Harvard Probes Larry Summers’ Epstein Ties

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from the board of OpenAI following the release of messages in which Summers was asking Jeffrey Epstein for dating advice to try and bed a female mentee whose father was a former CCP official.

On Monday Summers announced that he would be stepping back from all public commitments - and while he said he would continue to teach at Harvard, his office appeared to be gone Monday evening.

"In line with my announcement to step away from my public commitments, I have also decided to resign from the board of OpenAI," Summers told Axios. "I am grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company and look forward to following their progress."

Over 20,000 documents were released last week by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee from Epstein's estate.

Summers, a known longtime associate of Epstein, joined the board of OpenAI in 2023 during a brief period in which CEO Sam Altman was ousted from the company - only to return days later. Summers was appointed alongside Bret Taylor, former Salesforce CEO, and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo - the only member of OpenAI's initial board who still had a seat.

In a statement, OpenAI said "Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and we respect his decision. We appreciate his many contributions and the perspective he brought to the Board."

Meanwhile, the Economic Club of New York postponed a discussion with Summers this week, hours after the Crimson published its article - telling FT that it was "postponed due to an unavoidable change in schedule.

Harvard Investigates

According to the Harvard Crimson, the University will launch a new investigation into its ties to Epstein following the Summers scandal. The university had already conducted an investigation in 2020, in which they found that Epstein donated $9,179,000 across 22 'gifts', including a $736,000 donation after his 2006 arrest but before his 2008 conviction for sex trafficking a minor.

Epstein was also a Visiting Fellow in the Psychology Department in the 2005-2006 academic year despite lacking academic qualifications typically possessed by Visiting Fellows.

The new probe will cover any new information revealed in the new document dump, including hundreds of messages Summers and Epstein exchanged regarding women, politics, and Harvard-related initiatives.

Several other prominent Harvard faculty also appeared in the documents, including Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan M. Dershowitz and English professor emerita Elisa F. New, who is married to Summers, the Crimson reports.

The cache of documents released last week added to a long paper trail detailing ties between Epstein and prominent Harvard affiliates.

In the documents, New discussed her personal projects at length with Epstein, soliciting thousands of dollars in funding from the child sex trafficker several times — years after Harvard said it had stopped taking contributions from Epstein.

In one 2014 exchange, New and Epstein discussed a potential $500,000 gift to Poetry in America, a television show and digital initiative she spearheaded. She also accepted an unspecified amount of money from Leon Black, an executive at private equity giant Apollo, in a gift that she wrote Epstein helped broker.

“It really means a lot to me, all financial help aside, Jeffrey, that you are rooting for me and thinking about me,” she wrote in December 2015.