Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers announced plans Monday to step back from public commitments.
This announcement follows fallout surrounding the release of emails exchanged between the professor and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The trove of documents was released last week by Republicans on the House Oversight Committee. These materials indicated that the former official of both the Clinton and Obama administrations exchanged emails and text messages with the disgraced financier.
Communication continued well after Epstein’s 2008 guilty plea in Florida for sex crimes, according to reports. The communications persisted up until Epstein’s July 2019 arrest on federal child sex trafficking charges, per the documents.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused,” Summers stated in a statement obtained by the New York Post. He further added, “I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein.”
Summers explained that stepping away represents “one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.” The 70-year-old professor stated, however, that he would continue to “fulfill my teaching obligations” at Harvard.
Summers holds various other professional positions beyond his teaching post at the Ivy League school. He serves on the board of directors for the software company OpenAI and the interactive learning company Skillsoft. He also works as a Bloomberg columnist, a regular New York Times guest essayist and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank.
The documents released by the congressional oversight panel suggest that Summers and Epstein appeared to have maintained a close relationship. The pair discussed politics, women and Harvard-related business in the hundreds of emails exchanged between 2013 and 2019.
In one exchange, Summers discussed the topic of women’s intelligence. “I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population,” Summers wrote to Epstein in an October 2017 missive. A March 2019 online back-and-forth showed Summers seeking romantic advice from Epstein.
“I dint [sic] want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits,” Summers told Epstein while discussing his pursuit of a woman. He added that “she must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it.”
Summers utilized an email to Epstein in July 2018 to criticize President Trump’s first-term meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Do the Russians have stuff on Trump?” Summers wrote. “Today was appalling even by his standards.”
The former treasury secretary even asked Epstein whether President Trump was a “cocaine user.” This inquiry was made in an email sent a month before the president defeated former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election.
The final documented email correspondence between the two men occurred in March 2019. This exchange took place just months before Epstein’s July arrest on federal charges.
Text messaging between the pair continued further, up until the day before Epstein’s arrest, according to the Harvard Crimson.
This is Larry Summers.
He is trashing Trump for firing a crooked bureaucrat.
Calling him lawless…
Larry just got caught up in the Epstein scandal.
Whoops!pic.twitter.com/HL8Wa11xYh— C3 (@C_3C_3) November 18, 2025
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