People are, quite sensibly, prejudiced against someone convicted of sex crimes involving the exploitation of young women traveling with young women. The prejudice is against him, not the women. The incident and the reactions of the staff involved has been documented in greater detail elsewhere, you can just google it up.
To avoid the appearance of impropriety, should people avoid hiring female assistants? I hope not.
To avoid the appearance and reality of impropriety, people should avoid sex trafficking and other crimes. I don’t understand what the relationship to ‘employing women assistants’ is supposed to be.
Once you've been convicted of sex trafficking, yes.
He trafficked underage sex slaves
Most everyone else is interpreting this in the context of Epstein trafficking young women from eastern europe, because that's what he did.
If you interpret it as you describe instead, I also desperately hope you are not a professor and don't visit MIT.
Is anyone interpreting this as "At MIT, it's reasonable to be prejudiced against young women who claim to have a job in the philanthropy field. Anyone actually qualified for such a job would have a different age or a different gender."? If I'm a professor elsewhere and visit MIT to talk about my research, can my female graduate student (who did most of the work) safely visit at the same time, or will she run into the same prejudice? Does the answer depend on her physical appearance?