It’s been a rocky week for public intellectual Larry Summers.
On Tuesday, the 70-year-old Harvard economics professor gave an awkward announcement to his class of college students acknowledging his embarrassing ties to the deceased sex trafficker and billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein, which were brought to light with the recent release of another batch of Epstein’s emails.
“Some of you will have seen my statement of regret expressing my shame with respect to what I did in communication with Mr. Epstein, and that I’ve said that I’m going to step back from public activities, but for a time,” Summers intoned, gravely.
“But I think it’s very important to fulfill my teaching obligations. And so, with your permission,” he continues, not waiting for anyone’s objections, “I’m gonna — we’re gonna go forward and, uh, talk about the material, uh, in the class.”
A Harvard professor named in the Epstein files
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Summers’ preeminence as an economic authority has made him a mainstay of politics for decades, serving as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001, and an economic advisor under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011. He was also president of Harvard University for five years, but stepped down in 2006 after being criticized for making sexist remarks about women.
His connection to Epstein was once again brought under the microscope after a House committee released a trove of Epstein’s emails and documents last week, in which it became clear that Summers was far closer to the deceased sex criminal than he had previously let on. On Monday, Summers released a statement expressing how “deeply ashamed” he was for communicating with Epstein, the spirit of which he repeated in his address to his class.
In a 2018 email exchange, Summers, who is married with three children, asked Epstein for romantic advice related to a woman he said he was a mentor for — and who was decidedly not his wife — while lamenting that he wouldn’t be seen as anything more than that.
“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” Summers wrote to Epstein.
Epstein, referring to himself as Summers’ “wing man,” assured that the woman was “doomed to be with you.”
These exchanges, as did many others, took place well after Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to sexually abusing teenage girls as young as 14 years old, and continued up until his arrest in 2019 for child sex trafficking.
This isn’t the first time Summers’ ties to Epstein have been exposed. In 2023, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the pair met more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2016, during which Summers asked Epstein’s advice on raising $1 million for his wife’s poetry project. Epstein later chipped in $110,000, via a nonprofit.
Not much came of those revelations, but this time, it doesn’t seem Summers will be let off the hook quite so easily. On Wednesday, he announced he was stepping down from his position on OpenAI’s board of directors, conceding influence in what is, for better or worse, one of the most important companies in the world right now.
It also appears he won’t be allowed to finish teaching his class, as he told his students he would. Instead, according to his spokesperson, “co-teachers will complete the remaining three class sessions of the courses he has been teaching with them this semester, and he is not scheduled to teach next semester.”
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