It turns out the demon was himself. I am perplexed at his behavior as is everyone else who has known him for a long time. I met him almost 20 years ago in Japan through my ex-wife Megan Smith, who went to M.I.T. and now serves on its corporate board and is also part of a large, luminary-packed advisory committee to the Media Lab. He stood out for his enthusiasm for new internet developments. A longtime expert networker, gadfly and investor, he was always touting fascinating then-groundbreaking mobile start-ups, and he had a great eye for the future. He was early to companies like Twitter, for example.

I saw very little of him over the years, but when he landed at the M.I.T. Media Lab as its director in 2011, it was not a surprise, since the place had that eclectic and shaggy vibe that was less college than start-up. The Media Lab, unlike other parts of the university, was funded by a consortium of some 80 companies who paid for the creativity and brilliance regardless of the outcome.

“I think the Media Lab was very techno-utopian when it first started but I think there’s a huge chunk of the Media Lab that’s critical of technology these days,” he said to me in the podcast. “So we’re often criticizing the companies that support us.”

That has been true of the academic staff and its students, most of whom have been dragged into this mire by Mr. Ito’s broken ethical compass. The emails published by Mr. Farrow show a man in full denial of why taking money from a felon, one whom M.I.T. had disqualified as a donor, was wrong.

When the malfeasance was discovered, Mr. Ito was full of I’m-so-sorrys and bad-judgment excuses, and he even allowed prominent friends and colleagues to put up a now-embarrassing letter in support of him.

“Joi lied to me, and to many others including, obviously, M.I.T.,” wrote the well-known techie Mary Lou Jepsen on Medium, who had signed that letter and even posted a defense of him. “I was too trusting and I was wrong.”

Not everyone had come to Mr. Ito’s defense. Xeni Jardin had taken to Twitter in a fury when the first news of Mr. Epstein’s donations to M.I.T. were revealed, and she kept banging on the drum of common sense and pointing out that the whole thing smelled badly.