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In the winter of 2005, just after their wedding at Elmwood — the Harvard president’s official residence — Lawrence H. Summers and his wife, Elisa F. New, traded Cambridge’s cold for a warmer escape.
But their honeymoon route brought them to what would, years later, seem a fateful stop: financier Jeffrey E. Epstein’s private island in the Caribbean, a place that would become infamous as the center of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation.
The couple got married on Dec. 11 in Cambridge, celebrating a cozy reception in the Harvard Art Museum. Ten days later, on Dec. 21, they boarded Epstein’s plane in Bedford, Massachusetts, according to publicly available flight logs — bound for Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas, the standard jumping-off point for reaching Epstein’s private island by helicopter.
Those logs also list Ghislaine Maxwell, who was later convicted as Epstein’s partner-in-crime, and Epstein’s longtime pilot, Larry Visoski, as passengers on the same flight.
Steven Goldberg, a spokesperson for Summers, confirmed in a statement to The Crimson that Summers and New spent part of their honeymoon on Epstein’s island during their 2005 trip, which has not been previously reported.
“Mr. Summers and Ms. New spent their honeymoon in St. John and Jamaica in December 2005, which was long before Mr. Epstein was arrested for the first time,” Goldberg wrote. “As part of that trip, they made a brief visit of less than a day to Mr. Epstein’s island.”
The visit came months after authorities in Florida had opened a criminal sexual-battery investigation into Epstein. In March 2005, Palm Beach police began inquiring into allegations from the mother of a 14-year-old girl who said Epstein had molested her daughter at his mansion in Palm Beach. Over the following months, detectives identified additional potential victims and witnesses, and in October 2005, police executed a search warrant on Epstein’s home as part of the expanded investigation.
In that period, Epstein began assembling a legal defense team. He retained several lawyers — including then-Harvard Law School professor Alan M. Dershowitz — in the days immediately preceding Summers’ Dec. 21 flight.
The case first received widespread public attention in July 2006.
The December flight was one of four total trips Summers took aboard Epstein’s planes over several years — and one of three flights during the period when Summers served as president of Harvard. The four flights have been previously reported, and Harvard’s 2020 report on its ties to Epstein noted that several faculty had flown on Epstein’s plane.
While Summers has long acknowledged having known Epstein, the honeymoon visit is a new indication of the closeness of their relationship in the 2000s, including during Summers’ tenure in Massachusetts Hall.
The newly surfaced flight details come as Harvard intensifies its scrutiny of Epstein’s ties to Summers after documents released by House Republicans last Wednesday showed the two men exchanging messages at length for years.
On Wednesday, Summers abruptly stepped away from teaching and announced that he would go on leave from his role as director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government, just one day after Harvard launched a fresh investigation into his interactions with Epstein.
His correspondence with Epstein spanned nearly a decade and ended only on July 5, 2019 — one day before Epstein was arrested and detained on new federal sex-trafficking charges. Epstein died in prison in August 2019.
Summers’ earliest recorded trip on Epstein’s jet predates his Harvard tenure. In September 1998, according to the logs, Summers appeared on a manifest for a trip from Aspen, Colorado, to Washington, D.C., alongside several other passengers, including Emmy Tayler, who worked for Epstein at the time.
Summers took two additional flights on Epstein’s aircraft during his presidency. An April 2004 entry lists Summers traveling from New York to Bedford alongside Sarah Kellen, who was later accused of supporting Epstein’s sex trafficking ring but never charged.
Another flight, in September 2005, shows Summers and Epstein traveling from Bedford to Westchester County, New York, along with individuals identified in the logs as “AM,” Kellen, and Bill Hammond, one of Epstein’s pilots.
New does not appear in the flight logs beyond the one December 2005 trip.
The logs were released by Congress in February as part of a case against Maxwell for her role in recruiting and trafficking underage girls alongside Epstein. She was convicted on five counts, including sex trafficking of a minor.
The hundreds of messages released by Congress last week revealed a strikingly personal relationship between Summers and Epstein, who bantered regularly about women, politics, and Harvard-related initiatives.
In the messages, Summers repeatedly turned to Epstein for advice in his romantic pursuit of a prominent Chinese economist whom they sometimes referred to by the codename “peril.” At one point, the two men joked about modeling the probability that Summers would have sex with the woman.
Summers also wrote in one March 2019 message to Epstein that she could be hesitant to leave him because of his professional influence and connections.
“She must be very confused or maybe wants to cut me off but wants professional connection a lot and so holds to it,” Summers wrote.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.
—Staff writer Cam N. Srivastava can be reached at cam.srivastava@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @camsrivastava.
