Larry Summers said Monday night that he was “deeply ashamed” about his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, telling CNN that he would pause all public engagements as he works to “rebuild trust and repair relationships” — but the Harvard University professor added that he will continue teaching as some call for the university to sever ties with him.
“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said. “While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, 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.”
New details of Summers’ relationship with Epstein emerged last week when a House committee released emails showing years of personal correspondence between the two men, including Summers making sexist comments and seeking Epstein’s romantic advice.
Summers’ first statement addressing the newly unveiled Epstein correspondence comes on the heels of Sen. Elizabeth Warren calling on Harvard to sever ties with Summers and putting new pressure on the elite university to hold Summers accountable for his close friendship with Epstein.
Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and now the Democratic senior senator from Massachusetts, had said in response to a CNN inquiry that she believes Summers — Harvard’s former president and one of its most prominent faculty members — “cannot be trusted” with students given his past relationship with Epstein.
“For decades, Larry Summers has demonstrated his attraction to serving the wealthy and well-connected, but his willingness to cozy up to a convicted sex offender demonstrates monumentally bad judgment,” Warren told CNN. “If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else.”
Harvard has not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Center for American Progress, the left-leaning think tank where Summers has been a senior fellow, said Monday night after Summers’ statement: “Larry Summers has announced that he is stepping away from public commitments immediately, and this includes ending his fellowship at CAP.”
Summers served as Bill Clinton’s Treasury secretary and Barack Obama’s director of the National Economic Council and has been one of the country’s most influential economic voices for decades. Warren, an economic populist, has clashed with Summers over financial regulations in the past.
But her new call on policymakers and institutions to shun Summers represented an even sharper critique of his character.
Summers resigned as Harvard’s president in 2006 under pressure amid multiple controversies, including his suggestion that men may perform better in the sciences because of genetic differences from women. He currently serves as the Charles W. Eliot University Professor at Harvard.
The House Oversight Committee released tens of thousands of pages of documents on Wednesday that it received from the Epstein estate. Included in the recent trove were numerous exchanges between Summers and Epstein between at least 2013 and 2019. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges in Florida of one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of solicitation of prostitution with a minor.
The messages show the two men frequently bantered about current events, political headlines and high-profile figures in elite orbits — everything from Iran’s nuclear policy to Donald Trump’s first-term decisions in the White House.
At other times, the two men appeared to discuss Summers’ romantic endeavors, with Epstein offering advice.
In November 2018, for example, Summers seemed to forward an email from a woman to solicit Epstein’s advice on when to write back.
“Think no response for a while probably appropriate,” Summers wrote. (He happened to ask in the same email whether Epstein believed Trump was “getting crazier” or was “steady crazy.”)
Epstein wrote back in part: “she’s already beginning to sound needy 🙂 nice.”
In March 2019, the two men exchanged multiple emails over the course of one morning, appearing to debate whether Summers should send a note to a woman of romantic interest. Summers’ continued contact with Epstein during this period was particularly noteworthy because the Miami Herald published just months prior an exhaustive investigative series detailing Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, and exposed what the paper called “the deal of a lifetime” that he negotiated in 2007 and 2008 to avoid federal charges.
Sending a note would be “BAD FORM,” Epstein argued to Summers.
“Why bad form. Supposed to be face to face?” Summers wrote back.
“you care very much for this person. You might want to demonstrate that. a note does the very opposite,” Epstein wrote back, before appearing to compare the situation to Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey.
And in one October 2017 email to Epstein, Summers mused: “I observed that half the IQ In world was possessed by women without mentioning they are more than 51 percent of population.”
Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 4, 2025. – Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Summers’ wife, Elisa New, is a professor emerita of American literature at Harvard. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that Summers had asked Epstein to donate money to his wife’s nonprofit. The school’s student paper, The Harvard Crimson, reported on the outrage among some professors about the emails between Summers and Epstein. Rachel McCleary, a lecturer in the economics department, where Summers still teaches, told The Crimson his relationship with Epstein was not “just one lapse” but rather a “character flaw.”
Trump said after the release of the latest batch of Epstein files, which included numerous comments and discussions about the president, that he is asking his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to investigate Epstein’s ties to high-profile figures and institutions. Among those Trump singled out were Summers, Clinton and JPMorgan Chase.
The Economic Club of New York announced Monday that it postponed an upcoming event featuring Summers, according to an email obtained by CNN.
The virtual event, scheduled for Wednesday, was billed as a discussion about “the future of fiscal and monetary policy,” with Summers and an economics professor from Columbia University. But the club said in an email to registered attendees that there had been an “unavoidable change in schedule,” spurring the postponement.
Asked by CNN if the postponement was influenced by the Epstein revelations, a club spokeswoman reiterated that it was “due to an unavoidable change in schedule.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Marshall Cohen contributed to this report.
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