Jeffrey Epstein Helped Broker a Major Gift for Larry Summers’ Wife. She Said it ‘Changed Everything’ for Her at Harvard

By Deirdre Fernandes and Tricia L. Nadolny 

Globe Staff

November 18, 2025, 8:50 p.m.

In 2014, Elisa New, a prominent Harvard poetry professor and wife of the university’s former president Lawrence Summers, sought a major donation to enable her to expand her academic reach.

She turned to a troubled friend with tentacles deep in the finance and higher education world: Jeffrey Epstein. The convicted sex offender and disgraced financier helped broker a sizable gift from one of his high-profile connections.

The money “changed everything for me” at Harvard, New wrote in a 2015 email to Epstein.

“It really means a lot to me, all financial help aside, Jeffrey, that you are rooting for me and thinking about me,” she signed off.

Long a coveted voice, Larry Summers withdraws from a half-dozen groups amid Epstein ties. Harvard’s not among them.

This major gift — which has not been previously reported — isn’t mentioned in Harvard’s definitive 2020 report on Epstein’s two-decade-long relationship with the university and his role in delivering millions of dollars to faculty and programs.

The omission raises new questions about the thoroughness of that investigation, which Harvard has repeatedly cited when asked about its connections to Epstein. Despite New’s and Summers’ ties to Epstein, which were known when Harvard commissioned the report in 2019, both are mentioned just once. (A separate gift Epstein made directly to a nonprofit New started is mentioned only in a footnote.)

Late Tuesday, in response to questions from the Globe, Harvard announced it would undertake a new review of anyone related to the university who is also mentioned in the recently released Epstein emails.

“The University is conducting a review of information concerning individuals at Harvard included in the newly released Jeffrey Epstein documents to evaluate what actions may be warranted,” Harvard spokesperson Jonathan Swain said.

The 27-page report, completed by two Harvard attorneys and an outside lawyer, highlights several other gifts that are similar to the one Epstein brokered for New.

Following his conviction in Florida in 2008 related to soliciting minors for prostitution, Harvard banned Epstein from donating to the school, but was silent on whether he could broker gifts from others. In a section of the report titled “Epstein’s role in securing support from others,” it identifies two other professors, neither of whom are New, who benefited from Epstein’s financial network after his conviction. Both received gifts from the same person who donated to New’s poetry project: Leon Black, at the time one of the most prominent investors on Wall Street.

The gift to New was described in Epstein emails released by a House committee last week. The documents are peppered with mentions of Harvard, pouring new fuel on the longstanding scandal over Epstein’s relationship with the school.

At the center of that firestorm are Summers, who served as president of the university from 2001 to 2006 and retains the highest faculty title at Harvard, and New, a former professor of American literature at Harvard.

A former US treasury secretary and hugely influential figure in policy circles on economic matters, Summers said Monday that he would step back from public engagements. The announcement followed sharp, widespread criticism over adolescent and off-color emails he exchanged with Epstein.

The men emailed regularly over years. On the day after the Miami Herald in 2018 published the first in a series of investigations that would contribute to Epstein’s ultimate downfall, Summers wrote to Epstein: “U have returned to the press.”

The two then quickly changed subjects to a woman Summers was pursuing. Summers was married to New at the time and remains so.

“Im a pretty good wing man, no?” Epstein asked.

Summers replied that the woman seemed more interested in his professional guidance than his romantic overtures.

“Think for now I’m going nowhere with her except economics mentor,” he wrote

On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a former law professor at the school, called on Harvard to cut ties with Summers. Last week, President Trump urged the Justice Department to investigate Epstein’s ties with prominent Democrats, including Summers, which the agency agreed to do.

In a statement Monday, Summers said he was “deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused.”

“I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” he said.

In response to Globe questions about Harvard’s 2020 report, a spokesperson for Summers said he fully cooperated in an interview for the investigation, but declined to comment further.

New, who remains an emerita professor at Harvard, did not respond to detailed questions from the Globe, including whether she was interviewed by Harvard for its investigation, or how much money Epstein had arranged for her to receive from Black.

She did say that she regretted accepting another gift directly from Epstein and was “deeply sorry for maintaining contact with him.“ She said she made a personal donation in 2019, exceeding the amount Epstein gave her, to an organization that fights sex trafficking.

Summers’ relationship with Epstein has long been known. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2023 that Summers had asked Epstein in 2014 for help raising $1 million for a poetry project that New was developing. But the recently released emails portray a unknown level of chumminess.

The emails also reveal New had a distinct friendship with Epstein, and shows how she cultivated him to further her professional ambitions. In separate emails between 2013 and 2018, she solicited his advice on a grant proposal, coaxed him to woo Woody Allen for her poetry project, and even asked him to weigh in on a new topic she planned to explore.

“Thank you so much, Jeffrey, for your amazing support, without which much of what I’ve managed in the last few years would never have happened,” New wrote to Epstein in December 2017, while she was still at Harvard.

She ended the email, “xxoolisa.”

New is currently director of an educational media studio at Arizona State University.

Epstein was integral in one of New’s signature projects: “Poetry in America,” which grew from a course at Harvard to a show for PBS. He assisted in its development, advised on topics, and connected her with donors and celebrities, emails show. That included the donation he brokered from Black, as well as one Epstein himself made.

The first communication between the two in the recently released emails was sent in late 2013, as New was developing a poetry course.

She contacted Epstein about setting up an interview for the Poetry in America project with Allen, a friend of Epstein’s who had weathered his own scandal in the early 1990s when he married the daughter of his longtime partner. New was hoping to have Allen read the famous William Carlos Williams poem “This Is Just To Say," in which the author apologizes for eating a partner’s plums.

“I would love it if you would come visit Larry and me in Boston with Jeffrey,” New wrote Allen. “We could show you and Soon Yi [Previn, Allen’s wife] around Harvard, eat a big bowl of plums, and talk poetry.”

Epstein acted as a go-between and helped set up the Allen interview. It’s unclear when and where the Allen interview was ultimately conducted.

A few years later, after Allen’s legal team nixed the release of the resulting footage, New again asked Epstein to intervene. Epstein reached out to Previn, who said she was “open in principle.”

But New never got permission to use the footage.

“I’m so sorry about what happened with WA,” New wrote in a November 2018 email to Epstein, referring to Allen by his initials. “I will keep the ‘bootleg’ episode and hope to release someday. It’s so good, and he was so kind to read the poem with me and you were so kind to make it happen.”

In that same email, New urged Epstein to extend an invitation letter to tennis icon Serena Williams to be a featured guest on her poetry show.

The recently released Epstein emails also include a similar invitation New wanted to extend to Beyonce. It is unclear whether Epstein forwarded either invitation to the women.

Beyond Epstein’s celebrity connections, New also sought his input on her academic work. She once asked which scientists she should interview and later, when working on a segment on the environment and poetry, asked what he thought “kids/schools need in this area.”

Often, she emailed him about financial issues.

In her 2014 outreach to Epstein, she said Summers told her that both Epstein and a friend wanted to donate to her work, suggesting a $500,000 gift.

“Hallelujah and thank you a million times, Jeffrey,” she wrote. She also suggested the money would be best directed through Harvard’s EdLabs initiative, especially given that “your friend would like this to be a Harvard gift.”

In a 2015 email, New thanked Epstein for a donation from Black, a private equity investor and Epstein’s longtime friend.

A spokesperson for Black declined to comment. A Harvard graduate, Black had been a long time donor to the school.

Separately, in 2016, Epstein’s foundation also gave $110,000 to a nonprofit New had recently established.

When Harvard did its accounting of Epstein’s connections to the university in 2020, that gift was the only one related to New the university acknowledged, mentioning it in a footnote. The attorneys who wrote the report noted that since that gift wasn’t directed to the university, they had opted against examining the circumstances around the donation.

Summers receive only a glancing mention in the Harvard report. He was president in 2003 when Epstein gave his largest donation to the university: $6.5 million to establish the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics.

Harvard’s report was commissioned in 2019 by then-president Larry Bacow after Epstein’s death.

According to the report, Harvard attorneys interviewed more than 40 people, including senior leaders, faculty and staff in the university’s fund-raising office. They also reviewed more than 250,000 pages of documents.

It is unclear whether the university conducted a review of New’s or Summers’ Harvard email accounts for any references to Epstein.

That 2020 review acknowledged gaps in Harvard’s oversight of gifts and recommended changes, including expanded reviews of potentially controversial gifts and clearer communication about banned donors.

Scott Schneider, a higher education lawyer who has completed numerous investigations for universities, said they can be complex and need specific parameters to avoid “spirals into a million different directions.” He said, however, that were he looking into Epstein’s connections to Harvard, he would have probed anyone with a known relationship with the financier.

“I would have spent a lot of time — especially because she’s an employee as well — with Summers and his wife’s interactions, both directly and indirectly, with Epstein,” he said. “There would have been a lot of digging there.”

Deirdre Fernandes can be reached at deirdre.fernandes@globe.com. Follow her @fernandesglobe. Tricia L. Nadolny can be reached at tricia.nadolny@globe.com or on Signal at TriciaNadolny.07. Follow her on X @TriciaNadolny.