BOSTON – Larry Summers, the former president of Harvard University who once served as U.S. treasury secretary, says he will step back from public commitments after the release of emails showing he maintained a friendly relationship with Jeffrey Epstein long after the financier pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl in 2008.
Summers said in a statement that he would step back to “rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
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“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said.
Summers did not detail exactly what stepping back would entail, saying he would continue to teach and promised to “rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
However, the Center for American Progress, a progressive DC-based think tank, confirmed Tuesday that Summers was “ending his fellowship at CAP.” A spokesperson for the Budget Lab at Yale also said Summers is no longer a member of the organization's advisory group.
OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, declined to say Tuesday if Summers was stepping down from its board of directors, referring questions to Summers spokesperson Kelly Friendly who said she did not have anything to add “beyond his statement.”
Summers joined the OpenAI board in Nov. 2023, part of an effort to restore stability at the nonprofit and bring back its CEO Sam Altman after its previous board members fired Altman days earlier.
Summers' announcement came just days after President Donald Trump posted on his Truth Social platform that he would ask the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Summers' relationship with Epstein, along with former President Bill Clinton and LinkedIn founder and Democratic donor Reid Hoffman. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi has since said she has ordered a top federal prosecutor to lead the investigation.
Epstein killed himself in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial in 2019 on charges he sexually abused and trafficked underage girls.
Emails made public last week showed many in Epstein's vast network of wealthy and influential friends continued to stay in touch long after his 2008 guilty plea.
A 2019 email to Epstein showed Summers discussing interactions he had with a woman, writing that “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy’. I said awfully coy u are.”
Epstein, who often wrote with spelling and grammatical errors, replied, “you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring. , no whining showed strentgh.”
When asked about the emails last week, Summers issued a statement saying he has “great regrets in my life” and that his association with Epstein was a “major error in judgement.”
Summers served as treasury secretary from 1999 to 2001 under President Clinton. He was Harvard’s president for five years from 2001 to 2006. He is currently a professor and is a director of the school’s Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government.
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, told CNN she believes Harvard should sever ties with Summers, saying he “cannot be trusted” with students.
"For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor, told CNN.
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Kruesi reported from Providence, Rhode Island. Associated Press writer Matt OBrien in Providence, Rhode Island, contributed to this report.