Bill Ackman addresses wife Neri Oxman’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein, Brad Pitt
Bill Ackman addressed his wife Neri Oxman’s reported connections to late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and Brad Pitt — claiming in both cases that they were thin and fleeting at best.
“Neri’s lab received $150k from Epstein,” Ackman shared to X, referring to Oxman’s time working at MIT, between 2017 and 2021, when she left to have a child and move to New York City.
“She met him once at @MIT (and never again) at the request of the head of the MediaLab. He was presented to her as a donor no different from the hundreds of other donors over the years she was asked to present her work to at the request of the administration.”
Ackman continued: “The meeting with Epstein included Joey Ito, head of the MediaLab and her boss, and another one of the most respected members of the MIT senior faculty.”
“She was invited by Epstein to multiple dinners and she never accepted an invitation or saw or spoke to him again,” insisted Ackman, adding that Oxman “never did due diligence on her donors as that was the job of MIT and the development office, not that of a busy researcher working toward tenure.”
Ito resigned in 2019 after his acceptance of contributions from Epstein came to light.
“At some point, she was asked to give him one of the ‘orbs,’ small resin sculptures that her group made, which MIT used as gifts for donors to the university. Neri’s group made many of the gifts for MIT MediaLab donors as her work is unique and beautiful,” Ackman said.
The giant marble was 3D-printed, with a lighted base, which was gifted to the perv with a pair of gloves as to prevent fingerprints from smudging it.
Oxman has acknowledged her role in MIT’s relationship with Epstein, whose been back in the spotlight recently after a judge ordered a swath of documents related to the pedophile’s sex ring be unsealed.
“I regret having received funds from Epstein, and deeply apologize to my students for their inadvertent involvement in this mess,” Oxman said in a statement to the Boston Globe at the time.
Previously, she had been sworn to stay silent about Epstein’s cash donation to MIT — a claim consistent with a bombshell Sept. 6 New Yorker report detailing the lengths MIT went to conceal the donations, according to the Globe.
Ackman laid out Oxman’s side of the Epstein story in response to a tweet White House Correspondent Simon Ateba, who also had claimed Oxman had “questionable relationships with other people, including an actor” — who Ateba didn’t name, but who reportedly was Brad Pitt.
“He called and expressed interest in her work,” Ackman wrote. “He came to visit Neri’s lab once or twice, and she met him once in San Francisco in connection with a cultural architecture project idea he was working on that did not go forward. There was nothing questionable about her relationship with the actor. It was totally professional.”
In a subsequent X post, he revealed: “And yes, the famous actor was Brad Pitt.”
Before Ackman’s clarification, Oxman was thought to have dated Pitt following his divorce from Angelina Jolie.
In 2018 — a year before the Israeli MIT professor married Ackman — Page Six reported that Oxman and Pitt had been “spending more time” together.
Representatives for Ackman and Oxman at the billionaire’s firm, Pershing Square Capital Management, declined to comment beyond Ackman’s social media posts.
Ackman’s revelations about his wife’s ties to Epstein and Pitt come after Business Insider published two reports detailing alleged instances of plagiarism in Oxman’s work over the years — including her 2010 PhD dissertation for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she later served as a tenured professor.
Ackman claimed the outlet broke the “sacred code” by attacking his wife, suggesting that MIT was looking to get back at him after his very public crusade against its President, Dr. Sally Kornbluth, who he said should be fired for failing to squash on-campus antisemitism.
In response, White House Correspondent Ateba said Ackman’s claims that his “family should be off-limits” are “the craziest thing that I have read today.”
“For years, we’ve been talking about Hunter Biden and connecting his alleged corrupt business dealings to his father, President Joe Biden. Ackman’s wife @NeriOxman is accused of multiple instances of plagiarism, receiving Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts and questionable relationships with other people, including an actor,” Ateba wrote on Sunday.
He continued: “I believe the guy [Ackman] should just chill and allow the facts to come out. The CIA calls it blowback. When you go after others rightly or wrongly, they will fight back. If the president’s son is caught with cocaine, who do you think would be the focus? His son or the president?”
Ackman responded by addressing Oxman’s ties to Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 in his Manhattan jail cell.
Oxman did not respond to Ateba’s remarks, nor has she commented on Insider’s most recent report detailing dozens of instances where she copied passages from other sources without citation, including from Wikipedia.