The former CEO of Reddit drew criticism this week after revealing that she and several others at a ritzy 2011 Silicon Valley Christmas party attended by Ghislaine Maxwell “knew” or “suspected” that she was allegedly supplying underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein but did not call her out.
Ellen Pao, the former CEO of Reddit, said in the tweet posted Monday that Maxwell was at the party hosted by Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital giant where she worked as a partner.
“She was at the Kleiner holiday party in 2011, but I had no desire to meet her much less have a photo taken with her,” Pao wrote in a tweet on Monday.
“We knew about her supplying underage girls for sex, but I guess that was fine with the ‘cool’ people who managed the tightly controlled guest list,” she added.
Twitter users slammed Pao for not saying anything about the guest list for years after the party.
“Sorry but it sounds like you were fine with it too,” one user responded.
“Wait what? Everyone in the room knew she was a child sex trafficker… and no one in the room objected to her presence?” another wrote.
“Sounds like you‘re associated with some pretty cool people … ” a third user responded.
Pao set her Twitter to private after the criticism, but later lifted the privacy setting.
In a second tweet, she clarified that media reports had implicated Maxwell in sex trafficking — but the accused madame had not been charged criminally at the time.
“To be clear, the press had described her as supplying underage girls for sex, but she had not been charged so I guess it would be more accurate to say we ‘suspected’ v ‘knew,'” she wrote.
When asked by another Twitter user asked if everyone at the party was OK with Maxwell being at the party, she responded that the employees who made the guest list were fine with her attending.
The “super exclusive” party was attended by tech industry giants and former politicians, including Al Gore, ex-MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta and former Twitter engineering head Mike Abbott, according to Business Insider.
Kleiner Perkins is venture capital giant in Silicon Valley that provided funding for companies such as Amazon, Google and Twitter. Pao served as a partner at the firm before leaving in 2012.
Maxwell was arrested last week in New Hampshire and hit with a six-count indictment for allegedly trafficking underage girls for pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and lying about the alleged crimes under oath.
At the time of the 2011 party, Epstein had been convicted of sex trafficking in Florida and ordered to register as a sex offender.