How To Keep Your Job After An Epstein Scandal: The Goldman Sachs Case Study

If you’ve ever questioned how a figure like Jeffrey Epstein could exist — how he operated for decades, surrounded by some of the nation’s most credentialed and well-connected individuals, with seemingly no one willing to draw a line — well, I have a tale for you.

(Spoiler: it’s because the wealthy and powerful face no genuine repercussions.)

Goldman Sachs General Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler, whose extensive and deeply intertwined relationship with Epstein we’ve been tracking since the document releases began, announced her resignation in February and agreed to testify before Congress. However, it turns out Goldman hired a reputation management firm in an effort to ensure you never encountered that coverage in the first place.

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A New York Times investigation published last month revealed that Goldman Sachs retained Terakeet, a Syracuse-based reputation management firm, as early as 2024 — well before the January 2026 Epstein document dump — specifically to address Ruemmler’s “association risk problem.” According to internal Terakeet documents obtained by the Times, the objective was to inundate Google search results with positive content about Ruemmler until at least 80 percent of the first 30 results were favorable. Terakeet CEO Mac Cummings, who described Ruemmler as a personal friend and predicted she would one day serve on the Supreme Court, told his team: “We’re going to fix this for you.”

But when the Justice Department released 3.5 million Epstein pages in January, Ruemmler’s name appeared in over 10,000 of them. No amount of LinkedIn profile optimization could outrun that. Today, when you search for Kathryn Ruemmler on Google, prominently at the top of the results is her Wikipedia page, which notes in the opening paragraph that she resigned from Goldman Sachs “over her links to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”

Here’s the thing about that February resignation: it turns out it wasn’t exactly a resignation. According to reports, CEO David Solomon, who has privately maintained that he didn’t believe Ruemmler did anything wrong or inappropriate, urged her to stay, and she agreed. Goldman plans to promote Michael Bosworth, a former Latham & Watkins partner, to interim general counsel in July. But Ruemmler will remain as an adviser, with her tenure dependent on the ongoing legal matters she’s handling and until a permanent GC is eventually named. So she gets to keep her job in a different arrangement. The “this is fine!” energy has truly never waned.

Meanwhile, the one senior Goldman figure who apparently had the audacity to tell Solomon his support for Ruemmler was a problem is on his way out. Russell Horwitz, Goldman’s chief of staff, reportedly raised concerns for months about Solomon’s steadfast backing of Ruemmler as successive Epstein document releases kept worsening the situation, according to the Financial Times. Horwitz is leaving his role at the end of June.

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He denied that his departure has anything to do with the Ruemmler situation. Sure, Jan.

He was, according to the FT, one of the few senior figures willing to challenge Solomon on the issue at all. Make of that what you will about the internal culture at one of the world’s most powerful financial institutions, where the person flagging a genuine reputational catastrophe is the one who ends up leaving.

Not everyone is willing to let this slide quietly. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, ranking members of the Senate Banking Committee and the House Oversight subcommittee on health care and financial services, respectively, sent a letter to Solomon this week demanding answers about Goldman’s decision to retain Ruemmler. They want to know what the bank knew about her Epstein relationship, what due diligence it conducted after the DOJ document releases, and why Solomon decided the appropriate move was to urge her to stay. They’ve given Goldman until June 26 to respond.

Goldman, for its part, declined to comment. Which is, at this point, their entire brand.

This is a story where powerful institutions treat accountability as a PR problem to be managed rather than a reckoning to be had, and the person who called a convicted sex offender “Uncle Jeffrey” still has a corner office at one of the most powerful banks in the world.

Kathryn Rubino is a Senior Editor at Above the Law, host of The Jabot podcast, and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. AtL tipsters are the best, so please connect with her. Feel free to email her with any tips, questions, or comments and follow her on Twitter @Kathryn1 or Bluesky @Kathryn1

Topics:

DealBreaker

Finance

Finance Docket

Goldman Sachs

In-House Counsel

Jeffrey Epstein

Kathryn Ruemmler

Michael Bosworth