The Epstein Files claimed OpenAI’s first victim: board member Larry Summers

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers resigned from OpenAI’s board of directors days after Congress released a trove of emails with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, which included details of intimate affairs.

Summers is also a former president of Harvard University and a current professor. The university will open its own investigation into Summers’ contacts with Epstein, according to the Harvard Crimson, a student newspaper. The university newspaper also reported that Summers would step back from his public commitments.

His departure comes one day after the House and Senate voted to release the Epstein files. Over the past few days, a House committee released years of email exchanges between Epstein and Summers, including a letter in which Summers asked for advice about pursuing a relationship with a woman he described as an intern.

In interviews that took place between November 2018 and July 2019, Summers – who was married at the time – appeared to acknowledge his position of power over the woman he was mentoring.

“She must be very confused or may want to cut off contact with me but she wants the professional connection so much so she is sticking with it,” Summers wrote in a March 2019 email to Epstein. “She is doomed to be with you,” Epstein, who early in the talks referred to himself as Summers’ “wing man,” said in a June 2019 text message.

Later in the letters, Summers wrote that his “best shot” at getting his student to sleep with him was ostensibly that the woman found him “invaluable and interesting” and that she “couldn’t have him without romance/sex.” Throughout June, Epstein urged him to play the “long game” and keep the woman in a “forced holding pattern.”

Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors.