The economist and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers was one of many high-status figures hitting up sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for advice, as revealed in a dump of Epstein's emails last week by the House Oversight Committee. That correspondence has finally caught up to Summers, who has spent this week stepping down from his numerous posts in academia and industry.
According to Harvard University's student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, emails show that Summers sought Epstein's counsel while pursuing a relationship with a woman for whom Summers was an "economics mentor." In their correspondence on this topic, which dates from November 2018 to July 2019, Epstein describes himself as a "wing man." The two banter about the probability that Summers will have sex with the woman, Chinese economist Keyu Jin, and referred to her with a racist pseudonym. From the Crimson:
Throughout the seven months of correspondence reviewed by The Crimson, Summers and Epstein referred to the woman Summers was pursuing in some messages by the code name “peril” but never used her name in messages directly describing the relationship. On at least two occasions, the two men discussed Jin’s emails to Summers, which he forwarded to Epstein. In later messages, the two men appeared to joke about the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman, apparently Jin.
On Tuesday, Summers was recorded in a Harvard lecture hall, opening one of his classes with a mention of his "regret" and "shame" about his communication with Epstein. "I've said that I'm gonna step back from public activities for a time, but I think it's very important to fulfill my teaching obligation," he told the class. "So with your permission, we're gonna go forward and talk about the material in class."
That approach did not last long. On Wednesday, the Harvard Crimson reported that Summers would drop all teaching duties while the university investigated his ties to Epstein. He also took a leave of absence from his role as a director at the Harvard Kennedy School.
At time of writing, Summers has also stepped down from the board of artificial intelligence company OpenAI. Summers joined the board in 2023, right after the company's board briefly ousted chief executive Sam Altman, and right before it rehired Altman and began to morph the company from a hybrid non-profit/for-profit structure to a traditional for-profit structure, a move that was finally completed last month.
Also this week, Summers stepped down from his role on the international advisory board of the bank Santander. He removed himself from roles at several nonprofits and think tanks: the Center for Global Development, the Peterson Institute for International Economics, the Yale Budget Lab, and the Brookings Institution. As for his platforms in media, the New York Times and Bloomberg News have also cut ties with Summers.
That's not the end of it, though. On Thursday afternoon, the Crimson reported that Summers, for a 2005 honeymoon with his wife Elisa New, flew to Epstein's private island in the Caribbean. Years later, that island would be recognized as a base for Epstein's sex trafficking.
“Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time,” a spokesperson for Summers told the Crimson. “As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein’s island.” It's unclear how this statement is supposed to improve public perception of Larry Summers at this moment, but he now has a lot of free time to figure it out.
