Sen. Elizabeth Warren Urges Harvard to Cut Ties With Summers After Epstein Emails Surface

Updated November 17, 2025, at 2:32 p.m.

Senator Elizabeth A. Warren (D-Mass.) urged Harvard to cut ties with former University President Lawrence H. Summers after newly released emails revealed years of personal correspondence between Summers and convicted sex offender Jeffrey E. Epstein, CNN reported Monday.

Her remarks represent the highest-profile call so far for Harvard to distance itself from Summers, whose position as one of the University’s most influential — and polarizing — figures has endured despite past controversies.

Warren, a former Harvard Law School professor and now Massachusetts’ senior senator, said in a statement to CNN on Monday that Summers’ continued relationship with Epstein showed “monumentally bad judgement” that should bar him from advising policymaking or teaching students.

“If he had so little ability to distance himself from Jeffrey Epstein even after all that was publicly known about Epstein’s sex offenses involving underage girls, then Summers cannot be trusted to advise our nation’s politicians, policymakers, and institutions — or teach a generation of students at Harvard or anywhere else,” Warren said.

The newly disclosed messages, released last week by the House Oversight Committee, detail Summers’ unusually personal relationship with Epstein well after his 2008 conviction, prompting the sharpest challenge to his standing at Harvard since the explosive end to his presidency nearly two decades ago.

Spokespeople for Harvard and Summers did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Warren’s remarks. Summers told The Crimson in a statement last week that he harbored “great regrets” and described his association with Epstein as “a major error of judgement.”

Warren’s comments come less than a day after The Crimson reported that Summers remained in regular contact with Epstein until July 5, 2019 — the day before the disgraced financier was arrested on new federal sex-trafficking charges.

Across seven years of correspondence, Summers communicated with Epstein about politics and personal relationships. In the last months of messages between the two men, Summers repeatedly turned to Epstein for guidance on an intimate relationship with a woman he described as a mentee.

In December 2018, Summers forwarded Epstein, within minutes, an email from a London-based macroeconomist asking for feedback on her work. In response, Epstein replied that she was “already beginning to sound needy :) nice.”

In later messages, Summers appeared to continue to express romantic feelings toward a woman who is apparently the economist, referring to her by the codename “peril” and writing after a presentation she delivered at an academic conference that she was “Smart Assertive and clear Gorgeous.”

By the spring of 2019, the two men were openly joking about the odds of the relationship becoming sexual. In one exchange, Summers asked Epstein whether it was “meaningful” to forecast “my getting horizontal w peril” — their code name for the woman.

Summers has taught at Harvard for over two decades and currently holds Harvard’s highest faculty distinction as a University Professor. This semester, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary is teaching several Harvard courses, including two large undergraduate courses.

Epstein, and his ties to Summers and other figures in the American political elite, have come under intense scrutiny from lawmakers across the aisle since the Wednesday files were released.

On Friday, U.S. President Donald Trump called on the Department of Justice to open an investigation into Epstein’s affiliation with Summers, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and several major financial institutions. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi launched a probe just hours later.

Warren’s remarks also land just days before a closely watched House vote on a bill that would compel the federal government to release all documents it has obtained from the Epstein estate.

Trump — whose name appears hundreds of times in the files released on Wednesday — abruptly reversed course on Sunday and pledged support for the measure. The bill is expected to clear the House, but its fate in the Senate remains uncertain.

Warren and Summers have long had a contentious relationship, dating back to their clashes over financial regulation during the Obama administration, when Warren opposed proposals to nominate Summers to lead the Federal Reserve. In 2022, she hit back at Summers for his comments that the Biden administration was out of touch with Americans and accused Summers of living in a “soundproof bubble.”

​​ —Staff writer Megan L. Blonigen can be reached at megan.blonigen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X at @MeganBlonigen.

—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.