An Epstein Honeymoon
By 
One very obvious question arising from the congressional action to try to force the release of the Epstein files is why it didn’t happen during the Biden administration. The most parsimonious explanation is that Merrick Garland is a ninny with a completely misguided idea about what the rule of law requires, and his nomination by Joe Biden was an eminently foreseeable disaster. But a subsidiary reason might be that while ordinary Democratic voters don’t care about the Democratic-aligned elites who might be embarrassed by the disclosure, Garland certainly might.
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.
[…]
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.
The implication of his people that Summers was one of the few people who didn’t notice Epstein’s extremely unsubtle exploitation of teenage girls is further undermined by the fact that he continued to engage in (frequently sexist) correspondence with him after the Julie Brown story that would lead to his imminent arrest came out.
Speaking of the rot in America’s elites, one of the last people standing at Jeff Bezos’s torn down opinion section is upset that Summers is being investigated for asking advice about how to sexually harass his protege in a colloquy with one of the world’s most famous sex criminals:
The Washington Post, everyone!
[image or embed]— brent is Saw Gerrera-pilled (@therealbrent.bsky.social) Nov 19, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Taibbi is correct, in the sense that this is a web of very real scandals reactionary hacks will try to claim are fake through the sheer power of repetitive bare assertion.