improbable realm of self-promotion. Mueller, after all, made just a one-day appearance on the Hill, and that was forced upon him by congressional subpoena. And he has a strong argument that prosecutors with knowledge of ongoing cases and still-secret evidence should remain circumspect.

Mattis, however, chose to embark on an extensive book tour and open himself up to questions involving political figures, and he seems perfectly willing to answer those questions, as long as they are not about Trump. Few observers doubt that, privately, Mattis has strong negative views about the President’s judgment, character, and capabilities; the issue is whether and how he will ever share them. Isn’t that a duty, too? It’s also worth noting that Mattis did not serve as a military officer under Trump, as he did under Bush and Obama, but as a civilian political appointee, who resigned from the Administration in protest. “He wants to have it both ways,” a former government official who worked with Mattis told me. “He loved the pomp and circumstance” but opts for an “abdication of responsibility” when it comes to telling the truth about his time working for Trump. “Who is your responsibility to? Isn’t it to the Constitution and the American people?”

The last Republican-appointed Secretary of Defense had none of the same qualms about criticizing the President he served, and doing so while that President was still in office. In fact, Robert Gates, who was George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, and stayed on through the first two years of the Obama Administration, wrote a scathing 2014 memoir in the middle of Obama’s second term. In it, he complained not only about the aides on Obama’s National Security Council but also about Vice-President Biden, whom Gates memorably dismissed as having been wrong on “nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Gates called his book, “Duty.”

When Mattis left the Trump Administration, nine months ago, it was seen as a red line being crossed, which might have dire consequences for Trump among the still-wary Republican establishment. But that didn’t happen. Republicans on Capitol Hill, many of whom had spent the previous two years warning about a Mattis exit, remained quiescent, and Mattis himself stuck to his self-imposed silence, except for his long but essentially cryptic resignation letter. After his book tour, he promises to once again “retreat back across the Rocky Mountains” and only break his silence in the case of a truly monumental Trump outrage, an eventuality that he has likened to pornography, in that, he told Amanpour, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

Quitting in protest clearly isn’t what it used to be. On the one hand, Trump has had remarkable turnover among his top advisers and Cabinet. The Brookings Institution found a seventy-seven-per-cent turnover rate among Trump’s top staff, and more Cabinet departures in one term than any recent President. At the same time, remarkably few of those former aides have publicly spoken out against him, even in the numerous cases where the ex-adviser left on principle, couldn’t take it anymore, or was humiliated on his or her way out the door. Several others on Trump’s original national-security team, including his first Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, and his second national-security adviser, H. R. McMaster, shared Mattis’s concerns about a number of Trump’s policy decisions, from his withdrawal from the Iran deal to his move of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem. But, like Mattis, they have remained largely silent. When Tillerson gave a rare interview, to Bob Schieffer, about nine months after leaving the Administration, he caused days of headlines by commenting that Trump was “pretty undisciplined” and had frequently suggested actions that Tillerson refused to take because they were illegal. Since then, Tillerson has been so publicity-shy that he testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee in secret, with only the panel’s chairman and ranking member and their staffers present. When Trump’s advisers quit, their motto seems to be “Get out, and shut up.”

Twenty minutes into Mattis’s remarks on Thursday night, the NPR “All Things Considered” anchor Mary Louise Kelly took the microphone and gave it one last shot. What, she asked, was Mattis’s “duty and responsibility to country,” as opposed to its commander-in-chief? The Bradleys’ Impressionist-filled drawing room was crowded with veteran journalists, such as Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward. John Kelly, the former Marine general, who served as Trump’s second White House chief of staff, stood in the back corner—another refugee from the Administration who, like his old friend Mattis, has said nothing at all publicly about his former boss. Mattis was defensive but unswayed. “Yes, the duty and responsibility is to the Constitution, not the commander-in-chief,” he said. But, still, “I have to decide what’s right for me,” Mattis told the room. “I respect those who disagree with what I’m doing,” he added, before launching into a history lesson about strictly nonpartisan military leaders, from George Washington through Omar Bradley, who said that “when a general retires their uniform, they need to retire their tongue when it comes to political issues.” Like it or not, Mattis said, as far as the public is concerned, “I’m a general forever.”

Standing nearby as Mattis said all this was another former four-star general, his friend and fellow-marine John Allen. In 2016, Allen broke with Mattis’s code and endorsed Hillary Clinton at the Democratic convention, while another former general, Michael Flynn, endorsed Trump at the G.O.P. convention. Now Mattis brought that up, and criticized Allen and Flynn by name. “I could not disagree more strongly with what they did,” he said. “The military doesn’t do that . . .  Now, fortunately, that tradition is still alive, but I could very easily be the one most damning to it, if I don’t be careful. So I will retreat west of the Rockies soon, but in the interim, I’m not talking.”

Alice Roosevelt Longworth, a Washington doyenne of a different era, was famous for saying, “If you haven’t got anything nice to say, come sit by me.” Today’s Washington leaders, such as they are, have a different creed. If they haven’t got anything nice to say about the President, it appears they won’t say anything at all.

The M.I.T. Media Lab, which has been embroiled in a scandal over accepting donations from the financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, had a deeper fund-raising relationship with Epstein than it has previously acknowledged, and it attempted to conceal the extent of its contacts with him. Dozens of pages of e-mails and other documents obtained by The New Yorker reveal that, although Epstein was listed as “disqualified” in M.I.T.’s official donor database, the Media Lab continued to accept gifts from him, consulted him about the use of the funds, and, by marking his contributions as anonymous, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university. Perhaps most notably, Epstein appeared to serve as an intermediary between the lab and other wealthy donors, soliciting millions of dollars in donations from individuals and organizations, including the technologist and philanthropist Bill Gates and the investor Leon Black. According to the records obtained by The New Yorker and accounts from current and former faculty and staff of the media lab, Epstein was credited with securing at least $7.5 million in donations for the lab, including two million dollars from Gates and $5.5 million from Black, gifts the e-mails describe as “directed” by Epstein or made at his behest. The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or “he who must not be named.”

The financial entanglement revealed in the documents goes well beyond what has been described in public statements by M.I.T. and by Ito. The University has said that it received eight hundred thousand dollars from Epstein’s foundations, in the course of twenty years, and has apologized for accepting that amount. In a statement last month, M.I.T.’s president, L. Rafael Reif, wrote, “with hindsight, we recognize with shame and distress that we allowed MIT to contribute to the elevation of his reputation, which in turn served to distract from his horrifying acts. No apology can undo that.” Reif pledged to donate the funds to a charity to help victims of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, Ito disclosed that he had separately received $1.2 million from Epstein for investment funds under his control, in addition to five hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars that he acknowledged Epstein had donated to the lab. A spokesperson for M.I.T. said that the university “is looking at the facts surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts to the institute.”

The documents and sources suggest that there was more to the story. They show that the lab was aware of Epstein’s history—in 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procurement of minors for prostitution—and of his disqualified status as a donor. They also show that Ito and other lab employees took numerous steps to keep Epstein’s name from being associated with the donations he made or solicited. On Ito’s calendar, which typically listed the full names of participants in meetings, Epstein was identified only by his initials. Epstein’s direct contributions to the lab were recorded as anonymous. In September, 2014, Ito wrote to Epstein soliciting a cash infusion to fund a certain researcher, asking, “Could you re-up/top-off with another $100K so we can extend his contract another year?” Epstein replied, “yes.” Forwarding the response to a member of his staff, Ito wrote, “Make sure this gets accounted for as anonymous.” Peter Cohen, the M.I.T. Media Lab’s Director of Development and Strategy at the time, reiterated, “Jeffrey money, needs to be anonymous. Thanks.”

Epstein’s apparent role in directing outside contributions was also elided. In October, 2014, the Media Lab received a two-million-dollar donation from Bill Gates; Ito wrote in an internal e-mail, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.” Cohen replied, “For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey’s name as the impetus for this gift.” A mandatory record of the gift filed within the university stated only that “Gates is making this gift at the recommendation of a friend of his who wishes to remain anonymous.” Knowledge of Epstein’s alleged role was usually kept within a tight circle. In response to the university filing, Cohen wrote to colleagues, “I did not realize that this would be sent to dozens of people,” adding that Epstein “is not named but questions could be asked” and that “I feel uncomfortable that this was distributed so widely.” He wrote that future filings related to Epstein should be submitted only “if there is a way to do it quietly.” An agent for Gates wrote to the leadership of the Media Lab, stating that Gates also wished to keep his name out of any public discussion of the donation.

A spokesperson for Gates said that “any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false.” A source close to Gates said that the entrepreneur has a long-standing relationship with the lab, and that anonymous donations from him or his foundation are not atypical. Gates has previously denied receiving financial advisory services from Epstein; in August, CNBC reported that he met with Epstein in New York in 2013, to discuss “ways to increase philanthropic spending.”

Joi Ito and Peter Cohen did not respond to repeated requests for comment. Ito, in his public statements, has downplayed his closeness with Epstein, stating that “Regrettably, over the years, the Lab has received money through some of the foundations that he controlled,” and acknowledging only that he “knew about” gifts and personally gave permission. But the e-mails show that Ito consulted closely with Epstein and actively sought the various donations. At one point, Cohen reached out to Ito for advice about a donor, writing, “you or Jeffrey would know best.”

Epstein, who socialized with a range of high-profile and influential people, had for years been followed by claims that he sexually abused underage girls. Police investigated the reports several times. In 2008, after a Florida grand jury charged Epstein with soliciting prostitution, he received a controversial plea deal, which shielded him from federal prosecution and allowed him to serve less than thirteen months, and much of it on a “work release,” permitting him to spend much of his time out of jail. Alexander Acosta, the prosecutor responsible for that plea deal, went on to become President Trump’s Secretary of Labor, but resigned from that post in July, amid widespread criticism related to the Epstein case. That same month, Esptein was arrested in New York, on federal sex-trafficking charges. He died from suicide, in a jail cell in Manhattan, last month.

Current and former faculty and staff of the media lab described a pattern of concealing Epstein’s involvement with the institution. Signe Swenson, a former development associate and alumni coordinator at the lab, told me that she resigned in 2016 in part because of her discomfort about the lab’s work with Epstein. She said that the lab’s leadership made it explicit, even in her earliest conversations with them, that Epstein’s donations had to be kept secret. In early 2014, while Swenson was working in M.I.T.’s central fund-raising office, as a development associate, she had breakfast with Cohen, the Director of Development and Strategy. They discussed her application for a fund-raising role at the Media Lab. According to Swenson, Cohen explained to her that the lab was currently working with Epstein and that it was seeking to do more with the financier. “He said Joi has been working with Jeffrey Epstein and Epstein’s connecting us to other people,” Swenson recalled. She assumed that Cohen raised the matter “to test whether I would be confidential and sort of feel out whether I would be O.K. with the situation.”

Swenson had seen that Epstein was listed in the university’s central donor database as disqualified. “I knew he was a pedophile and pointed that out,” she said. She recalled telling Cohen that working with Epstein “doesn't seem like a great idea.” But she respected the lab’s work and ultimately accepted a job with them.

That spring, during her first week in her new role, the issue arose again. Swenson recalled having a conversation with Cohen and Ito about how to take money from Epstein without reporting it within the university. Cohen asked, “How do we do this?” Swenson replied that, due to the university’s internal-reporting requirements, there was no way to keep the donations under the radar. Ito, as Swenson recalled, replied, “we can take small gifts anonymously.”

In the course of 2014 and 2015, according to the e-mails and sources, Ito and Epstein also developed an ambitious plan to secure a large new influx of contributions from Epstein’s contacts, including Gates, without disclosing the full extent of the financier’s involvement to M.I.T.’s central fundraising office. The e-mails show that Epstein was the point person for communication with the donors, including Gates and Black, the founder of Apollo Global Management, one of the world’s largest private-equity firms. In one message to Ito, Epstein wrote, “Gates would like a write up on our one science program for tues next week.” In an e-mail from Cohen to Ito, asking whether Black wished his contributions to remain anonymous, Cohen wrote, “Can you ask Jeffrey to ask Leon that?” He added, “We can make it anonymous easily, unless Leon would like the credit. If Jeffrey tells you that Leon would like a little love from MIT, we can arrange that too.…”

Black declined to comment. A source close to him said that he did not intend for the donation to be anonymous. Black has downplayed his relationship with Epstein in recent months, describing it as limited and focussed on tax strategy, estate planning, and philanthropic advice. He has declined to answer questions about business dealings with Epstein that suggest a closer relationship. Several years after Epstein’s conviction, Black and his children and Epstein jointly invested in a company that makes emission-control products.

Although the lab ultimately secured the $7.5 million from Gates and Black, Epstein and Ito’s fund-raising plan failed to reach the still larger scale that they had initially hoped. Epstein had suggested that he could insure that any donations he solicited, including those from Gates and Black, would be matched by the John Templeton Foundation, which funds projects at the intersection of faith and science. Ultimately, the Foundation did not provide funding and a spokesperson said that the organization has no records related to any such plan.

In the summer of 2015, as the Media Lab determined how to spend the funds it had received with Epstein’s help, Cohen informed lab staff that Epstein would be coming for a visit. The financier would meet with faculty members, apparently to allow him to give input on projects and to entice him to contribute further. Swenson, the former development associate and alumni coördinator, recalled saying, referring to Epstein, “I don’t think he should be on campus.” She told me, “At that point it hit me: this pedophile is going to be in our office.” According to Swenson, Cohen agreed that Epstein was “unsavory” but said “we’re planning to do it anyway—this was Joi’s project.” Staffers entered the meeting into Ito’s calendar without including Epstein’s name. They also tried to keep his name out of e-mail communication. “There was definitely an explicit conversation about keeping it off the books, because Joi's calendar is visible to everyone,” Swenson said. “It was just marked as a V.I.P. visit.”

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By then, several faculty and staff members had objected to the university’s relationship with Epstein. Associate Professor Ethan Zuckerman had voiced concerns about the relationship with Epstein for years. In 2013, Zuckerman said, he pulled Ito aside after a faculty meeting to express concern about meetings on Ito’s calendar marked “J.E.” Zuckerman recalled saying, “I heard you’re meeting with Epstein. I don’t think that’s a good idea,” and Ito responding, “You know, he’s really fascinating. Would you like to meet him?” Zuckerman declined and said that he believed the relationship could have negative consequences for the lab.

In 2015, as Epstein’s visit drew near, Cohen instructed his staff to insure that Zuckerman, if he unexpectedly arrived while Epstein was present, be kept away from the glass-walled office in which Epstein would be conducting meetings. According to Swenson, Ito had informed Cohen that Epstein “never goes into any room without his two female ‘assistants,’ ” whom he wanted to bring to the meeting at the Media Lab. Swenson objected to this, too, and it was decided that the assistants would be allowed to accompany Epstein but would wait outside the meeting room.

On the day of the visit, Swenson’s distress deepened at the sight of the young women. “They were models. Eastern European, definitely,” she told me. Among the lab’s staff, she said, “all of us women made it a point to be super nice to them. We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them.”

Swenson and several other former and current M.I.T. Media Lab employees expressed discomfort over the lab’s recent statements about its relationship with Epstein. In August, two researchers, including Zuckerman, resigned in protest over the matter. In a Medium post announcing the decision, Zuckerman wrote that M.I.T. had “violated its own values so clearly in working with Epstein and in disguising that relationship.” Zuckerman began providing counsel to other colleagues who also objected. He directed Swenson to seek representation from the legal nonprofit Whistleblower Aid, and she began the process of going public. “Jeffrey Epstein shows that—with enough money—a convicted sex offender can open doors at the highest level of philanthropy,” John Tye, Swenson’s attorney at Whistleblower Aid, told me. “Joi Ito and his development chief went out of their way to keep Epstein’s role under wraps. When institutions try to hide the truth, it often takes a brave whistleblower to step forward. But it can be dangerous, and whistleblowers need support.”

Questions about when to accept money from wealthy figures accused of misconduct have always been fraught. Before his conviction, Epstein donated to numerous philanthropic, academic, and political institutions, which responded in a variety of ways to the claims of abuse. When news of the allegations first broke, in 2006, a Harvard spokesperson said that the university, which had received a $6.5-million donation from him three years earlier, would not be returning the money. Following Epstein’s second arrest, in 2019, the university reiterated its stance. Many institutions attempted to distance themselves from Epstein after 2006, but others, including the M.I.T. Media Lab, continued to accept his money. When such donations come to light, institutions face difficult decisions about how to respond. The funds have often already been spent, and the tax deductions already taken by donors. But the revelations about Epstein’s widespread sexual misconduct, most notably reported by Julie K. Brown in the Miami Herald, have made clear that Epstein used the status and prestige afforded him by his relationships with élite institutions to shield himself from accountability and continue his alleged predation.

Swenson said that, even though she resigned over the lab’s relationship with Epstein, her participation in what she took to be a cover-up of his contributions has weighed heavily on her since. Her feelings of guilt were revived when she learned of recent statements from Ito and M.I.T. leadership that she believed to be lies. “I was a participant in covering up for Epstein in 2014,” she told me. “Listening to what comments are coming out of the lab or M.I.T. about the relationship—I just see exactly the same thing happening again.”