Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has stepped down from the board of OpenAI just days after Congress unveiled a significant collection of communications involving the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. This release included troubling insights into Summers’s interactions with Epstein, raising questions about his conduct.
In addition to his role at OpenAI, Summers is a former president of Harvard University and currently serves as a professor there. Reports indicate that Harvard is initiating an investigation into his ties to Epstein, according to The Harvard Crimson. Furthermore, the publication noted that Summers will be reducing his public engagements.
Summers’s resignation followed the recent votes in both the House and Senate to make the Epstein documents public. The House panel disclosed years of email interactions between Summers and Epstein, revealing a concerning exchange in which Summers sought guidance on pursuing a romantic relationship with a woman he referred to as a mentee.
These emails, dated from November 2018 to July 2019, illustrated Summers’s awareness of the inherent power dynamics. “She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 email to Epstein. Epstein, who characterized himself as Summers’s “wing man,” responded in June 2019, suggesting that “She is doomed to be with you.”
Later messages displayed Summers’s troubling strategy, indicating that he believed his best chance of engaging with the mentee hinged on her finding him “invaluable and interesting.” Epstein encouraged Summers to adopt a prolonged approach, advising him to keep the woman in a “forced holding pattern.”
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking minors and conspiracy related to those activities.
