One of the ways Jeffrey Epstein infiltrated America’s elite was by giving important people what they wanted — private plane travel for Bill Clinton, research funding for Harvard professors and donations for the leaders of world-renowned museums. He drew them into his orbit using the gravitational pull of his wealth and rarefied social network. They reciprocated not necessarily because they liked him, but because it was their business to know people like him.
In theory, Kathy Ruemmler — the top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and a White House counsel under President Barack Obama — should have been the last person to fall for Mr. Epstein’s charms. She had prosecuted white-collar criminals, risen to the highest levels of the Justice Department and built a sterling reputation as a defense lawyer in the private sector.
The Epstein files, however, paint a damning picture of their relationship. Among their emails were elliptical messages about “girls” (“careful i will renew an old habit,” he once wrote), sharp criticisms of the lawyers representing Mr. Epstein’s accusers (“Victim’s rights, my ass”) and discordant terms of endearment (“sweetie,” “Uncle Jeffrey”). He gave her gifts, including luxury handbags and a fur coat, and offered her career advice. At one point Mr. Epstein designated her as the backup executor of his will.
Ms. Ruemmler has been criticized by politicians and commentators for consorting with Mr. Epstein, but outside of the media spotlight (and off the record), most white-collar lawyers I know have been unwilling to condemn her. That is not because they are sympathetic to Mr. Epstein or friendly with Ms. Ruemmler, but because doing business with Mr. Epstein, and people like him, was business as usual for the top ranks of the legal profession. It most likely remains so to this day.
I recently sat down with Ms. Ruemmler for her first and only interviews since all of this became public. Years earlier, when I was still practicing law, we’d had a call to discuss opportunities in the public sector, and in March, she contacted me to ask if I’d like to hear her side of the Epstein story. For more than three hours over two interviews, we covered how she came to work with Mr. Epstein despite his questionable past and what she knew, or thought she knew, about the extent of his criminal misconduct.
The unsettling truth that emerges from these conversations and my reporting says less about the content of the emails and much more about the culture of big law firms. She looked past his 2008 conviction — for procuring a minor for prostitution and solicitation of prostitution — in the pursuit of business. Many other prominent criminal defense lawyers and former federal prosecutors would have made the same decision, and that tells you everything you need to know about how unreliable and corroded the legal world has become.
In the summer of 2014, Ms. Ruemmler was at the top of the legal profession.
At 43 years old, she had just stepped down as the White House counsel (“one of my most trusted advisers,” Mr. Obama said) after advising the president on some of his most consequential decisions: to seek to end the filibuster for lower court judges, get congressional approval for a military strike against Syria and accept the legal analysis that paved the way for gay marriage nationwide. Seen as one of the most impressive lawyers of her generation, she was in high demand. Large law firms had grown reliant on former high-ranking government officials to attract business and connect them to prospective clients.
After the White House, she returned to her old firm, Latham & Watkins. Her days were long and hectic. She regularly worked 12 hours a day — when she was handling a trial, it was more like 17 — and spent nearly half of her time traveling for clients. Some days, she might be finalizing a settlement with the Justice Department. On others, she might simply be supervising colleagues doing the day-to-day work.
But her principal responsibility was business development. She had been brought on to generate new work — to burnish the profits that have become standard at the largest law firms — and that required her to stay in regular contact with current and prospective clients.
She was “getting paid what seemed like an extraordinary amount of money” to do this, she told me, after a modest upbringing in a small town in southeastern Washington, a public-school education through college and a career spent working mostly in the public sector in Washington, D.C.
Before Ms. Ruemmler had even started her new job at Latham, she received a phone message from a man she had never met. He wanted to set her up with Bill Gates to oversee legal work for a new investment fund that would provide grants to specified charities over time. Before long, the three of them were eating together at the Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan.
The middleman was Jeffrey Epstein. The moment would change Ms. Ruemmler’s life.
Almost anyone in her position would have taken that lunch. The then-richest man in the world wanted help with an enormous philanthropic endeavor that would require years of specialized legal work. If the project went ahead, Ms. Ruemmler would be responsible for landing a marquee client and generating millions of dollars in business for colleagues who specialized in tax and securities laws.
In their first meetings, you could see the forces that shape elite law firms. This is a world that trades on personal connections — referrals, recommendations and friends vouching for friends and associates. Mr. Epstein told her that Larry Summers, himself fresh off a stint in the Obama White House, as well as a prominent criminal defense attorney, had sent him to her. (Twelve years later, Mr. Summers would leave his job as a Harvard University professor in the fallout from the Epstein files after emails containing derogatory language about women and minorities became public.)
“I have a Google history,” Mr. Epstein told Ms. Ruemmler during one of their first conversations, she told me, “and if you have any questions about that, I’m happy to talk to you about it.”
Ms. Ruemmler said she did look into the case against him, both by reviewing the underlying procedural history and speaking with Mr. Epstein. She was particularly persuaded by a 2008 letter written by one of Mr. Epstein’s lawyers — a former Justice Department prosecutor with extensive experience prosecuting sex crimes who had become a federal appeals court judge. In that letter, the lawyer criticized the involvement of federal prosecutors and insisted that there was no credible evidence that Mr. Epstein knew that any of the women identified in the case were under 18.
From her time in the Obama administration, Mr. Ruemmler also knew federal prosecutors in Miami were aggressive, and she assumed they had looked long and hard at the evidence against Mr. Epstein. They eventually reached a very lenient deal: The government agreed not to file federal charges as long as Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to state charges of solicitation of prostitution and procuring a minor for prostitution.
When prison officials granted him extensive work-release privileges just a few months into his short sentence, it seemed, to Ms. Ruemmler, further proof that the case against him was never that strong. The government clearly thought he was unlikely to reoffend. Even if he was guilty, he had served his time, and she believed he deserved a second chance.
Ms. Ruemmler said Mr. Epstein told her that he had been meeting and socializing over the years with a former federal prosecutor in the Miami office who had overseen the investigation and plea deal — a highly unusual turn of events, to put it mildly, that further suggested to her that the underlying case against Mr. Epstein had been weak.
She never would have worked with him if she had known the true extent of his crimes, she told me. She said she kept up the relationship because of what he could offer: referrals, business, the rarefied professional network. “I would not have been very effective in my job if I took the position that I would not meet with people who had been convicted of crimes or accused of crimes,” she said.
He, of course, got something in return: Whether Ms. Ruemmler knew it or not, her presence in Mr. Epstein’s life supported a facade of legitimacy that may have helped him rehabilitate his reputation among the moneyed elite and evade law enforcement over the next five years. (He once described Ms. Ruemmler to someone as “an arch feminist who is my great defender.”) They continued to correspond until around the time of his second arrest, in 2019.
In finance, the most important conversations happen over the phone; Big Law revolves around email. At Latham, Ms. Ruemmler fired off hundreds of notes a day — to clients, colleagues, consultants. Her priorities changed almost daily based on the firm’s shifting demands.
Read today, many of the emails she sent Mr. Epstein are deeply awkward and unseemly. She maintains that the worst bits have been quoted without context. You would never know that when he talked about renewing “an old habit,” she thought he meant his old habit of referring to adult women as “girls.” Or that luxury gifts were common in those circles (she also received cases of wine from clients and a vintage Chanel necklace from a client’s daughter). Or that many defense lawyers at the time shared her opinion that the lawyers representing Mr. Epstein’s accusers — private attorneys working on contingency fees, as opposed to lawyers from nonprofit legal advocacy groups — were simply out for a big payday.
I believe the explanations that she offered for those emails and for others that have raised eyebrows. She did not duck any of my questions. Her remorse felt genuine, her stunned reaction sincere.
She condemned Mr. Epstein repeatedly and unequivocally, telling me at one point that she was “overwhelmed with anger and sadness” over the harm he had wrought. She had, she told me, been a victim of sexual assault herself. “If I had seen or heard anything to suggest that Epstein was harming women or girls, I would have taken action to stop it,” she insisted.
At times, though, she seemed oddly naïve. She never knew, she told me, how serious and extensive Mr. Epstein’s crimes were until she heard the prosecutors describe the charges against him in court in 2019. She couldn’t understand why so many people assumed she was complicit. (“I don’t know what about my life and my career,” she said, “would lead someone to believe that all of a sudden I need Jeffrey Epstein.”)
She attributed the friendly tone of her emails to the cultural demands of working as a woman in a space heavily dominated by men — both competing lawyers and clients. (As “the only woman in the room oftentimes,” she said, “you have to figure out how to get people to listen to you.”) She was unaware that Mr. Epstein had designated her as a backup executor for his will.
Ms. Ruemmler insisted that people had rushed to judgment to condemn her without considering the professional dynamics that drove her dealings with Mr. Epstein or the information that was available to her. “Hindsight bias has caused many people to assume that given everything we know now, everyone who dealt with Epstein must have known all of that then,” she told me. “That assumption is wrong.”
“What I did not appreciate at the time and now deeply regret,” Ms. Ruemmler continued, “is that Epstein used me, along with many others, to legitimize his standing.”
That Alan Dershowitz and Kenneth Starr were part of his 2008 legal team only seemed like further proof of his relative innocence — surely, they wouldn’t have chosen to work for someone they knew had committed the crimes Mr. Epstein was accused of.
That would prove to be a catastrophic miscalculation.
Ms. Ruemmler left Latham to join Goldman Sachs in 2020. She will leave her current position as Goldman’s general counsel at the end of the month, though she reportedly agreed recently to remain at the company as an adviser at the request of the chief executive, David Solomon. She’ll walk away with $25 million for her work last year and $80 million in stock options. (The Times recently reported that Goldman had at one point hired an online reputation management firm, Terakeet, to promote positive content about Ms. Ruemmler amid the stories about her dealings with Mr. Epstein. I never had any contact with Terakeet.) Soon, she’ll appear before the House Oversight Committee to answer questions about her relationship with Mr. Epstein.
Has anything tangible changed in the fallout from the Epstein files? It has been six months since they began to be released, and we are no closer to identifying other people who may have participated in Mr. Epstein’s crimes. A relatively small number of people have suffered professional consequences: largely academics, businesspeople like Ms. Ruemmler and foreign officials accused of sharing confidences or accepting gifts from Mr. Epstein while in office.
The world of elite law firms remains unchanged. Business is still strong, the biggest firms continue to compete aggressively and the methods for generating business are the same. Ambitious young and midlevel partners need to bring in work to get ahead, and they are still working for it just like Ms. Ruemmler did — socializing with current and prospective clients over drinks, plying newly wealthy college friends over dinner for business and doing whatever they can to leverage their personal and professional relationships for referrals.
Castigating Ms. Ruemmler will not change the incentives that allowed Mr. Epstein to evade prosecution for so long, and it will not fix the deficiencies in federal law enforcement and the American legal system that ensure people like Mr. Epstein will always find a home.
Ankush Khardori is a lawyer and legal analyst. He spent several years as a prosecutor at the Justice Department prosecuting financial fraud and other white-collar crime. Before he joined the federal government, he defended corporate clients against charges of fraud and other crimes.
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