Larry Summers to Step Back From Public Commitments Over Epstein Emails

New emails showed that Lawrence H. Summers, a former Harvard president, had stayed in touch with Jeffrey Epstein for years after Mr. Epstein faced sex trafficking charges.

Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s former president and a former Treasury secretary, said Monday that he would be stepping back from public commitments following the release of emails between him and Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” Mr. Summers said in a statement Monday. “I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.”

Mr. Summers added that he would continue teaching as an economics professor at Harvard, though he did not specify which public commitments he would be stepping back from. But the Yale Budget Lab said Mr. Summers has indicated he would be withdrawing from his role in its advisory group. And a spokeswoman for the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, said he would be ending his fellowship there immediately.

The relationship between Mr. Summers and Mr. Epstein was previously known. Mr. Summers had sought money from Mr. Epstein for a poetry foundation led by his wife, Elisa New, an emerita Harvard literature professor.

But emails released last week showed a cozier relationship that included Mr. Summers seeking romantic advice and trading banter with Mr. Epstein over several years. The communications stretched to 2019, long after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to charges related to soliciting a minor for prostitution. In 2018, The Miami Herald published a deeply reported article about Mr. Epstein’s abuse of young girls. Mr. Epstein died while in custody in 2019, which was ruled a suicide.

Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.

Earlier on Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts had called on Harvard and other institutions to sever their relationship with Mr. Summers.

“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,” Ms. Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, said in a statement on Monday, which was first reported by CNN.

“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.”

Others also criticized the relationship. The Revolving Door Project, a watchdog group, called on prominent institutions to cut their ties with Mr. Summers, including Harvard, OpenAI, Bloomberg and The New York Times. (Mr. Summers is a contributing writer for the Times Opinion section.)

On Friday, President Trump, under fire for his own ties to Mr. Epstein, said he would direct his administration to investigate the financier’s connections to Democrats, including Bill Clinton and Mr. Summers, “to determine what was going on with them.”

Mr. Clinton has denied having a close relationship with Mr. Epstein. In 2019, his office said Mr. Clinton had not spoken to Mr. Epstein in more than a decade. Mr. Trump was friendly with Mr. Epstein for at least 15 years, but said they later became rivals in a real estate battle.

The latest emails were part of a trove of more than 20,000 pages of documents released by House Republicans.

In one exchange from 2019, Mr. Epstein provided a pep talk after Mr. Summers described an exchange with a love interest who was seeing another man.

“I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Mr. Summers wrote in the email.

“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,” Mr. Epstein responded.

Mr. Summers served a tumultuous run as Harvard’s president, resigning in 2006 as he faced a vote of no-confidence among the faculty. The vote came after controversy emerged over his suggestion that women were less represented than men in the fields of math and science partially because of biological differences, a topic he also discussed with Mr. Epstein, the newly released emails show.

“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population,” Mr. Summers wrote in a 2017 email.

Pooja Salhotra and Ben Casselman contributed reporting.

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