Larry Summers Apologises, Steps Back After Epstein Emails Become Public

Former Harvard president and longtime political heavyweight Larry Summers says he is pulling back from public life after a tranche of his private emails with Jeffrey Epstein dropped into the political bloodstream.

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

Summers added that he would keep teaching but “step back from public commitments” as part of an effort to “rebuild trust and repair relationships”.

The move comes after the US House Committee on Oversight released 20,000 pages of documents from Epstein’s estate last week, accelerating scrutiny of Epstein’s links to President Donald Trump, whose own past association with the disgraced financier has reemerged as a political fault line.

The emails show Summers, then a senior statesman of the Democratic establishment and a board member at OpenAI, regularly corresponding with Epstein between 2017 and 2019 on everything from US foreign policy to Trump’s first term to Summers’s personal entanglements.

In one 2017 exchange, Summers warned Epstein that his “pal”, billionaire Thomas Barrack Jr, should stay far from reporters after a Washington Post investigation.

“Public link to manafort will be a disaster,” he wrote. “This is a staggering [expletive] show.”

In another, from late 2018, Summers attempted to secure an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos. Epstein appeared to brush him off.

The emails also reveal flashes of the same worldview that got Summers pushed out of Harvard in 2006, when he suggested women were biologically less suited to maths and science. In a 2017 note to Epstein about “inclusion”, Summers wrote:

“I observed that half the IQ in world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of the population …”

And as the #MeToo movement was reshaping public life later that year, Summers appeared irritated by the reckoning. “I’m trying to figure why American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard, but hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank,” he wrote.

Several emails show Summers hashing out personal dilemmas with Epstein, including a lengthy thread about a younger female colleague. “Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” he wrote in late 2018. Later, in the same exchange, he added: “Smart. Assertive and clear. Gorgeous. I’m [expletive].” He concluded he needed a “cooling off” period.

Summers’s professional life has been defined by stints at the peak of political and economic power, Treasury secretary under Bill Clinton, top adviser to Barack Obama, Harvard president, and most recently a high-profile public commentator whose views on inflation and interest rates routinely moved markets.