Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from OpenAI’s board days after Congress released an extensive cache of emails with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included details of intimate affairs.
Summers is also a former president of Harvard University and a current professor. The university will open its own probe into Summers’ connections with Epstein, reports the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. The university newspaper also reported that Summers will step back from public commitments.
His departure comes a day after both the House and the Senate voted to release the Epstein files. Over the past few days, a House panel released years of email exchanges between Epstein and Summers, including one in which Summers asked for advice about pursuing a relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.
In the exchanges, which took place between November 2018 and July 2019, Summers — who was married at the time — seemed to acknowledge his position of power over the woman he was mentoring.
“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 referred to himself early on in the exchanges as Summers’ “wing man,” told him in a June 2019 text: “She is doomed to be with you.”
Later in the messages, Summers wrote that his “best shot” at getting his mentee to ostensibly sleep with him was that the woman found him “invaluable and interesting” and that “she can’t have it without romance/sex.” Throughout June, Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep the woman in a “forced holding pattern.”
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 for sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.
