In September 2019, an email thread from an MIT Computer Science and AI Laboratory (CSAIL) mailing list became public. The thread concerned MIT's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein's estate donations. In the thread, stallman had written comments suggesting that Marvin Minsky — a computer scientist at MIT and a figure in the mit-ai-lab hacker culture stallman had come up in — might have had sexual contact with an Epstein victim that was "entirely voluntary" on her part. The comments were widely condemned as dismissive of trafficking victims.
The backlash was rapid and extensive. stallman resigned from his position as president of the free-software-foundation on September 16, 2019, and from his visiting researcher position at MIT the same day. He published a statement saying he had expressed himself poorly and did not intend to defend Epstein's behavior, but the explanation did not substantially quiet the criticism.
In March 2021, the FSF announced that stallman had rejoined the board of directors. This announcement provoked a second wave of protest: an open letter signed by hundreds of free software developers, organizations, and companies called for Stallman's removal from the FSF board and asked the entire FSF board to resign. Signatory organizations included the electronic-frontier-foundation, the software-freedom-conservancy, and numerous others. The FSF board did not remove Stallman; several board members resigned instead.
The controversy produced a lasting institutional fracture. The software-freedom-conservancy, which had been a close partner organization, formally severed ties with the FSF. The free software community remained divided between those who viewed Stallman's reinstatement as incompatible with the movement's values and those who viewed the campaign against him as an attempt to use personal controversy to suppress his philosophy.
The events are documented in the gplv3-and-later-career-2006-present era. The controversy sits at the intersection of Stallman's role as the essential intellectual architect of the free-software-definition and four-freedoms framework and his longstanding personal controversies — his statements about sexual ethics, autism, personal hygiene, and institutional power had generated tension for decades before 2019.