Ex-Harvard President Asked Epstein for Donation to Wife’s Poetry Project after Sex Offender’s Conviction

Former Treasury secretary and onetime Harvard University president Larry Summers asked Jeffrey Epstein for a donation to his wife’s non-profit, years after the disgraced financier was convicted of soliciting an underage prostitute and blacklisted by Harvard fundraisers.

Epstein donated millions of dollars to Harvard during Summers’s tenure as the university’s president from 2001 to 2006. After Epstein’s guilty plea in 2008, Harvard decided to reject donations from Epstein.

However, documents show that Summers, who is still a Harvard professor, had more than a dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein from 2013 through 2016, including dinners. A spokeswoman for Summers said the pair discussed “global economic issues.” However, the Wall Street Journal disclosed that Summers also solicited a donation for a public-facing online-poetry project run by his wife, Harvard professor Elisa New.

“I need small scale philanthropy advice. My life will be better if i raise $1m for Lisa,” wrote Summers in an email to Epstein in April 2014, obtained by the Wall Street Journal. “Mostly it will go to make it a pbs series and for teacher training. Ideas?”

The solicitation ultimately resulted in a donation in the amount of $110,000. The spokeswoman for Summers clarified that he never personally received money from Epstein, nor did he solicit a donation for Harvard after Epstein’s conviction.

The revelation was included in the second installment of a Wall Street Journal series which has already shed light on Epstein’s intertwinement with current CIA director William Burns and ex-White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, among others. The Journal has now revealed personal relationships the sex offender had with Summers, director Woody Allen, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

These meetings, like the ones reported Sunday, all occurred after Epstein served jail time in 2008 for a sex crime involving a minor in Florida. Epstein also registered as a sex offender. Accusations would continue to accumulate until he was charged in 2019 with a sex-trafficking conspiracy, dying by suicide in a New York jail cell as he awaited trial.

Woody Allen, the Oscar-winning director, knew Epstein well. He and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, attended dozens of dinners at Epstein’s mansion and the director invited Epstein to film screenings. “Woody never had a business meeting with Epstein and not once spent time with him without Soon-Yi also being present,” a spokeswoman for the couple told the Journal.

Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist and the co-founder of LinkedIn, also knew Epstein. Hoffman invited the sex offender to a 2015 dinner in Palo Alto. He also visited Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, Little St. James, along with Joi Ito, then-director of MIT’s Media Lab. Hoffman said he met with Epstein to raise funds for MIT. “It gnaws at me that, by lending my association, I helped his reputation, and thus delayed justice for his survivors,” Hoffman said in an email to the Journal.

Other names included in the second report from the Journal included former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Norwegian diplomat and Oslo Accords negotiator Terje Rød-Larsen, the billionaire couple Glenn Dubin and Eva Andersson-Dubin, and Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of private-equity firm Apollo Global Management, who had more than 100 meetings scheduled with Epstein from 2013 to 2017.