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Former US Treasury secretary Lawrence Summers said he would step back from public commitments after documents showed he asked Jeffrey Epstein for advice on pursuing an extramarital relationship with a female mentee.
Summers, who ran Bill Clinton’s Treasury department and was later president of Harvard University, sent repeated messages to Epstein about a woman codenamed “peril” in 2018 and 2019, according to files released from the late sex offender’s estate last week.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognise the pain they have caused,” Summers said on Monday evening.
“I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”
He said he took responsibility for his “misguided” decision to stay in touch with the paedophile and said he would continue teaching students while stepping back from the public domain.
Summers is one of the most prominent US macroeconomists of recent decades, regularly speaking at academic and policy conferences and contributing to leading economics journals and news outlets. He is a paid contributor at Bloomberg TV and previously wrote for the Financial Times.
He also sits on the board of OpenAI and remained in that role as of Monday evening, according to the company.
Ahead of his announcement, senator Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, had urged the university to cut ties with Summers, who still teaches at the Ivy League school.
Summers’ relationship with Epstein showed “monumentally bad judgment”, Warren said, adding he “cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else”.
The Harvard Crimson first reported on the messages between Summers and Epstein over the woman the former Treasury secretary was interested in.
The Economic Club of New York had been due to host a discussion with Summers this week but said it was postponing it just hours after the Crimson published its article.
The club told the FT the session was “postponed due to an unavoidable change in schedule”.
Summers revived the economic concept of “secular stagnation” to describe the shift of advanced economies towards low growth. He was one of the first economists to predict that the government stimulus under then-president Joe Biden in response to the Covid-19 pandemic would trigger inflation.
His decision came amid a deepening scandal in Washington over Epstein’s contacts with senior US establishment figures, including President Donald Trump.
A cache of files released last week by members of the US House oversight committee included a document in which Epstein said Trump “spent hours at my house” with a woman later identified as a victim of sex trafficking.
More documents could be published in the coming weeks if Congress votes to compel the justice department to release its Epstein files.
Summers had already faced criticism for his links with Epstein. He previously said he regretted his relationship with the paedophile, who died in jail in 2019. But the new revelations cast light on the personal nature of their contact. Summers has been married since 2005.
The tranche of files released last week included messages in which Summers lamented to Epstein that he was “going nowhere” with a woman he was interested in “except economics mentor” and that she had not wanted to have a drink with him “cuz she was ‘tired’”.
“When I’m reflective I think I’m dodging a bullet . . . Think right thing is to cut off contact. Suspect she will miss it. Problem is I will too,” Summers wrote in a message to Epstein in November 2018.
The following day Summers wrote the woman had been “Smart Assertive and clear Gorgeous” at a conference and concluded: “I’m fucked”.
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and charged with sex trafficking of minors. He had previously served 13 months in a Florida county jail as part of a 2008 plea deal that let him avoid federal charges by pleading guilty to state offences, including procuring a child for prostitution.
The FT last week reported Summers in 2017 asked Epstein, “How is life among the lucrative and louche?” He also told the sex offender he had said at a conference “that half the IQ In the world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 per cent of population”.
Additional reporting by Lauren Fedor in Washington
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