Larry Summers quits teaching at Harvard after Epstein probe

Former US treasury secretary and onetime Harvard president Larry Summers is retiring from his roles at the Ivy League university over its review into his ties with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Harvard said it had accepted Summers' resignation as co-director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government and that he would retire from his other academic and faculty posts.

Last year, Summers expressed "regret" over his links with Epstein, while addressing students in a class he had been teaching at Harvard.

Released emails had indicated that he corresponded with Epstein until the day before the financier's 2019 arrest for the alleged sex trafficking of children.

No Epstein survivor has accused Summers of misconduct, and there is no publicly available evidence indicating that he was involved in any of Epstein's crimes.

Harvard said in a statement that Summers' exit was "in connection with the ongoing review by the University of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein".

Summers wrote in a statement to the Harvard Crimson, the college newspaper, that his decision had been "difficult".

"Free of formal responsibility, as President Emeritus and a retired professor," he added, "I look forward in time to engaging in research, analysis, and commentary on a range of global economic issues."

Summers said last November that he was taking leave while the school investigated his ties to Epstein.

He stepped back shortly after Congress released over 20,000 pages of Epstein files that included emails between the convicted paedophile and Summers.

The messages showed the two communicated up until the day before Epstein's arrest on sex-trafficking charges. A decade earlier, Epstein had pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.

Summers messaged Epstein in November 2018 seemingly asking for romantic advice related to his interest in someone he said viewed him as an "economics mentor".

"Think for now I'm going nowhere with her except economics mentor," Summers wrote in one exchange where Epstein referred to himself as Summers' "wing man".

"Am I thanking her or being sorry re my being married. I think the former," he wrote in another email.

The emails also indicated that Summers and Epstein dined together frequently, with Epstein often trying to connect Summers to prominent global figures.

After those emails were made public, Summers quit the board of OpenAI.