Harvard President Asked Epstein for Donation to Wife’s Poetry Project after Sex Offender’s Conviction
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During his tenure as the president of Harvard University, Larry Summers asked Jeffrey Epstein for a donation to his wife’s non-profit, years after the disgraced financier was convicted of soliciting underage prostitutes 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 explained the pair discussed “global economic issues,” but the Journal disclosed that Summers had 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,” Summers wrote 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, which was followed by a series of meetings, ultimately resulted in a donation in the amount of $110,000.
The revelation was included in the second installment of a Wall Street Journal series which has already shed light on Epstein’s intertwinement with now-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 while he was Harvard president, controversial 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 because of the incident. Accusations would continue to rack up 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 who remains controversial for marrying his ex-wife’s adoptive daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, knew Epstein well. He and his wife 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 Allen told the Journal.
Reid Hoffman, a billionaire venture capitalist and LinkedIn co-founder, 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, at the behest of the then director of MIT’s Media Lab, Joi Ito. Hoffman said he wanted to raise funds for the university. “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 stunning 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.
