Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has resigned from the board of OpenAI. This follows the release by Congress of a large collection of emails between Summers and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The emails contained details about Summers’s personal relationships.
Summers is a former president of Harvard University and currently a professor there. The university will open its own investigation into his connections with Epstein. According to the student newspaper The Harvard Crimson, Summers will also step back from his public commitments.
His resignation occurred one day after both the House and the Senate voted to release the Epstein files. A House panel recently released years of email exchanges between Epstein and Summers. One email showed Summers asking Epstein for advice about pursuing a relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.
The exchanges took place between November 2018 and July 2019. During this time, Summers was married. In the emails, he seemed to acknowledge his position of power over the woman he was mentoring. In a March 2019 email to Epstein, Summers wrote that the woman must be very confused or perhaps wanted to cut him off but valued the professional connection too much to do so.
Epstein, who referred to himself early on as Summers’s “wing man,” told him in a June 2019 text that the woman was doomed to be with him. Later in the messages, Summers wrote that his best chance of having a sexual relationship with his mentee was that she found him invaluable and interesting, and believed she could not have that connection without romance or sex. Throughout June, Epstein urged him to play a 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.