Harvard Law Professor Sues New York Times for 'Clickbait Defamation' Over Jeffrey Epstein
Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig claimed the New York Times defamed him for clicks.
January 13, 2020 at 05:01 PM
4 minute read
Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig lawyered up Monday to sue the New York Times in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts over a article he claims defamed him for clicks.
Lessig claimed the newspaper used "clickbait" and incorrectly linked him with "perhaps the most horrific and widely publicized pedophile scandal in American history."
Vice president of communications for the Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, stood by the report.
"When Professor Lessig contacted The Times to complain about the story, senior editors reviewed his complaint and were satisfied that the story accurately reflected his statements," Rhoades Ha said in an emailed statement. "We plan to defend against the claim vigorously."
The report ran Sept. 14, 2019, with a lede and headline that said Lessig was defending the acceptance of clandestine donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to educational institutions, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Epstein, a disgraced West Palm Beach, Florida, financier, died by apparent suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial in a New York jail on sex trafficking charges.
"It is hard to defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But Lawrence Lessig, a Harvard Law professor, has been trying," the opening sentence read.
That was false, according to Lessig's lawsuit, which said the article had a radioactive effect, prompting "mass outrage" from universities, social media followers and sexual assault victims. The complaint claims "Lessig became associated with the notoriety surrounding the Epstein scandal, and the community that quietly or silently tolerated such monstrosity."
The lawsuit alleged the article was an example of clickbaiting, where a writer uses a shocking but misleading headline to draw in readers. The plaintiff argued that a few lines of text can do a lot of harm when published by a media outlet with about 150 million global readers.
"Defendants are fully aware that many, if not most, readers never read past the clickbait, and that their takeaway concerning the target of the headline is limited to what they read in the headline," the complaint said.
The Times report stemmed from an essay Lessig had written for the online platform Medium in which he had reasoned that institutions should avoid accepting money from scorned figures and criminals such as Epstein but that, if they did, the donor should be anonymous.
"I thank god that I've never been obligated to raise money for an institution like MIT," Lessig's essay read. "Because I know that in every moment of that existence, I would be forced to confront a gap between what I believe is right and what every institution does. And yet, as a person charged with fundraising, I would be pressed to adopt the ethics of the institution, not the ethics of myself."
Now, Lessig has published a new blog post in tandem with the lawsuit.
"My essay said—repeatedly—that such soliciting was a 'mistake,'" he wrote in Monday's post. "And more importantly, it was a mistake because of the kind of harm it would trigger in both victims and women generally."
He has retained Howard Cooper and Tara Dunn of Todd & Weld in Boston to handle the case.
Read the full complaint:
Read more:
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Attorney Sues Attorney for Defamation After Sex Harassment Scandal in State Government
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