Ronan Farrow has done it again: Exposed the power players who prey on women for profit in his new piece for the New Yorker.

This time, it's not Harvey Weinstein but Bill Clinton's 'Lolita Express' captain, Jeffrey Epstein, who had a sick thing for underaged girls, a lot of unexplained money to throw around, and many prominent Democrats, academics, and Hollywood figures in his little black book. His game was to get prominent people on his hook over his sex traps and then call the shots. He mysteriously committed 'suicide' while in prison last month, leaving lots of perverts and compromised people relieved. 

Farrow's piece targets one of the places where Epstein had the the hooks in, the MIT Media Lab, a group that focuses on putting unrelated sciences together to solve global problems. Epstein was donating money to MIT Media Labs and they were taking it, despite his earlier Florida conviction on sex with child prostitutes charges, which on paper rendered him a pariah they couldn't take money from. They were, but they were covering it up, which in the last day or two has led to the resignation of its director, Joi Ito.

Farrow doesn't get every story right, but he seems to have done a Weinstein-level one with this story, something that rightly earned him a Pulitzer prize earlier.

Here's the thing though: As with the Weinstein story, the information was out there, it just wasn't being reported in the mainstream press.

The Washington Post notes that a woman named Xeni Jardin had been trying to expose the misdeeds of the MIT Media Lab and was trying to tell anyone who would listen and she got ignored.

Before Ito’s resignations, prominent women in the media world such as Xeni Jardin had spoken out on social media against his ties to Epstein, and writer Anand Giridharadas announced he would leave the jury for the Media Lab’s Disobedience Award.

She said she talked a lot to the New York Times about it, and Ito was a New York Times board member, and  ... they published nothing. Missed the explosive scoop. Still sticking to the story of Epstein's suicide....

I told the @nytimes everything. So did whistleblowers I was in touch with inside @MIT and @Edge. They printed none of the most damning truths. @joi is on the board of the NYT.

THANK GOD FOR @RonanFarrow https://t.co/MMFI9umhf2

— Xeni Jardin (@xeni) September 7, 2019

Which prompted Mickey Kaus to ask why the heck not, which, by logic, drew an uncomfortable bigger question.

If the @NYTimes really knew the things in Farrow's @NewYorker piece (and @xeni doesn't quite say that) how did it NOT publish them? It can't just be that Ito is (was?) on the NYT Board. Is the paper compromised in some way we don't know about?

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) September 8, 2019

The answer to that is that either they are the world's dumbest reporters and wouldn't know a scoop if it bit them on the butt, or Ito's role as a New York Times board member ensured that nothing was going to get out.

Were they covering up for Ito? Sure looks like it. But as Kaus says, that probably wasn't a big enough reason. Epstein, as I noted earlier, thrived by getting prominent power people on his hook. What might Epstein have had on them? 

Farrow has his next story topic cut out for him.