Nearly a month after his death, Jeffrey Epstein continues to haunt some of America’s most prestigious institutions.On Saturday, a prominent figure at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology stepped down after the disclosure of his efforts to conceal his financial connections to Epstein, the disgraced financier who killed himself in a Manhattan jail cell last month while facing federal sex trafficking charges.

Ito, a tech evangelist and master networker who led the MIT Media Lab a program that prides itself on contrarian thinking acknowledged last week that he had received $1.7 million from Epstein, including $1.2 million for his own outside investment funds.

“After giving the matter a great deal of thought over the past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the media lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute, effective immediately,” Ito wrote in an email Saturday to MIT’s provost, Martin Schmidt.

Ito’s resignation came less than a day after an article in The New Yorker described the measures that he and other media lab officials took to conceal its relationship with Epstein. The internal emails, which a former media lab employee shared with The New York Times, described the handling of donations that Epstein made and apparently solicited from the rich and powerful over the years, including a $2 million gift from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

In an email in October 2014 six years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to a sex charge involving a minor in Florida Ito wrote that the gift from Gates had been “directed by Jeffrey Epstein.” A development official at the media lab, Peter Cohen, wrote in a subsequent email, “For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey’s name as the impetus for this gift.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Gates said Epstein had been introduced to Gates as a person interested in helping increase philanthropy. “Although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true,” the statement said. “And any claim that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grant making for Bill Gates is completely false.”

Gates one of the world’s richest men and perhaps its most generous philanthropist is one of many powerful people to face scrutiny for their connections to Epstein. President Donald Trump and former President Bill Clinton have been forced to explain their associations with him.