Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

In this week's episode, we're going to explore a story that centers around three men,

two of whom you've probably heard of and one of whom you haven't.

The first is financier and sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein.

The second is New Yorker journalist Ronan Pharaoh.

And the third is former MIT Media Lab fundraiser Peter Cohen.

This is the story of how Epstein's money tainted a whole university and about how Ferro's flawed reporting

on the ensuing scandal at MIT smeared the reputation of Cohen,

a mild-mannered middle-aged school official who never expected to get his name in the headlines.

And it's a story that in some ways could happen to any of us, because it shows how media narratives, even flawed ones, are hard to erase once they've been created.

What's more, even famous journalists, the ones who tell us they're trying to hold the elite to account,

can themselves evade accountability when they fear for their own reputations.

On July 6, 2020, Peter Cohen told his story in detail in a Colette article entitled,

Jeffrey Epstein's Money Tainted My Workplace, then Ronan Ferros botched reporting,

...