Speaker 1: So last week we did an episode about doctor Claudine
Speaker 1: Gay residing from Harvard University, and after we published it
Speaker 1: on Friday, the story really continued. Bill Ackman, that billionaire
Speaker 1: donor to Harvard who was calling for doctor Gator resign
Speaker 1: while his wife was also accused of plagiarism, their connection
Speaker 1: to Jeffrey Epstein resurfaced, and really Bill Ackman just had
Speaker 1: a meltdown about the entire thing. I could not stop
Speaker 1: thinking about it, and I have a lot more to say,
Speaker 1: so I did a video run down on the aftermath
Speaker 1: of Gay's resignation in the Patreon over the weekend. The
Speaker 1: story has continued, so I wanted to unlock that Patreon
Speaker 1: episode with everybody here in the main feed to y'all.
Speaker 2: This story is a wild one.
Speaker 1: I cannot stop thinking and talking about it, So please
Speaker 1: let me know what you think. You can hit me
Speaker 1: up via email at Hello at Tangoti dot com.
Speaker 2: There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 1: As a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative, I'm Bridget
Speaker 1: Todd and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
Speaker 2: Hey, it's Bridget.
Speaker 1: It's Sunday, January seventh. It's about ten o'clock at night
Speaker 1: Eastern time. I'm here with some herbal tea because I'm
Speaker 1: getting my dry January on. Thank you for being here, Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's get into it. We did an episode this
Speaker 1: week in the main there are No Girls on the
Speaker 1: Internet feed about doctor Claudiin Gay, the first black woman
Speaker 1: and black, first black president of Harvard who basically stepped down.
Speaker 1: She did resign earlier this week after right wing education
Speaker 1: activist Chris Rufo surfaced plagiarism accusations against her. So in
Speaker 1: the episode, first of all, I just have to say
Speaker 1: I was pretty emotional, So thank you to everybody who listened.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that was a bit of a departure from
Speaker 1: the kind of content that you're used to from me.
Speaker 1: I am not terribly emotional on Mike most times, and
Speaker 1: so just genuinely thank you for letting me feel like
Speaker 1: I can really bring my full self to these conversations.
Speaker 1: And in case you're wondering, like I am, okay, I
Speaker 1: am fine that conversation. We taped it during a particularly
Speaker 1: weird and emotional time for me, like the holidays are weird.
Speaker 1: Coming back from the holidays is always weird for me.
Speaker 1: So it was a time, I just felt like I
Speaker 1: had a lot going on emotionally to quote mean girls,
Speaker 1: I had a lot of feelings. So thank you for
Speaker 1: giving me space to be so vulnerable and yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: doing great. So in that episode we broke down Christopher
Speaker 1: Rufo's campaign against doctor Gay. Ruffo had this like very
Speaker 1: gleeful like victory lap he was doing after Gay resigned,
Speaker 1: and he was openly taking credit for her resignation, and
Speaker 1: pretty explicitly in my book said that the reason why
Speaker 1: he was going after Gay and why he wanted to
Speaker 1: force her to resign was race related, right, Like he
Speaker 1: explicitly said in that political article that we were talking about,
Speaker 1: it was about or diversity, equity, and inclusion. So like,
Speaker 1: regardless of how you feel about it or what you
Speaker 1: think about it, it is pretty clearly about race. And
Speaker 1: so from his own admission, he wanted to push out
Speaker 1: this woman at of her job because of race. So
Speaker 1: we talked in the episode about one of the people
Speaker 1: that he worked with to accomplish that, Bill Ackman, a
Speaker 1: billionaire hedge fund manager who was also a donor to Harvard.
Speaker 1: It basically sounds like Acman had his own unrelated beefs
Speaker 1: with Harvard before doctor gay ever even was at the
Speaker 1: Helm there as president, and that he used this scandal,
Speaker 1: I used, had in air quotes, deep air quotes, this
Speaker 1: scandal around her to finally have the opportunity to push
Speaker 1: her out because of like long existing beefs that probably
Speaker 1: didn't have a lot to do with her.
Speaker 2: Although I do.
Speaker 1: Think that even if he had these long standing beefs,
Speaker 1: I think having a beef with a university that has
Speaker 1: a black woman at the Helm probably hit differently for him.
Speaker 1: I just know the energy when someone feels like because
Speaker 1: you are a black woman, you owe them something or
Speaker 1: that you were going to be differential to them in
Speaker 1: some way as a default.
Speaker 2: And from all my time on.
Speaker 1: This earth as a black woman, I suspect that had
Speaker 1: something to do with it. So since we put out
Speaker 1: that episode on Friday, this story has really continued to evolve,
Speaker 1: So I had to revisit it and fill y'all in
Speaker 1: on some of the new updates and some of the
Speaker 1: new stuff that frankly, I have learned stuff that's been
Speaker 1: out there, but I only recently was like, oh, that
Speaker 1: was them oo yikes.
Speaker 2: So let's get into it.
Speaker 1: Basically, Ackman's wife is doctor Neery Oxman, who I actually
Speaker 1: had never heard of before this whole situation. Doctor Oxman
Speaker 1: is a designer who studies things like three D printing,
Speaker 1: art and fabrication. She was born in Israel and graduated
Speaker 1: with a PhD in architectural design and computation from MIT
Speaker 1: in twenty ten. That detail is going to be important
Speaker 1: in a moment. So I have to say, if doctor Oxman,
Speaker 1: Ackman's wife had not been connected to this larger situation
Speaker 1: with Ackman pushing out a black woman from her position
Speaker 1: at Harvard, I probably would have thought that doctor Oxman
Speaker 1: was like kind of a cool person, maybe question mark,
Speaker 1: or maybe that means I would have been like susceptible
Speaker 1: to a glamour media campaign that is meant to make
Speaker 1: people like me think that people like doctor Oxman are
Speaker 1: really cool. There's this New York Times profile about her work,
Speaker 1: and the vibe of the profile is like.
Speaker 2: Oh, who is this woman? She's so cool in artsy like.
Speaker 1: The article is about how she worked with Byork, and
Speaker 1: I talked about how maybe she was.
Speaker 2: Dating Brad Pitt.
Speaker 1: So it is hard to describe it, but you know
Speaker 1: it when you see it. Doctor Oxman just has this
Speaker 1: sort of personal or public persona that just sort of
Speaker 1: reads like cool, techie, artsy woman, like lots of images
Speaker 1: of her, like looking slightly off camera or gesturing with
Speaker 1: her hands while wearing like a black blazer, and like
Speaker 1: one of those microphone headsets, you know, just someone who
Speaker 1: like she's someone who I think does a good job
Speaker 1: of signaling and taking a kind of photo that is
Speaker 1: meant to signal like I am an interesting person who
Speaker 1: does interest in.
Speaker 2: Work fast, is my take.
Speaker 1: Like your mileage may vary on that, but if you
Speaker 1: have any sense of like what I'm describing, it is exactly.
Speaker 2: What you're imagining. So here is the problem.
Speaker 1: In the wake of her husband, Ackman his crusade against
Speaker 1: doctor Gay for these sloppy citations in her PhD and
Speaker 1: during her academic record at Harvard, which he says is
Speaker 1: plagiarism and like proof that she is unqualified and proof
Speaker 1: that she should not be in leadership at Harvard, Business
Speaker 1: Insider looked into his wife, doctor Oxman's history while she
Speaker 1: was at MIT, and.
Speaker 2: It sounds like the results were kind of not great.
Speaker 1: We talked about this in the last episode, but like,
Speaker 1: I'm not an academic, I don't have a PhD. I
Speaker 1: don't do academic writing, so you know, what the hell
Speaker 1: do I know about what is or it is not plagiarism. However,
Speaker 1: one of the big issues that Business Insider found is
Speaker 1: that apparently it appears as if doctor Oxman lifted entire
Speaker 1: sections of her doctoral dissertation from Wikipedia. So I'm not
Speaker 1: an academic currently, but before I dropped out of my
Speaker 1: PhD program, I taught.
Speaker 2: Many, many, many, many, many college courses, mostly.
Speaker 1: One oh one and one of two, like introduction to
Speaker 1: composition or rhetoric courses. I've got a lot of that
Speaker 1: in my career, and in the training that I received
Speaker 1: for doing that, we were taught specifically to tell students
Speaker 1: to not use Wikipedia as a source because it's just
Speaker 1: not a reliable source. Anybody can edit it, all of that,
Speaker 1: and so instead the party line was to tell these
Speaker 1: students that, like, they should scroll down to the bottom
Speaker 1: of whatever Wiki entry they were looking at, check out
Speaker 1: the sources links there, read those, and cite them if
Speaker 1: those sources are legit, rather than citing Wikipedia.
Speaker 2: That was like a big glaring no no.
Speaker 1: But even if you were to cite Wikipedia properly, it
Speaker 1: was still a big no no for like undergrad one
Speaker 1: oh one students, So certainly it will be a big
Speaker 1: no no for somebody who is trying to submit a
Speaker 1: PhD dissertation. And again she's being accused of not citing
Speaker 1: the passages that she copied from Wikipedia. So using Wikipedia
Speaker 1: at all bad. Using Wikipedia and then not even sighting
Speaker 1: it and passing it off as your own doubly bad.
Speaker 3: Let's take a quick break at our back.
Speaker 1: Acman is kind of having a meltdown about this whole
Speaker 1: thing on Twitter, and I feel like his tweets are
Speaker 1: very telling, So let's talk a little bit about those.
Speaker 1: So by the time you listen to this, whenever you're
Speaker 1: listening to this, I know that he will have tweeted
Speaker 1: quite a bit more because he's having one of those
Speaker 1: kind of like tweet storm. He has been just tweeting
Speaker 1: NonStop all weekend. I mean this, like very literally, the
Speaker 1: longest tweet I have ever seen in my entire life,
Speaker 1: Like longer than I ever thought that you would be
Speaker 1: able to tweet. In one tweet, I am going to
Speaker 1: be honest and say that one hundred percent did not
Speaker 1: read it. And I don't know a single soul who
Speaker 1: would read that tweet. Unless they were being paid for it,
Speaker 1: or if it was their job or something.
Speaker 2: But then for as.
Speaker 1: Long as that tweet is like you scroll and scroll
Speaker 1: and scroll and scroll and scroll. At the bottom it
Speaker 1: still says tweet continued below, which like, yeah, you know
Speaker 1: that meme that's like sorry that happened to you or
Speaker 1: happy for you. But I am not reading all of that.
Speaker 1: I am not reading all of that end of story period.
Speaker 1: So I will give you a couple of the sect
Speaker 1: of what he is tweeted. I didn't read his whole
Speaker 1: like novel, but I did read some of his shorter tweets.
Speaker 1: So he says, how can one defend oneself against an
Speaker 1: accusation of plagiarizing Wikipedia for a dissertation written fifteen years
Speaker 1: ago in two thousand and nine. Isn't the whole point
Speaker 1: of Wikipedia? That is a dynamic source of info that
Speaker 1: changes minute by minute based on edits and contributions from
Speaker 1: around the globe. So no, Acman, that is not act truly, hell,
Speaker 1: Wikipedia works like Wikipedia has a very clear edit history
Speaker 1: with like timestamps and dates of when it was edited.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it even tells you who edited it.
Speaker 2: So it really is like really easy.
Speaker 1: For anybody to tell when an entry on Wikipedia was
Speaker 1: edited or edited. So it sounds like maybe Acman is
Speaker 1: suggesting that somebody could have edited the Wikipedia entries to
Speaker 1: match his wife's dissertation after the fact, but you would
Speaker 1: know that, and the Business Insider reporter who wrote this
Speaker 1: story has already confirmed that she checked, because it's really
Speaker 1: easy to know, So sorry, Acman.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: He also asks is Wikipedia even copyrighted? Which, like, the
Speaker 1: reason why it is not cool to copy and paste
Speaker 1: bits of Wikipedia into your PhD dissertation with out citations
Speaker 1: is not because it's breaking copyright law. It's like breaking
Speaker 1: academic norms, like he because completely is like grasping at
Speaker 1: things to prove that this is fine. He also objects
Speaker 1: to the fact that Business Insider reached out to his
Speaker 1: wife on Friday night, right before Shabbat. I will just
Speaker 1: say this. It is really clear that he sees this
Speaker 1: as a direct attack on his family. He tweets, it
Speaker 1: is unfortunate that my actions to address problems in higher
Speaker 1: education have led to these attacks on.
Speaker 2: My family, and this is my thing.
Speaker 1: Doctor Gay also has a family, and it sounds like
Speaker 1: when he is looking into the academic records of people
Speaker 1: like doctor Gay, that is him like taking legitimate actions
Speaker 1: to protect academic integrity or whatever, but when someone looks
Speaker 1: into the academic record of his wife, now that's an
Speaker 1: attack on his family. It also needs to be said
Speaker 1: that doctor Gay in her resignation that she published in
Speaker 1: the New York Times, her letter about what happened, she
Speaker 1: says that she has gotten more racial slurs and death threats.
Speaker 1: And I actually read that her house has been put
Speaker 1: under police surveillance because of so many attacks that she's
Speaker 1: gotten and threats that she's gotten. And so it's pretty
Speaker 1: telling to me that Acman is not necessarily seeing those
Speaker 1: as attacks against Gay. The only person here who is
Speaker 1: being attacked in his book is his family. He defends
Speaker 1: his wife saying, what makes my wife human is that
Speaker 1: she makes mistakes, And again, like why is his wife
Speaker 1: allowed to make mistakes in her academic writing and doctor
Speaker 1: Gay is not? And it's telling that like he sees
Speaker 1: his wife as human, then what does he see doctor
Speaker 1: Gay as like not human, not allowed to make mistakes.
Speaker 1: And I think it really comes down to that dynamic
Speaker 1: that we were talking about in that episode, like it's
Speaker 1: bad when you do it, but it's different when I
Speaker 1: do it. I get to surveil the behavior of other
Speaker 1: people to make sure.
Speaker 2: That their behavior is on the up and up.
Speaker 1: But if someone dare tries to do the same to
Speaker 1: my behavior, then that's an attack. Because it all comes
Speaker 1: down to who is seen as a rightful person belonging
Speaker 1: in a space and who is automatically looked at or
Speaker 1: treated with suspicion, and also who gets to act like
Speaker 1: the authority of who belongs and who doesn't, who deserves
Speaker 1: to be surveiled and who doesn't, Who gets to be
Speaker 1: looked at with suspicion.
Speaker 2: And who doesn't. You know, when people like Acman and
Speaker 2: Rufo and Jason from.
Speaker 1: The All In podcast to boy, did I have a
Speaker 1: mouthful for him in that episode, I know when they
Speaker 1: say things like, oh, we need to return to like
Speaker 1: a colorblind, merit based society, I think what they're really
Speaker 1: saying is that we need to make sure that we
Speaker 1: have a society where the things that people like me
Speaker 1: and people who look like me get are not questioned
Speaker 1: or challenged, while the things that people who are not
Speaker 1: me and people who do not look like me are
Speaker 1: always viewed with suspicion. Like Bill Ackman clearly sees himself
Speaker 1: as the authority at Harvard, a place where he has
Speaker 1: no real connection other than like donating a pretty small
Speaker 1: amount of money, Yet he still thinks that he should
Speaker 1: have the ultimate say and how these places are run.
Speaker 2: And all of that said, though this might be a.
Speaker 1: Little bit of an unpopular opinion, and I genuinely do
Speaker 1: want to know, like if you're listening, what you think.
Speaker 1: But I am actually not thrilled about what is happening
Speaker 1: to doctor Oxman. I know, I get it. I don't
Speaker 1: want to be a wet blanket here, and like I'm
Speaker 1: also not above enjoy the memes and the tweets and
Speaker 1: all of that. I think there's some real kind of karma.
Speaker 1: What goes around comes around stuff happening here, which I love.
Speaker 1: I enjoy that too. However, I know that it's super
Speaker 1: hard to resist the lure of all of that. But
Speaker 1: I am worried about this idea of what happens when
Speaker 1: weaponizing plagiarism accusations becomes a thing, you know, where accusations
Speaker 1: are not coming from peers or academic colleagues, but just
Speaker 1: like Randos with an axetra grind, obviously, like I'm not
Speaker 1: crying too many tears because Acman definitely started this and
Speaker 1: like can certainly dish it out but doesn't seem to
Speaker 1: be able to take it. But ultimately I think that
Speaker 1: what is going to happen is that academia is going
Speaker 1: to suffer. The institution of like education is going to suffer.
Speaker 1: This is not what academia is about. And so many
Speaker 1: of our institutions have just become these way to these
Speaker 1: weapons to hurl at each other. And I, legit do
Speaker 1: not know if Acman's wife has any kind of connection
Speaker 1: to this doctor game other than being having the misfortune
Speaker 1: of being married to a man like Acman, Like was
Speaker 1: she beating the drum for gay to resign alongside her
Speaker 1: husband or like what she genuinely had nothing like said
Speaker 1: nothing about it publicly, and like now is all mixed
Speaker 1: up in it?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: And I also know that like with the plethora of
Speaker 1: AI tools like turn it in that are used to
Speaker 1: sort of check for plagiarism but are routinely very janky
Speaker 1: and specifically like return false positives for cheating when a
Speaker 1: writer or plagiarizing when a writer is a non native speaker, like,
Speaker 1: they're much more likely to flag writing by somebody who
Speaker 1: has learned English as a second language as having been plagiarized. Right,
Speaker 1: So it just seems like a really scary precedent When
Speaker 1: all these tools are everywhere, They're so janky, and I
Speaker 1: just feel like it will definitely if weaponizing plagiarism in
Speaker 1: this way becomes the norm, it will definitely harm people
Speaker 1: who are already marginalized.
Speaker 2: And so I don't like any of it.
Speaker 1: I understand why people are making it about Akman's wife's
Speaker 1: plagiarism record, but like, I don't think it sets a
Speaker 1: good precedent. It doesn't feel good to me. It feels
Speaker 1: kind of icky. I don't like where this will ultimately
Speaker 1: end up. So again, Acman is kind of going scorched
Speaker 1: earth here. He is vowing to use his vast wealth
Speaker 1: like he is a billionaire to investigate every faculty member
Speaker 1: at MIT and a business insider to see if they
Speaker 1: ever wrote anything that.
Speaker 2: Could be considered plagiarism.
Speaker 1: And it just seems like he is somebody who can
Speaker 1: really only direct outward, like anger and suspicion can only
Speaker 1: be directed from me to others. It will never be
Speaker 1: directed inWORD to examine his own behavior, for instance.
Speaker 2: It is always.
Speaker 1: Someone else who has done something wrong. And yeah, it's
Speaker 1: just like a very weird situation. I saw this tweet.
Speaker 1: I think it might have been deleted by now. That
Speaker 1: really summed it up nicely, which is like, imagine if
Speaker 1: you had plagiarized your dissertation from Wikipedia, had gotten away
Speaker 1: with it for like fifteen years, went on to become
Speaker 1: an academic celebrity, and then flung your work into the
Speaker 1: national spotlight because he was on a separate crusade about
Speaker 1: DEI like, how.
Speaker 2: Pissed would you be? H? Yeah, I would be pretty angry.
Speaker 3: More after a quick break, let's.
Speaker 2: Get right back into it.
Speaker 1: So even beyond these new plagiarism accusations against Ackman's wife,
Speaker 1: doctor Oxman, even more like wild than that is their
Speaker 1: connection to Jeffrey Epstein, which, like it's just really something.
Speaker 1: So heads up, this might get a little a little
Speaker 1: tough because we're talking about Epstein. So you might have
Speaker 1: listened to the episode that we did in our very
Speaker 1: first season back in twenty twenty with former MIT student
Speaker 1: Ottawa Umboya.
Speaker 2: She was a.
Speaker 1: Grad student at MIT and she was actually the first
Speaker 1: person to call for joy Eto, who then was the
Speaker 1: head of MIT's media Lab. To step down after it
Speaker 1: was revealed that Joi Eto had taken donations from Epstein
Speaker 1: after Epstein was already a convicted child sex predator. Epstein
Speaker 1: pled guilty in two thousand and eight to a sex
Speaker 1: crime involving a child, and his donation records to MIT
Speaker 1: continued until like twenty seventeen, so well after he had
Speaker 1: already pled guilty and been convicted of a crime involving
Speaker 1: a child. So yeah, a child sex predator. So in
Speaker 1: that episode we talked about how that year the organization
Speaker 1: Me Too in STEM won MITS Media Labs Disobedience Award.
Speaker 1: The Disobedience Award is a pretty big deal. It is
Speaker 1: a two hundred and fifty thousand, no strings attached prize
Speaker 1: for recognizing individuals and groups who engage in the website
Speaker 1: says responsible ethical disobedience aimed at challenging norms, rules or
Speaker 1: laws that sustain societies injustices. So the physical award is
Speaker 1: this like glass Orb sculpture and that gear. When me
Speaker 1: Too and STEM won the Disobedience Award for calling out
Speaker 1: sexual abuses in the sciences, Jeffrey Epstein also got a
Speaker 1: replica of the Disobedience Award that Glass Orb because he
Speaker 1: donated to the Media Lab. I remember this being like
Speaker 1: a viscerally disgusting, enraging detail about the coziness that MIT
Speaker 1: had with somebody who had already been convicted and plugged
Speaker 1: guilty to a sex crime against a child. Like that
Speaker 1: is just something that I remember to being that episode
Speaker 1: that like sticks with me. And it turns out that
Speaker 1: Acman's wife, doctor Oxman, was the one who was in
Speaker 1: charge of like having that award made and presenting it
Speaker 1: to Epstein. And because she ran the Mediated Matter group
Speaker 1: at MIT's Media Lab, and she her organization that she
Speaker 1: ran within the lab got out one hundred and twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars donation from Epstein after he had been convicted,
Speaker 1: which she says that she was required to keep confidential
Speaker 1: by the university because he was a tex criminal. So
Speaker 1: Doctor Oxman, like I thought it, it's so much worse
Speaker 1: she didn't physically make and deliver the award herself. It
Speaker 1: really sounds like she kind of forced her grad students
Speaker 1: to do it on her behalf. One of them, according
Speaker 1: to reporting from The Boston Globe, actually sent her an
Speaker 1: email with a paper trail that was like, Hey, this
Speaker 1: guy is super sketchy. Are you sure you want me
Speaker 1: to do this? Are you sure you want to be
Speaker 1: connected with them? So yeah, I really feel bad for
Speaker 1: the grad students who were sort of forced into doing
Speaker 1: this by doctor Oxman, and it sounds like they really
Speaker 1: had like registered some objections and didn't want to do it.
Speaker 1: So after MIT's connection to Epstein was finally all coming
Speaker 1: to light, but before joy Eto resigned from the media lab,
Speaker 1: it sounds like there was media interest in reporting on
Speaker 1: who did what as it pertains to Epstein at NT
Speaker 1: and doctor Oxman's husband, Bill Ackman was the you know,
Speaker 1: the one beating the drum against doctor Gay at Harvard
Speaker 1: was sending like vaguely threatening emails to joy Eto, basically
Speaker 1: saying that he better keep his wife's name out of
Speaker 1: this if he knows what's good for him.
Speaker 2: I have to give it to Akman here.
Speaker 1: He is a man who can write the fuck out
Speaker 1: of a threatening email, like it is clear what is
Speaker 1: being threatened here. But he never outright comes out and
Speaker 1: says like, hey, joy if you include my wife's name
Speaker 1: in this.
Speaker 2: I will blow up your spot.
Speaker 1: But he communicates that that as the intention very well
Speaker 1: without ever saying it.
Speaker 2: Clearly. So here's a little bit of what I mean.
Speaker 1: So this is an email that Bill Ackman wrote to
Speaker 1: the head of the MIT media lab, joy Eto, about
Speaker 1: his wife's connection to Epstein.
Speaker 2: Mariy forwarded your email to me.
Speaker 1: I would please ask that you copy me on all
Speaker 1: Epstein related communications going forward, as I and members of
Speaker 1: my legal and communications team are working to help her,
Speaker 1: and Neery already has enough on her plate breastfeeding a
Speaker 1: three month old baby, a very beautiful one, mud I add,
Speaker 1: without a baby nurse until early September. So, first of all,
Speaker 1: I hope I never find myself using the line please
Speaker 1: copy me on all Epstein related communications. God also that
Speaker 1: little detail she's breastfeeding without a baby nurse. Can you
Speaker 1: imagine no baby nurse? My God, what a saint. So
Speaker 1: he goes on the same are I mean, this is
Speaker 1: how you know that, like they are very privileged people.
Speaker 1: The fact that he would throw that in there, the
Speaker 1: way that like a billion women have to breastfeed and
Speaker 1: take care of their children every single day, she's doing
Speaker 1: it without a nurse. The fact that he has to
Speaker 1: throw that detail in there is very telling to me.
Speaker 1: So he goes on the same our advice on handling
Speaker 1: the recent press request. I would suggest that, on background
Speaker 1: that you let the press know that Epstein did not
Speaker 1: receive a obedient Disobedience award, but he, like other donors
Speaker 1: to the lab, donor A, B, C, D, et cetera,
Speaker 1: received a gift from the Media Lab of a unique
Speaker 1: design object. So here's subtle threat number one. I don't
Speaker 1: think it is necessary for you to say that it
Speaker 1: was at your request, which I understand it was in
Speaker 1: this case, but it is very important that you don't
Speaker 1: Mentionneri's name or otherwise get her involved, or she will
Speaker 1: have to issue her own statement to protect her reputation,
Speaker 1: explaining why it was sent and at whose request, who
Speaker 1: else received similar gifts, how she met Epstein, and who
Speaker 1: else at MIT received funding from Epstein, why she declined
Speaker 1: to attend meetings and dinners with Epstein's and which other
Speaker 1: faculty members attended. This will, of course blow this entire
Speaker 1: thing up even more. We would certainly not let to
Speaker 1: see that happened. The fact that Mariy, as the designer
Speaker 1: of the Media Lab, was asked to produce nearly all,
Speaker 1: if not all, physical gifts for donors using her students'
Speaker 1: time and resources at either of your Rafael's office, Nina's
Speaker 1: and Jess's requests is not a good reason for NII
Speaker 1: to be outed as a supplier to Epstein.
Speaker 2: Because of nii's.
Speaker 1: Profile, her upcoming MoMA show, and the large amount of
Speaker 1: recent media attention around her, she would be an appealing
Speaker 1: target for the press.
Speaker 2: As I'm sure you.
Speaker 1: Understand, like ten out of ten as far as vaguely
Speaker 1: threatening emails go. I hope that nobody ever has to
Speaker 1: write this level of vaguely threatening email on my behalf,
Speaker 1: but ten out of ten on this one.
Speaker 2: And so here's another thing that I want to say.
Speaker 1: If you knew that there were emails out there, like
Speaker 1: if like I'm just trying to think, like, if I
Speaker 1: knew there were emails out there about me trying to
Speaker 1: obscure my partner's connection to Jeffrey Epstein comma literal sex criminal,
Speaker 1: literal like child sex abuser, I would probably have like
Speaker 1: really turned down my public profile. I certainly would not
Speaker 1: be picking like national front page fights with other national
Speaker 1: public figures, and I especially would not be doing it
Speaker 1: the very same week that a trove of documents about
Speaker 1: Epstein is unredacted and I guess like that is my point,
Speaker 1: that these people do not operate in the same realities
Speaker 1: that you and I operate in. You know, I was thinking, like, Wow,
Speaker 1: this person really is not self aware. Acman really has
Speaker 1: no self awareness.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: But I don't think that's it.
Speaker 1: Like, I just think that they think that their behavior
Speaker 1: is always above reproach and it always will be. Surveillance
Speaker 1: and screw is for other people's behavior, not his behavior.
Speaker 1: Dare I say that surveillance and scrutiny is for black
Speaker 1: women's behavior, not for behavior of white billionaires like Bill Ackman.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I really.
Speaker 1: Want to know what you think. Let me know what
Speaker 1: you're thinking in the comments. Also, Happy New Year. I
Speaker 1: hope that folks had a happy holiday or a mary holiday,
Speaker 1: whatever you celebrate, I hope you had a good one.
Speaker 1: I help you out a good New year. How's it going?
Speaker 1: What do you want to hear about? Where are you at,
Speaker 1: what are your thoughts? Don't be shy, tell me how
Speaker 1: it's going.
Speaker 2: Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1: Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or
Speaker 1: just want to say hi? You can reach just at
Speaker 1: Hello at tangody dot com. You can also find transcripts
Speaker 1: for Today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No
Speaker 1: Girls on the Internet was created by me bridget Toad.
Speaker 1: It's a production of iHeartRadio, an unbossed creative. Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: is our executive producer. Kari Harrison is our producer and
Speaker 1: sound engineer. Michael Almado is our contributing producer. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: bridget Toad. If you want to help a grow, rate
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