Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, former presidential economic adviser, former president of Harvard, will no longer teach at the university at the end of this academic year. Summers’ relationship to convicted child molester Jeffrey Epstein is the reason for this measure, according to a university spokesperson. Summers will immediately step down as head of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, a Harvard institution.
After the release of documents from the Epstein dossier in November, it emerged that Summers, who was a secretary of state under President Bill Clinton and a top adviser under President Barack Obama, also served as sex offender had maintained intensive contact with the financial advisor in 2008. Between November 2018 and July 2019, until a day before Epstein’s arrest, the men wrote a series of emails to each other, university magazine discovered The Harvard Crimson. The subject was Summers’ crush on a colleague, with the economist asking Epstein for advice on how to seduce her. In one of the letters, Epstein referred to himself as Summers’ “wing man”, an accomplice in luring the woman who apparently showed no interest in the married Summers.
After the revelations in November, Summers announced that he would step back from public life. “I deeply regret my actions and acknowledge the pain I have caused,” he wrote. He described the fact that he had remained in contact with Epstein as a “wrong assessment”. At the time, he stepped down from several prestigious additional positions, such as at Open AI, where he was on the supervisory board, and at the Center for American Progress, where he fellow was, and as a regular opinion writer The New York Times. The American Economic Association later decided that Summers would never be allowed to become a member of this professional organization again.
In a statement he issued on Wednesday American media Summers calls his departure “a difficult decision.” But “without my formal obligations as a former president and professor, I look forward to working on research, analysis and commentary on global economic topics.”
Harvard is still investigating the ties between (former) employees of the university and Epstein. Larry Summers’ wife, whom he wanted to deceive with the help of Epstein, is also the subject of the investigations. Elisa New was a professor of English at Harvard and received substantial financial support from Epstein to produce a TV program on contemporary poetry. Another prominent Harvardian who appears in the Epstein documents is criminal lawyer (known for the OJ Simpson case) and professor Alan Dershowitz
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