Eugene US56🇺🇲🟦🥃

I thought to do one more post about the @NeriOxman Business Insider story in the hopes of its rapid resolution. In this post, I share the entire story including many new facts that we have learned in the last 24 hours, and hold nothing back from the public domain, including all intimate details. Even those who have followed the story closely will find this a fascinating read. Perspective In business and in life, I have always believed that the best way to understand someone’s perspective is to reverse places with them. Pretend that you are sitting in their seat, and they are in yours. The story I am about to tell begins on January 3rd, 2024 January 3rd, 2024 At 10:29pm on Wednesday January 3rd, Fran McGill, Pershing Square Capital Management’s head of communications, trieds to reach me to tell me that Business Insider (“BI”) had emailed him at 10:29pm that evening. I did not answer the phone as I was asleep. Fran had tried to previously reach me at 10:37pm and 10:38pm. He then tried my wife @NeriOxman at 10:39pm. Then he texted both of us at 10:40pm, and again at 1:03am, and also sent us emails, but we had already gone to sleep. We were on a family vacation in the Dominican Republic where the time is one hour later than NY. Fran tries us the following morning on Thursday, January 4th at 7:29am ET, and then finally reaches us at 9:05am DR time. When we finally hear the phone ring, Neri and I are in bed in our hotel enjoying our last morning before packing and heading back to New York City. We are still on vacation, and we are not expecting any calls, so I thought the incoming call was likely urgent. For context, my mom is 83; Neri’s dad is 90, and her mom has Alzheimer’s. I answer the call. Fran quickly explains that he had received an email from Katherine Long, a Business Insider reporter who claims to have identified a number of examples of what BI calls “plagiarism” in my wife’s MIT PhD dissertation from 2010, and she would shortly be publishing a story about these findings. The reporter wants to know if I have any comment. Fran forwarded the email from the reporter, which also copied Jake Swearingen, Deputy Editor, and Jack Newsham, Senior Reporter – Fast Investigations [What other news organization has a “Fast Investigation” division], all from BI. The subject line reads: “Journalist on Deadline | Plagiarism by Your Wife” In the email, the reporter claims that Neri had “plagiarized” five times in her dissertation, and explains that BI would be running a story to that effect. After providing the examples of alleged plagiarism, the reporter writes: “Do you expect your wife to remain at MIT in light of these instances of plagiarism?” This question is in a bold font. It is the only bold language in the three-page email. It is the only question in the email that I am asked to respond to. We are given a 12pmET/1pm DR deadline to respond. In response, Fran emails the reporter and explains that Neri is no longer at MIT, having given up her tenure when she moved to NY. Fran is asked again by the reporter, this time on the phone, about when Neri left MIT. Again, Fran confirms Neri is no longer at MIT. She left in 2020. BI then asks for a formal email confirmation that she is no longer a professor at MIT, which Fran then provides. In short, BI does not believe that Neri is no longer a professor at MIT. It immediately becomes clear to us that BI’s and the reporter’s goal for the story is to get Neri fired from MIT for plagiarism. In her email, the reporter says that I sought the firing of former President Gay from @Harvard due to her plagiarism, and suggests that Neri should be fired from MIT for the same reason. As a result, Katherine and the editorial team are very disappointed that Neri is no longer a professor as they won’t be able to get her fired. So they then set out to destroy Neri’s reputation and career, as the second-best outcome. The questions about plagiarism concern Neri’s 2010 MIT PhD dissertation entitled: Material-Based Design Computation. Unfortunately, our hotel has weak WiFi and the subject document in question is 330-pages long. We do not have a printed version, nor access to a printer. At 8:41am ET, Fran asks the reporter for more time to respond, and proposes a deadline of noon the following day on Friday, explaining that we are on vacation out of the country with our daughter, and will be shortly heading to the airport to return to New York. At 9:25am ET, Jake adds John Cook to the email chain. John is Executive Editor for News at BI. Together, they call Fran. On the call, John says that under no circumstances can we delay until tomorrow, and he offers a final deadline of 4pm ET. We postpone our flight and accept the 4pm ET deadline. After several hours of work, we determine that in four paragraphs of the 330-page document – in which Neri had correctly provided the proper citation for each author – she should have used quotation marks at the beginning and end of each paragraph. Now bear in mind, Neri’s thesis has 2,774 paragraphs, which implies an error rate of 0.1141%. In other words, for 99.8859% of the paragraphs Neri used proper citation. Not perfect, but pretty darn good. Also, for one sentence in her dissertation, Neri had properly paraphrased the author, but, by mistake, had omitted citing the author. In the dissertation, Neri expressed gratefulness for the author’s contribution to the field, and he is featured prominently in the document. In the other eight instances where Neri uses his work in the dissertation, she provided proper punctuation and attribution. Clearly, her intent was not to present his work as her own. Microsoft Word does not have a feature which counts sentences, but it looks like, on average, that there are about four sentences per paragraph in her dissertation. So using this assumption, Neri’s error rate for sentences was: 1/(2,774*4) or 1 out of 11,096 sentences. In other words, Neri accurately provided citations for 99.0988% of the sentences. Even better than her paragraph punctuation accuracy. In light of these errors, Neri and I prepare a response which she intends to post on X. When Neri finalizes the post, Fran emails the BI group at 12:48pm ET and tells BI that they should feel free to publish their story promptly. John calls Fran after receiving this email, and Fran again explains that BI should post the story, and further explains that Neri and/or I may want to comment once we see the story. At 1:10pm, Fran emails John, thanks him for the call, and says that Neri and I will be losing connectivity at 2:30pm, as there is no bandwidth on the 90-minute drive to the airport, and asks that BI publish the story before then. John responds that BI is not ready to publish the story, and asks us to hold off from posting until BI publishes its story. We give BI this courtesy, and we holdover in our hotel room while we wait for BI to finish and post its story. BI publishes a story at 2:28pm entitled: “Bill Ackman’s celebrity academic wife Neri Oxman’s dissertation is marred by plagiarism.” We quickly read the story. Neri then posts her response on @X, seven minutes later at 2:35pm ET. Neri’s post acknowledges the four missing quotations and the one missing attribution, apologizes for her mistakes, and graciously thanks MIT and the scientists who enabled her to build upon and create her own work: https://t.co/5dikIdd1Uy Then we drive to the airport, fly home, and arrive about four hours later than planned. That same evening, at 5:54pm while we are enroute in the air, Business Insider publishes a story entitled: “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarizing in her doctoral dissertation after BI Report” We don’t see the story until the following day. The story is catastrophically damaging to Neri, and our nightmare begins. The “Neri admits to plagiarism” story is reposted and re-reported around the world in thousands of articles including on the front pages of the most important Israeli newspapers, Neri’s beloved homeland where she spent the first 25 years of her life, and where she has many family members and friends. It is also the number one trending post on X all day by a factor of 10X. Imagine the following headline: “Bill Ackman admits to insider trading” Would any publication write such a story unless I actually admitted to insider trading? In light of the catastrophically damaging nature of the headline to me and my family and business, don’t you think the publication would do serious analysis including consulting counsel to determine if I actually insider traded, and that I actually admitted to insider trading? BI’s headline about Neri, however, is much worse and more damaging. Plagiarism According to https://t.co/wG89Y6ob2q: to "plagiarize" means: to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one's own to use (another's production) without crediting the source to commit literary theft to present as new and original an idea or product derived from an existing source In other words, plagiarism is an act of fraud. It involves both stealing someone else's work and lying about it afterward [My bold emphasis added]." Neri did not do any of the above offenses. Plagiarism is one of the most serious crimes you can accuse a professor of doing, as a finding of plagiarism is catastrophic to a professor's career. It is also catastrophically damaging to a former tenured member of the faculty, even if she has left the university, and she founds a company based on her academic research. For if Neri in fact committed fraud and stole other people's ideas, who would ever invest in or do business with her or her company? Because of the career-ending and reputationally damaging nature of a plagiarism finding, universities take allegations of plagiarism extremely seriously and adjudicate these cases with extraordinary care in academic tribunals. These proceedings typically take six or months before a finding is made, and can take years to be resolved if litigation ensues. The facts of each case are meticulously reviewed often with the benefit of separate counsel representing the faculty member and the university. Plagiarism is fraud. Fraud is a crime. Neri publicly admitted to making four clerical errors of punctuation and one missed footnote in her 330-page dissertation, and she apologized for doing so. To this day, she has never admitted to plagiarism despite BI’s incredibly damaging headline and story to the contrary. Neri has never committed fraud of any kind. January 5th, 2024 The following day, January 5th, Fran receives an email at 5:19pm from Katherine Long, copying John, Jake, and Jack, alleging other purported plagiarism. Note again that the email is sent to Fran at Pershing Square, and not to Neri Oxman or to her company. The email subject heading states: Journalist on deadline | Plagiarism by your wife and the email begins: "Dear Francis, My colleagues and I have identified numerous additional examples of Dr. Oxman’s plagiarism and we plan to publish a story about them this evening." The email continues for 11 more pages and 6,900 or so more words. The email is received at 5:19pm after sundown last Friday, after the beginning of Shabbat. Ninety-one minutes later, BI publishes a story entitled: “Academic celebrity Neri Oxman plagiarized from Wikipedia, scholars, a textbook, and other sources without attribution” The article makes novel and speculative assumptions about what is plagiarism including asserting that definitions of basic terms and words from Wikipedia, and quotations from software and hardware manuals that describe products used in Neri's research are plagiarism. Neri and I hire counsel on Monday. It is going to take many weeks to properly analyze all of the assertions as many of the sources are not readily available. We are working on cataloguing all of the factual misstatements and errors in the five BI stories, but even that takes time. The good news, however, is that in only 24 hours, Neri’s lawyers use the Wayback Machine to check MIT's plagiarism policy back when Neri wrote her thesis in 2009. It turns out that MIT's Academic Integrity Handbook did not require citations or even mention Wikipedia until 2013, four years after Neri wrote her dissertation and used Wikipedia for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms. Bear in mind that 2009 was still the early days for Wikipedia. Interestingly, Business Insider also used the Wayback Machine to research MIT's plagiarism policy, but only when it cited Wikipedia to manufacture plagiarism claims against Neri: "MIT’s academic integrity handbook notes that authors must either “use quotation marks around the words and cite the source,” or “paraphrase or summarize acceptably and cite the source.” Identical language appeared in MIT’s handbook at least as far back as 2007." [From Business Insider's initial email to Pershing Square of Jan. 3, 2014, 1030pm] As a side note, what are the chances that Business Insider examined the MIT handbook "as far back as 2007" and did not notice that there was no requirement to cite Wikipedia nor was it even mentioned until April 4, 2013 when the following language was added: "Wikipedia is Not a Reliable Academic Source Many of us use Wikipedia as a source of information when we want a quick explanation of something. However, Wikipedia or other wikis, collaborative information sites contributed to by a variety of people, are not considered reliable sources for academic citation, and you should not use them as sources in an academic paper. The bibliography published at the end of the Wikipedia entry may point you to potential sources. However do not assume that these sources are reliable – use the same criteria to judge them as you would any other source. Do not consider the Wikipedia bibliography as a replacement for your own research." To be clear, Neri did not use Wikipedia as a source, but only for the definitions of 15 words and/or terms for her dissertation. The words and terms are not ideas stolen from others. They are facts and descriptions like: “Weaving,” “Tensor,” “Functionally graded material,” “Finite element method,” “Manifolds,” “Heat flux,” “Constitutive equation,” “Pain,” “Computer-aided design,” “Computer graphics,” “Principle of minimum energy,” “Optimization,” entries related to “symmetry,” “Raster graphics,” and “sustainable design.” While there was no way for us to do any of the research required and respond to BI in the 91 minutes we were given before Business Insider published its story, our lawyers in a day were able to uncover the lack of Wikipedia guidance in the MIT handbook until April 13, 2013, four years after she wrote her dissertation. This finding wipes away 15, or more than half of the plagiarism claims made by Business Insider at 5:19pm last Friday night. It is clear from the order that the plagiarism claims are provided to us in the 12-page letter that BI put the “best ones” first, i.e., the ones we received on Friday, and the rest are just stuff they throw against the wall to see what sticks. Substantially all of the remaining 13 plagiarism claims consist of text excerpts from software and hardware manuals and websites for software and hardware used in Neri’s research and provided in the dissertation including a description of “poles.” It is also clear that the stories were staged. BI's goal was to get Neri to "admit plagiarism" based on the clerical errors of the first five examples. Then, once she is an admitted plagiarist, hit her with 7,000 words of accusations and publish 91 minutes later. Because by then, Neri is a self-admitted plagiarist so why even read anything but the headline. Impact on Neri Neri is one of the most acclaimed designers and scientists in the world. In order to understand what she does, I recommend you watch her podcast with Lex Fridman which can be found here: https://t.co/g8WNeu4Ucl. Alternatively, you can take a look at her 73-page CV which can be found here https://t.co/6GabCqIymw. You will likely conclude from viewing the podcast and/or reading the CV that Neri is one of the most creative, brilliant and talented people in the world, and she has been recognized as such with the most important awards and honors in her field. Neri is also one of the kindest, most loving, and gentle human beings in the world. She has a remarkable combination of incredible attributes, and I am the luckiest man in the world to have met her when I did. But don’t take my word for it, ask around. Business Insider’s campaign to destroy Neri could have literally killed her, if she did not have profound love and support from me, love from our family and incredible friends, and confidence and respect from the most important scientists, architects, and designers around the world who have shown an incredible outpouring of support to her during this extraordinarily difficult time. But it still has been very, very challenging for her. She has suffered severe emotional harm, and as an introvert, it has been very, very difficult for her to make it through each day. Try to imagine how she feels. Seriously, try hard. Among other things, in one of the stories BI tried to create the impression in a materially false and misleading portion of one story that Neri had some kind of inappropriate relationship with Epstein, taking advantage of recent headlines concerning the release of the Epstein list. In short, Neri’s lab received a $150k donation from Epstein. She met Epstein once at the request of her boss the head of the MIT MediaLab in a meeting attended by one of the most important members of the MIT faculty, presented her work, and never saw Epstein again. Please see here for details: https://t.co/j1G5AmrmqE Being in the Spotlight Few people feel comfortable in the spotlight. Some love it, but most do not. Why? Because bright lights reveal things, and that makes people uncomfortable. And if you are in the spotlight and you make a mistake, other people find out. The number of people who find out depends on how bright the spotlight is. Some people try to get in the spotlight because it can be good for business, but it can be hard to get attention in a world with so much news and social media. One guaranteed way to be in the spotlight is to be a high-profile person and do something wrong or be accused of something wrong, the more wrong the brighter the spotlight. Another way to get in the spotlight is to be married to a high-profile person, and then be accused of serious wrongdoing like fraud, (let’s not forget that plagiarism is fraud). And if you happen to be a gorgeous, incredibly talented and charismatic person that is highly recognized in your field, the spotlight will be even brighter. And if they can somehow connect you to Jeffrey Epstein the spotlight will really, really glare, until it is so blinding that you can no longer see. And if the story says that you admitted to fraud and the online publication and its large German parent company both put out statements which say: “the facts in the story are undisputed,” that is the most spotlight you can possibly create. The story will become the biggest story in the world, and it will stay there until it is resolved. Every newspaper, magazine, blog post, and social media site in the world will write that story, and write many more follow ups. My Opening Words Now here is where my opening words become relevant again. The only way to begin to feel how Neri feels right now is to have the spotlight of the entire world bearing down on you. But you can only begin to feel what she is feeling if the spotlight is on you, and you have done something wrong or are responsible for wrongdoing. So I am now going to turn the spotlight around to the people responsible for this unbelievably disastrous mess. I have reached this point in the journey only after taking every step I could possibly take to try to end this madness that is severely harming the woman I love. And time is not her friend, every day of this incredibly damaging media mess is grinding down on her. Naming Names Below I am going to tell the behind-the-scenes story beginning Saturday, January 6th, and name names. So here goes: When the “Neri Oxman admits to plagiarism story” broke, I reached out to a board member I knew at BI, and to its controlling shareholders, the co-ceos of KKR, and to Mathias Döpfner, the Chairman and CEO of Axel Springer. I assumed that with a call or two, I would be able to convince BI or AS to suspend the stories so we could address the materially misleading and false statements that were damaging to Neri while the stories were in suspension. This seemed like an easy request to me. If we weren’t able to rebut the allegations, then BI was free to republish the stories. They would be even bigger stories in that case, but after 110 hours or so of trying, I haven’t been able to achieve this objective. Alternatively, I proposed that AS announce that an investigation was pending about both the alleged facts in the story – including the most important false statement, i.e., that Neri had admitted to plagiarism – in addition to the already launched investigation of journalistic practices and ethics that was underway and already announced. By putting the stories in suspense or at least announcing that the facts were under investigation, that would enable Neri to defend herself against the plagiarism accusations. The stories could then be corrected, or I thought, more likely, depublished, and new stories could be written that would help restore Neri’s reputation. Whom did I contact and why? I reached out to a board member of Business Insider because the board of BI oversees the hiring and firing of BI management including its Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas Carlson, Executive Editor John Cook, the reporter, Katherine Long, and Deputy Editor Jake Swearingen. I reached out to Joe Bae because he is Co-CEO of KKR, the effective controlling shareholder of Axel Springer, which according to public information, holds 48.5% of the company along with CPPIB, the Canadian pension fund. I didn’t call CPPIB because I didn’t know until today that it was an owner of the company. And I reached out to Henry Kravis because he is KKR’s representative on the board of Axel Springer, and he and George Roberts are the founders and largest individual shareholders of KKR. AS is only one of two boards that Henry sits on. The Business Insider Board Member I called a board member of BI that I knew, but not well, on Saturday. He responded by text and we ultimately scheduled a call on Sunday morning at 10am. On 830am, on Sunday morning, he sent me a text in which, after pleasantries, he said: “After spending a lot of time over the past few weeks looking at and thinking about the definition of “plagiarism” (and some cited examples), I agree with you about it. Academia needs to narrow the definition. There’s a big difference between clerical oversights and intentional theft and misrepresentation. And there should be a clear delineation between the two. I’m actually planning to write about that myself this week. If you’re still free today, happy to call you whenever convenient between 10-2. Look forward to talking.” I was obviously encouraged by his text as Neri was certainly not a plagiarist under this definition. We spoke Sunday at 10:01am. It was a condition of him speaking to me that I not disclose his name publicly, which is why I am not doing so here. In summary, he said that he would resolve the issue with a four-part plan including an investigation of what went down, an opinion piece he was writing for BI on plagiarism referenced above, and two other steps which I don’t remember. I was encouraged by his words, but ultimately, he misled me. I shared with him many concerns I had about the reporting, its factual inaccuracy, and the materially false and misleading stories that had been published. I made one request. I asked him to publicly disclose that Axel Springer had launched an investigation of the story, and he said he would have to get back to me on that request. Hours later, at 3:41pm, (I had previously told him that Neri and I were going to a wedding at 4pm) he told me that AS would be releasing a statement about the investigation. Unfortunately, that statement and the contemporaneous ones made by BI and its Editor-in-Chief Nicholas Carlson in an email to staff, all made the same false and damaging statement that: “the facts of the reports have not been disputed…” This of course was a catastrophically damaging statement for Neri.

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