{"id":43457,"date":"2025-11-18T11:27:18","date_gmt":"2025-11-18T11:27:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/43457\/"},"modified":"2025-11-18T11:27:18","modified_gmt":"2025-11-18T11:27:18","slug":"harvards-larry-summers-stepping-back-from-public-commitments-in-fallout-over-jeffrey-epstein-emails","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/43457\/","title":{"rendered":"Harvard’s Larry Summers stepping back from public commitments in fallout over Jeffrey Epstein emails"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ex-Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers announced plans Monday to step back from public commitments amid fallout from the release of emails between him and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.<\/a><\/p>\n

The former Clinton and Obama administration official had exchanged emails and text messages with the disgraced financier well after his 2008 guilty plea in Florida for sex crimes \u2013 and up until Epstein\u2019s July 2019 arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges, a trove of documents released by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee revealed last week.<\/p>\n

Larry Summers announced he is stepping back from public commitments after emails between Jeffrey Epstein and the Harvard professor surfaced. Gage Skidmore\/ZUMA Press Wire \/ SplashNews.com<\/p>\n

\u201cI am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,\u201d Summers said in a statement, obtained by The Post.<\/p>\n

\u201cI take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Summers explained that stepping away is \u201cone part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, the 70-year-old professor said he would continue to \u201cfulfill my teaching obligations\u201d at Harvard.<\/p>\n

Aside from his post at the Ivy League school, Summers also serves on the board of directors for software company OpenAI and interactive learning company Skillsoft; as a Bloomberg columnist; a regular New York Times guest essayist; and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, among other gigs.<\/p>\n

Epstein died in prison in 2019 after killing himself. Corbis via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Summers and Epstein appeared to have had a close relationship and discussed women, politics and Harvard-related business in hundreds of emails exchanged between 2013 and 2019, the documents released by the congressional oversight panel showed.<\/p>\n

In one missive, Summers joked that women were less intelligent than men<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population,\u201d Summers wrote Epstein in October 2017, without providing further context.<\/p>\n

In another online back-and-forth in March 2019, Summers asked Epstein for romantic advice.<\/p>\n

\u201cI dint [sic] want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,\u201d Summers told Epstein while discussing his pursuit of a woman, adding that \u201cshe must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Summers criticized President Trump\u2019s first-term meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in a July 2018 email to Epstein.<\/p>\n

Photo from 2011 shows L-R:\u00a0James Staley (aka Jes Staley), Larry Summers, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, and Boris Nikolic at Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s Manhattan house.<\/p>\n

\u201cDo the Russians have stuff on Trump?\u201d Summers wrote. \u201cToday was appalling even by his standards.\u201d<\/p>\n

Summers even asked Epstein if Trump was a \u201ccocaine user,\u201d a month before the president defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.<\/p>\n

Their last email correspondence occurred in March 2019, just months before Epstein\u2019s July arrest.<\/p>\n

The pair continued to text up until the day before his arrest, according to the Harvard Crimson.<\/a><\/p>\n

Last week, Trump directed the Justice Department to probe Epstein\u2019s ties with Summers, former President Bill Clinton and other prominent Democrats and institutions.<\/p>\n

Attorney General Pam Bondi subsequently announced that US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jay Clayton, would oversee the investigation \u201cwith urgency and integrity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial.<\/p>\n

His death was ruled a suicide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ex-Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers announced plans Monday to step back from public commitments amid fallout…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43458,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[16204,6769,24900,9,11,10,87,58],"class_list":{"0":"post-43457","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-harvard","9":"tag-jeffrey-epstein","10":"tag-larry-summers","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-news","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-us-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43457"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43457\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}