Artificial Intelligence and commercial sex purportedly intersect
For anyone who knew Marvin, “AI pioneer accused of having sex with trafficking victim on Jeffrey Epstein’s island” is a surprise.
Apparently Jeffrey Epstein was using some of the money that he stole to run Templeton Foundation-style scientific gatherings in the Caribbean (funded with money that John Templeton earned and then skipped paying taxes on by renouncing his U.S. citizenship and relocating to the Bahamas). A woman now says that, as a 17-year-old, she was paid to have sex with the then-73-year-old Marvin Minsky at one of these gatherings. (There does not seem to be any evidence the Marvin ever left the mainland U.S. to hang out with Epstein, though. See below.)
In the 40+ years that I saw Marvin, at his office, at his home, and at conferences, he never once took notice of a young woman or commented on the appearance of a woman. He was simply not very interested in matters of the flesh.
On a more practical level, if Marvin had wanted to have sex with 17-year-olds, he could have done so legally in Massachusetts, in which the age of consent is 16. (Prostitution per se is illegal in Massachusetts, but it wouldn’t be illegal for an older person to supply a young sex partner with gifts of jewelry, housing, transportation, vacation trips, etc. (though the real money would be in a pregnancy followed by harvesting the unlimited child support cash available under Massachusetts law)) There were also quite a few graduate students who had sexual relationships with successful academics and, lo and behold, found that the path to a tenure-track professorship was wide open. There was never any hint or rumor around Marvin of a sex-for-career-advancement exchange (or any other kind of affair).
Ever since Stormy Daniels dominated the mainstream media, I guess it isn’t surprising that people whose job is having sex in exchange for money are newsworthy. But if they’re claiming that they were paid to have sex with those who are deceased, and there is no evidence to support these claims, should reporters be broadcasting these tales? This is the first one about someone that I know personally and it rings false.
Related:
- NYT article on Virginia Giuffre, in which she describes her employment as a “traveling masseuse” and provider of “erotic massage”: “[the young women] were generally paid $200 per visit.”
- NY Post article in which Marvin’s wife explains some of the circumstances under which they visited Epstein (there was no trip outside of the mainland U.S.)
- “For vulnerable high school girls in Japan, a culture of ‘dates’ with older men” (Washington Post): Here, “high school dating” matches girls in uniforms with men in their 40s and 50s and beyond. And it means money changing hands. … “There are men who want to spend time with high school girls, and there are girls who want to make money,” he said.
- https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/01/25/marvin-minsky-1927-2016-the-death-of-a-skeptic/