Lawrence Lessig. Photo: Justin Ide/Harvard University News Office

Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig on Monday dropped his federal defamation lawsuit and public battle with The New York Times, 11 days after the Times made changes to a 2019 story that Lessig argued had falsely portrayed him as trying to defend the practice of MIT accepting money donations from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

"Professor Lessig is voluntarily dismissing this action, without prejudice, in light of the defendants' decision to correct the offending publication [article] at issue, making it clear that Professor Lessig never defended MIT for taking, or advocated other institutions of higher learning to take, money from Jeffrey Epstein, even if anonymously," said Lessig's one-paragraph "Notice of Voluntary Withdrawal Without Prejudice," filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by his attorney, Howard Cooper, a Todd & Weld partner in Boston.

But even as the lawsuit apparently came to an end—and as Lessig was quoted Monday in The Hill indicating that he was satisfied enough with the article changes to move on from his suit—the two sides put out somewhat different takes on the article's alterations and on what may have been the impetus for Lessig dropping the suit.

In an email Monday, Times spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha said, "We chose not to enter into a settlement agreement but instead decided to make minor changes in the lead [of the 2019 article] so that it more fully captures what the story says, and we are now using our original print headline on the online version of the story."

Rhoades Ha further noted that "as we were about to file a motion to dismiss [Lessig's Jan. 13-filed lawsuit], Professor Lessig withdrew his suit, before a judge was able to assess the suit's merits."

Cooper, meanwhile, said in an email Monday that "Professor Lessig achieved everything he set about to accomplish when the defendants on their own chose last week to correct the errors in the headline and story they published rather than respond to the lawsuit."

"I think this was a smart move on their part," Cooper continued. He added that "for Professor Lessig, this is now a teachable moment which demonstrates the importance of standing up to and demanding accuracy from even a journalistic outlet you admire and otherwise support. The truth matters."

The article that sparked Lessig's defamation suit ran last September on the Times' website and then in print. Its original website headline read, "A Harvard Professor Doubles Down: If You Take Epstein's Money, Do It in Secret."

The story began with the following sentences, "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 Times article focused on a 3,500-word essay that Lessig had written for the online publication, Medium, about an MIT friend of his, who'd played a key role—as part of the university's donations apparatus—in accepting Epstein's money.

The friend, Joichi Ito, who has since resigned as director of the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had reportedly come to Lessig early on after Epstein had contacted him and as he was considering whether to take donations from the financier, according to Lessig's original Sept. 8, 2019, Medium essay about that matter.

In part of the essay, Lessig 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.

Lessig, who currently has about 358,000 Twitter followers, soon followed the Times' September article with another Medium post in which he argued that The Times had engaged in "clickbait defamation" by using an inaccurate headline and opening that he believed was meant to get readers to click on the story.

"Whatever else my [original] essay from a week ago was doing, it was not my trying to 'defend soliciting donations from the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,'" Lessig argued in the follow-up Medium post. "Instead, the essay said taking money from Epstein was wrong," he added.

He further wrote that in the original essay he "is not defending. It [the essay] is attacking. It is not arguing that Joi did something right. It's attacking the scapegoating" that he believes happened to Ito after his role in accepting Epstein's donations became public in a New Yorker article.

On April 2, The Times published an editor's note below its Sept. 14, 2019, article that read, in part, "The lead has been edited to reflect that while Mr. Lessig defended Joichi Ito, who had accepted anonymous donations from Jeffrey Epstein, he said he would prefer that institutions not accept such money. The headline has also been changed, and this version of the article now has the same headline as in the print edition of The Times."

The print headline, now used for the online story, reads, "What Are the Ethics of Taking Tainted Funds?"

Lessig on Monday told The Hill, "I don't think we should be suing papers except in the most extreme cases, but on the other hand I think newspapers have to make sure that if they're going to start selling ads on the basis of the click-throughs from headlines, they need to continue to make sure that their headlines are accurate and fair."

He also said that he still admires The New York Times and views it is as an important institution.