Jeffrey Epstein and Harvard economist and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers used a shocking slur during a racist exchange about a younger Chinese female mentee, newly released emails show.
A cache of documents released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee shows that Summers, 70—who served as Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton and later led Barack Obama’s National Economic Council—stayed friends with Epstein long after the disgraced financier’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution from a minor, and right up to his 2019 charge for child sex trafficking.
Many of the texts and emails, published Monday by The Harvard Crimson, show Summers turning to the billionaire sex offender for advice on pursuing a woman he worked with.
In correspondence between November 2018 and July 5, 2019—the day before the financier was arrested—the pair gave the unidentified woman the nickname “peril.”
Critics say the code-name echoes the racist and dehumanizing “yellow peril” trope from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, used by politicians, newspapers, and cartoonists, to stoke fear that Asian immigrants—especially Chinese and Japanese people—were a danger to Western purity, jobs, and culture.
Civil-rights attorney Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic, called the exchanges “absolutely disgusting” and wrote that “Larry Summers needs to resign or be pushed out of Harvard” in a series of Bluesky posts.
Arguing that the nickname pointed directly to that slur, she said Summers “needs to resign.”
A separate Crimson article published last Friday on the new emails quotes Harvard statistics professor Joseph Blitzstein calling the “cozy friendship between Epstein and Summers” on display in the cache “disgusting and disgraceful.”
In other emails, Summers forwarded the woman’s academic emails to Epstein, who described her as “needy” and urged Summers to play the “long game,” according to the Crimson’s review of the cache.
One exchange highlighted by the Crimson, sees Summers fret that the woman may be clinging to him for his professional connections.
Epstein responds that “she is doomed to be with you,” and later jokes that the chance of Summers “in bed again with peril” is “0” before reassuring him that “she is never ever going to find another Larry summers.”
In at least some of the messages, Summers appears to be referring to Chinese economist Keyu Jin, 43, a Harvard-educated macroeconomist who has held senior academic posts and whose emails to Summers about her work were passed on to Epstein.
Jin does not describe a romantic relationship with Summers in the correspondence released by Congress, and it is unclear whether she knew her messages were being shared.
Records show Summers flew on Epstein’s private jet at least four times, including one 2005 trip to Epstein’s Caribbean island, and sought six-figure donations from Epstein for a nonprofit project run by his wife, Harvard English professor Elisa New, according to flight logs and earlier reporting.
The messages sit inside more than 20,000 pages of emails and attachments that the GOP-led House Oversight Committee dumped online last week from the Epstein estate, after Democrats first released a smaller tranche that highlighted Epstein’s claims about Donald Trump and other powerful men.
The committee said the additional documents were turned over by the estate and made public “in the interest of transparency, and have led the “Epstein files” fight to explode in Washington.
Trump, 79, had spent months railing against their release before suffering a political humiliation over the weekend.
Under pressure from his own party, he abruptly urged Republicans to vote to release the files, then erupted in a late-night posting spree attacking the disclosures.
Survivors of Epstein have launched a new video campaign demanding that every remaining government file on the case be released, while a bipartisan coalition in the House pushes legislation to force the Justice Department to do just that.
Summers, who has been married to New since 2005 and still holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank as a University Professor, said in a statement that “my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”
The Daily Beast has contacted Summers, Keyu Jin, and Harvard University for comment.
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