Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, who also served as Harvard's president, announced Monday his withdrawal from public commitments following email disclosures between him and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, The New York Times reported.
Monday's statement from Summers declared, "I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused." He stated, "I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein."
While Summers indicated he would maintain his Harvard economics professorship, he did not detail which public roles he would abandon, The New York Times noted. The Yale Budget Lab confirmed Summers signaled his advisory group's withdrawal. A Center for American Progress spokesperson stated that his immediate fellowship termination at the progressive organization was due to his actions.
Previous public knowledge existed regarding the Summers-Epstein connection, The New York Times reported. Summers had pursued Epstein funding for a poetry organization headed by his spouse, Elisa New, a retired professor of literature at Harvard.
However, correspondence disclosed the previous week revealed a more intimate association featuring Summers requesting relationship guidance and exchanging casual conversation with Epstein across multiple years, The New York Times noted. The messages extended into 2019, well beyond Epstein's 2008 guilty plea to solicitation charges involving an underage individual for prostitution. In 2018, the Miami Herald published an extensively researched piece detailing Epstein's exploitation of young females.
Monday morning saw Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren demanding that Harvard and additional organizations terminate their Summers associations, according to The New York Times. Warren's Monday statement, initially covered by CNN, declared: "For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment," The New York Times noted. The former Harvard Law School faculty member continued: "If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein's sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation's politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else."
The Revolving Door Project, a watchdog organization, urged leading institutions to sever Summers' connections, including Harvard, OpenAI, Bloomberg, and The New York Times itself. Summers contributes to the Times' opinion section.
Friday brought President Donald Trump's announcement, while facing scrutiny over his own Epstein connections, that his administration would probe the financier's links to Democrats, featuring Bill Clinton and Summers, "to determine what was going on with them," according to The New York Times. Clinton has rejected claims of a close Epstein relationship. His 2019 office statement indicated that Clinton had maintained no communication with Epstein for over ten years. Trump maintained a friendship with Epstein for at least 15 years, although he claimed they subsequently became adversaries in a property dispute.
House Republicans released a collection of recent correspondence exceeding 20,000 document pages, The New York Times reported. A 2019 exchange featured Epstein delivering encouragement after Summers' description of an encounter with a romantic interest who was involved with another individual. Summers' email stated: "I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits," The New York Times noted. Epstein replied: "shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh," according to The New York Times.
Summers' turbulent Harvard presidency concluded with his resignation in 2006, as he faced a faculty no-confidence vote, The New York Times reported. The vote followed controversy surrounding his suggestion that biological differences partially explained women's underrepresentation compared to men in mathematics and science fields, a subject he also explored with Epstein, as the newly disclosed correspondence demonstrates. Summers' 2017 email stated: "I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population," The New York Times reported.
