Larry Summers

Lawrence H. Summers (born November 30, 1954, in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American economist who served as Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton from 1999 to 2001 and as president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006.¹ In 2003, during his presidency, Harvard established the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics with a 6.5 million dollar gift from Jeffrey Epstein, the largest Epstein gift Harvard received.² Emails released by the House Oversight Committee in November 2025 showed Summers seeking Epstein's advice on his pursuit of a woman who regarded him as a mentor, in messages running until the day before Epstein's July 2019 arrest. Within three weeks Summers had resigned from the board of OpenAI, taken leave from his Harvard center, and been banned for life by the American Economic Association.¹³

Treasury and Harvard

Summers was Treasury secretary for the last two years of the Clinton administration and became Harvard's president in 2001, serving five years.¹ He remained on the faculty afterward with the rank of University Professor, Harvard's highest, and directed the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School.³

The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics

Harvard had courted Epstein as a donor from 1992 and received his first gift in 1998. Between 1998 and 2006 he made 22 gifts totaling 8,443,000 dollars, most between 10,000 and 200,000 dollars, with one exception: 6.5 million dollars in 2003 for the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, led by the mathematical biologist Martin Nowak, whom Harvard recruited from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where Epstein had already funded his work.² The program's original website stated: "The Program for Evolutionary Dynamics was established in 2003 by Harvard University President Lawrence H. Summers following an imaginative proposal by Jeffrey Epstein and Benedict Gross."² The gift paid for a separate research facility in a leased building in Harvard Square.²

Press reports at the time described the gift as part of a 30 million dollar pledge; Harvard's 2020 review "found no Harvard record of such a pledge."² Epstein's own foundation website was still claiming in 2020 that he had established the program "with a $35 million gift."² Harvard stopped accepting Epstein's gifts under Summers's successor, Drew Faust, no later than November 2008.² The review found that Epstein kept a keycard, a passcode, and an office at the program's building into 2018, visiting more than forty times after his 2008 conviction.² Epstein used the suite for dinner parties organized by Nowak's assistants, among them the celebration of Summers's sixtieth birthday.⁴

The 2014 Philanthropy Contact

Epstein's calendars show Summers meeting him more than a dozen times between 2013 and 2016, in the years after Harvard had stopped accepting Epstein's money; a Summers spokesperson said in 2023 that he "deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein."⁵ The Wall Street Journal's 2023 reporting on Epstein's calendars recorded that in April 2014 Summers sought Epstein's advice on small-scale philanthropy, to help raise one million dollars for an online poetry project developed by his wife, the Harvard literature professor Elisa New.⁵ New later emailed Epstein herself, including a 2015 message thanking him for arranging financial support for the poetry project she directs.¹ On November 17, 2014, six years after Harvard stopped taking his gifts, Epstein wrote to Summers: "harvard ok with donation?"⁶

The Churkin Meeting

On January 13, 2016, Epstein arranged by iMessage a meeting for the next day with Vitaly Churkin, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations. After Churkin proposed Thursday, Epstein wrote "2?", then "Larry summers will be here as well," and then "Or 12 if you prefer privacy." Churkin replied, "2OK." On January 14 Epstein wrote to Churkin, "Running 15 minutes late."⁷ Eleven days earlier Epstein had offered Churkin a meal with Ehud Barak, who was "in town this week."⁷

The 2018 and 2019 Emails

The House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 documents from Epstein's estate on November 12, 2025. Among them was a correspondence of about seven months between Summers and Epstein, from November 2018 to July 2019, which ended one day before Epstein's arrest on federal sex-trafficking charges.³ In it Summers, who was married, sought Epstein's help with a woman who viewed him as an economic mentor. "im a pretty good wing man , no?" Epstein wrote on November 30, 2018, two days after the Miami Herald began publishing its "Perversion of Justice" series on his 2008 plea. The next day Summers told Epstein he had texted the woman that he "had something brief to say to her," and asked, "Am I thanking her or being sorry re my being married. I think the former."¹ The woman has not been publicly identified.

Resignations and the Lifetime Ban

On November 17, 2025, Summers announced that he would step back from public commitments: "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."⁸ He then left his advisory role at the Yale Budget Lab and his fellowship at the Center for American Progress, and the New York Times declined to renew his contributor contract.¹⁸ On November 19 he resigned from the OpenAI board, where he had sat since November 2023, when he was added after the brief ouster of Sam Altman. The board said it respected his decision and appreciated "the perspective he brought to the Board."³⁸ The same day he took leave from the Mossavar-Rahmani Center; a Harvard Kennedy School spokesman, Steven Goldberg, said co-teachers would finish his courses and that "he is not scheduled to teach next semester." Harvard said it was "conducting a review of information concerning individuals at Harvard included in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents to evaluate what actions may be warranted."³

On December 2, 2025, the American Economic Association accepted Summers's resignation and barred him for life from "attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating" in its events, calling his conduct "fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession." Summers declined to comment on the ban; the previous week he had called his association with Epstein a "major error in judgement."¹ In February 2026, after further Justice Department releases, Summers resigned from Harvard.⁴ No legal proceeding has named him.