Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers’s exchanges depict relationship as confidantes, emails reveal

A series of exchanges between child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, showing a relationship as confidants emerged among the emails released by Republican legislators this week in the continuing political turmoil over Epstein’s connections to Donald Trump.

The exchanges, from 2013 to early 2019, showed the two men sharing personal – and sometimes unseemly – views about politics and relationships.

“I’m trying to figure why [the] American elite think if u murder your baby by beating and abandonment it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard,” Summers wrote to Epstein in a 2017 email. “But hit on a few women 10 years ago and can’t work at a network or think tank. DO NOT REPEAT THIS INSIGHT.”

At the time, Harvard University was wrestling with an admissions debate after a formerly incarcerated woman’s admission to a PhD program. Summers, a former president of the university who lost his position in a scandal after making sexist comments about female academics, went on to say in the email to Epstein: “I observed that half of the IQ In [the] world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”

Summers was once a leading light in Democratic circles – a former treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, one of the primary engineers of Barack Obama’s response to the financial crisis and a stalwart in the liberal commentariat. But questions have lingered about his association with Epstein, a longtime associate of Trump. Epstein was accused of running a wide-ranging child sex trafficking operation before his death in jail in 2019 in New York City.

After the Wall Street Journal revealed a previous tranche of emails between Epstein and Summers in a 2023 piece, a spokesperson for Summers told the paper that he “deeply regrets being in contact with Epstein after his conviction”.

Summers’s spokesperson has not yet responded to a request for comment from the Guardian.

Democratic lawmakers released emails from the Epstein estate this week that suggest Epstein believed Trump was aware of conduct by the now-convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell. In response, Republican lawmakers released a much bigger tranche of 20,000 emails from the Epstein estate.

The documents show that Summers maintained congenial contact with the convicted child sex trafficker well into 2019, with the last email exchange occurring only months before Epstein’s arrest.

Trump wrote on Truth Social on Friday that he would be asking the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate Epstein’s “involvement and relationship” with Summers, among other prominent Democrats and business leaders.

In the emails, Summers and Epstein discuss politics – particularly Summers’s contempt for Trump – as well as the details of philanthropic social networking – and women. Summers, 70, confided in Epstein in a 2019 exchange about his romantic gestures toward an unnamed woman, and being rebuffed.

“shes smart. making you pay for past errors,” Epstein wrote in an exchange on 16 March. “ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”

Summers reiterated his regret to the Harvard Crimson on Wednesday. “I have great regrets in my life,” he wrote. “As I have said before, my association with Jeffrey Epstein was a major error of judgement.”

Summers was president of Harvard University from 2001 to 2006. Epstein donated more than $9m to Harvard and its affiliated programs between 1998 and 2008, and was appointed a visiting fellow to conduct research. The university later concluded Epstein “lacked the academic qualifications visiting fellows typically possess and his application proposed a course of study Epstein was unqualified to pursue”.

Harvard only stopped accepting Epstein’s donations after he pleaded guilty to child sex offenses in 2008.

By then Obama’s star was rising. Summers would eventually win appointment as director of the White House national economic council (NEC) from January 2009 until November 2010.

After Summers left the White House, he began asking Epstein for philanthropic advice for his wife, Elisa New, a Harvard professor pursuing a poetry project, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Epstein and his foundations made philanthropic donations to projects connected to Summers’s wife, and the two men met a dozen times between 2013 and 2016, often for dinner.

After reporting about Epstein’s donations emerged, New’s charity made a donation “in excess” of that received to anti-sex-trafficking organizations, a spokesperson told journalists in 2023.