Collateral Damage From the Epstein Files: Larry Summers

Today on TAP: The Greeks had a phrase for it: ‘Character is fate.’

https://prospect.org/2025/11/14/collateral-damage-epstein-files-larry-summers/


Then-Harvard University President Larry Summers faces reporters as he departs a faculty meeting, March 15, 2005. Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a no-confidence vote against Summers; a demonstrator holds a sign, top right, concerning women’s issues. Credit: Steven Senne/AP Photo

Like the proverbial bad penny, Larry Summers keeps turning up. He has now turned up in the Epstein files, revealing not only a long-standing chummy relationship with the sexual predator, but explicit emails worthy of a nerdy tenth grader looking for advice on how to bed an evasive girlfriend. Epstein should know. Summers wrote in his email that his coy mistress kept ducking trysts. “And then I said. Did u really rearrange the weekend we were going to be together because guy number 3 was coming … I dint want to be in a gift giving competition while being the friend without benefits.”

He put this in an email. To Jeffrey Epstein. Poor Larry, a friend without benefits. This was in 2019, long after Epstein’s sordid history was well documented. And Epstein advised Summers, “shes smart. making you pay for past errors … you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.” Summers was married at the time to Harvard professor Elisa New, who is still his wife. And while he was seeking Epstein’s advice on how to two-time his spouse, Summers was also enlisting Epstein to raise $110,000 for one of New’s poetry projects. Nice touch, better than sending flowers.

If this sleazy attitude toward women rings a vague bell, let’s recall that Summers’s contempt for women’s intellectual capacities was one of the main factors that led to his ouster as Harvard president. In another email to Epstein, Summers wrote that he still believed that. This week, Summers put out a statement of groveling apology. “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.” A little late. And totally in character.

In the aftermath of these icky revelations, a number of commentators have called for Summers’s long-delayed banishment from elite posts and especially from institutions connected to the Democrats. Today, in a scoop for the Prospect, Dan Boguslaw revealed that Summers is slated to be the economic policy lead on the Center for American Progress’s “Project 2029” effort. I agree that it’s long past time to jettison Summers as hopelessly contaminated. But there are far more serious reasons to dump Summers than his gross connections with Epstein.

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