What he intended to do doesn't matter. That's not my point. What matters is that his words could be interpreted that way and that he was affiliated with MIT.
This is not only untrue, this is the direct opposite of what said:
> (Now) Labor Secretary Acosta's plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal. I wonder whether this makes it possible to resentence him to a longer prison term. I disagree with some of what the article says about Epstein. Epstein is not, apparently, a pedophile, since the people he raped seem to have all been postpuberal. By contrast, calling him a "sex offender" tends to minimize his crimes, since it groups him with people who committed a spectrum of acts of varying levels of gravity. Some of them were not crimes. Some of these people didn't actually do anything to anyone. I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist."
Stallman called Epstein's sentencing extremely lenient to the point of being illegal, and that calling him a "sex offender" was too weak of a term and that he prefers to call him a "serial rapist".
He did not minimize Epstein's behavior. The original interpretation of his words in that way is not reasonable and may well have been an outright lie instead of an honest misinterpretation.
If there's one place in our society that should welcome discussion of ugly issues it should be our universities, particularly the few as storied as MIT.
What he intended to do doesn't matter. That's not my point. What matters is that his words could be interpreted that way and that he was affiliated with MIT.