Computer scientist Richard Stallman has severed his connections with MIT after he claimed that Virginia Giuffre, one of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking victims, presented as entirely willing." A leading voice in the free software movement, Stallman on Monday resigned as a visiting scientist at the Institute's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) and as president of Free Software Foundation. In a message circulated to an MIT CSAIL mailing list and revealed last week by MIT grad Selam Jie Gano, Stallman wrote that Giuffre, who has testified that she was forced to have sex with MIT professor Marvin Minsky on Epstein's private island aged 17, most likely "presented herself to him as entirely willing." The email was in a response to a Facebook event calling for MIT students to protest over Epstein's secret donations to the institution, which were revealed by the New Yorker this month. In the emails Stallman claimed that the term "sexual assault" in relation to Minsky, as used in the Facebook post for the event, was "absolutely wrong." He added that the term "presumes that [Minsky] applied force or violence." Stallman also implied that being 17 and therefore underage, was a "minor detail." The MIT Media Lab has been racked by the revelations that it solicited cash from the disgraced financier and had sought to present his donations as coming from anonymous donors to duck the university's ban on receiving money from Epstein.
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