Yes. In her 2021 memoir The Empathy Diaries and related interviews, Turkle addressed this as part of a broader critique of MIT's culture. She described the world Fast CompanyMSN of legendary MIT figures like Minsky as one that "laundered bad behavior in exchange for brilliance," and the revelations about the Media Lab's ties to Epstein underscored that point for her — in a world where brilliance beats values, people start treating other humans like objects.

In the Amanda Palmer podcast around the same time, the framing was explicit: the conversation linked the permissiveness around men like Minsky to the broader MeToo moment, with Turkle speaking about a culture where "this man is so brilliant that he's literally allowed to" behave badly — a currency-of-human-life problem she saw running through her years at MIT. Amanda Palmer

So her comments weren't narrowly about Minsky-and-Epstein as a specific relationship so much as using that scandal as confirmation of a pattern she had observed firsthand across decades at MIT — that institutional deference to genius created moral impunity.