Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers resigned from OpenAI’s board days after Congress released a large cache of emails containing details of his intimate relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Mr. Summers is a former president and current professor at Harvard University. The university will launch its own investigation into the relationship between Summers and Epstein, the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, reported. The university newspaper also reported that Summers would withdraw from public commitments.
His resignation came a day after both the House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files. In the past few days, a House committee released years of email correspondence between Mr. Epstein and Mr. Summers, including one in which Mr. Summers asked for advice about pursuing a relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.
In conversations between November 2018 and July 2019, Summers, who was married at the time, appeared to acknowledge his position of power over the women he was coaching.
“I’m sure she’s very confused and maybe even wants to cut ties with me, but I’m holding back because she really wants a professional connection,” Summers wrote in an email to Epstein in March 2019. Epstein, who referred to himself as Summers’ “wingman” early in the conversation, told her in an email in June 2019 that “she is destined to be with you.”
Later in the message, Summers wrote that his “best bet” for getting a mentee to ostensibly sleep with him was for the woman to find him “valuable and interesting” and that “you can’t have that without romance or sex.” Throughout June, Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep women in a “pattern of coercive restraint.”
Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.
