Marginal ...

Epstein/Summers Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Rick Friedman/
Corbis via Getty Images and Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images.

No real mystery here but the above picture indirectly shows the respective gazes of Jeffery and Larry to be rather discomforting to say the least. Brilliant but marginal as a "quality" guy, Summers finally lost favor with the elites and it's about time.

Of all the oddities to emerge from Larry Summers’ newly released communications with the late, disgraced sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, perhaps the strangest is his sudden expulsion from elite America. Over the past three days, there has been a rush to cut ties with Summers just about everywhere—the Center for American Progress, the New York Times, the Hamilton Project, the Yale Budget Lab, and the Center for Global Development all announced the termination of their relationships with him. On Wednesday Summers himself resigned from the OpenAI Board of Directors, and on Thursday, Harvard announced that Summers would be removed from teaching duties pending a University investigation.

And yet the connection between Summers and Epstein has long been public knowledge. Summers joined OpenAI in November of 2023, almost four years after the New York Times published a photo of him hanging out with Epstein at the sex trafficker’s Manhattan mansion, and six months after the world learned that Summers had solicited donations from Epstein on behalf of his wife’s poetry foundation. Undeterred, the Times itself hired Summers as a contributor to its Opinion section at the beginning of 2025.

What is unsettling about the Summers-Epstein saga is not who he got in bed with, but who got in bed with him, given what was already known. Prestigious institutions knew exactly who Summers was, and sought him out anyway, for years. There will no doubt be different horrors to come in the Epstein documents, but the latest tranche has more to do with power than sex. It reveals an American elite blinded to outrages occurring in plain view, due to the clubby nature of high society. 

The Nation

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