NEW YORK - A prominent Harvard Law School professor sued The New York Times on Monday, claiming it engaged in “clickbait defamation” by falsely suggesting he once approved of accepting donations from the late accused sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
He also said it refused to change the headline and first paragraph after he told the paper they falsely suggested he defended soliciting donations from Epstein. Lessig had written it was a mistake to solicit the donations, but also wrong for Ito to be “scapegoated.” Lessig’s complaint in Boston federal court seeks unspecified damages from the Times, executive editor Dean Baquet, business editor Ellen Pollock and reporter Nellie Bowles.
The complaint calls Lessig a “nationally prominent professor and legal scholar with a large social media following,” and his Harvard biography quotes the New Yorker calling him “the most important thinker on intellectual property in the Internet era.”