Goldman Sachs’s top lawyer, Kathryn Ruemmler, resigned on Thursday in the wake of the Justice Department’s release of emails and other material that revealed her extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier.
Ms. Ruemmler and representatives for Goldman said for years that she had a strictly professional relationship with Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender. But emails, text messages and photographs released late last month upended that narrative, leading to Ms. Ruemmler’s sudden resignation, which surprised many inside the firm.
Before joining Goldman in 2020, Ms. Ruemmler was a counselor, confidante and friend to Mr. Epstein, the documents showed. She advised him on how to respond to tough questions about his sex crimes, discussed her dating life, advised him on how to avoid unflattering media scrutiny and addressed him as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.”
Mr. Epstein, in turn, provided career advice on her move to Goldman, introduced her to well-known businesspeople and showered her with gifts of spa treatments, high-end travel and Hermes luxury items. In total, Ms. Ruemmler was mentioned in more than 10,000 of the documents released by the Justice Department.
Ms. Ruemmler, in addition to being Goldman’s general counsel since 2021, was a partner and vice chair of its reputational risk committee. She earlier served as White House counsel under President Obama and was a white-collar defense lawyer at Latham & Watkins.
“My responsibility is to put Goldman Sachs’s interests first,” Ms. Ruemmler, 54, said in a statement confirming the resignation.
In a separate statement, Goldman’s chief executive, David M. Solomon, said he respected her decision and described her as “a mentor and friend to many of our people.”
Until her resignation, Ms. Ruemmler had, through representatives, said she engaged in banter and social interactions with the well-connected Mr. Epstein in order to gain introductions to new clients.
The documents illustrated a closer relationship between the two that began in 2014 and was described by Ms. Ruemmler in one email as a “friendship.”
She educated him on how the law differentiates between underage victims of sex crimes and adult prostitutes. “I think the point is that if she was underage, she could not legally consent to engaging in prostitution,” Ms. Ruemmler wrote to Mr. Epstein in 2015.
She offered advice on how to knock down the credibility of one of his accusers, writing in one email that Mr. Epstein’s lawyer could push the woman into a “perjury trap.”
Ms. Ruemmler signed some emails “xoxo” and swapped photos. She joked with Mr. Epstein about the weight of visitors at New Jersey rest stops and speculated about the sexual orientation of a well-known hedge fund billionaire.
And over a series of meetings, she sought his advice on personal and professional matters, (“men aren’t interested in women my age,” one email lamented).
In 2019, while interviewing for the job at Goldman, Ms. Ruemmler told Mr. Epstein that she was wearing gifts from him. “Am totally tricked out by Uncle Jeffrey today!” she wrote.
Goldman Sachs and Ms. Ruemmler have said Mr. Epstein was never her client. But in 2018, she helped him edit a legal document that defended his 2008 agreement to plead guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor.
Ms. Ruemmler exited a week after another elite Wall Street lawyer, Brad Karp, was ousted as chairman of Paul Weiss amid revelations that his relationship with Mr. Epstein was more extensive than previously known. Others in the worlds of art and politics have also lost their jobs.
But for the weeks leading up to her resignation, the top brass at Goldman stood behind Ms. Ruemmler.
At a widely attended partner retreat in Miami’s South Beach last week, the firm’s leadership kept Ms. Ruemmler front and center, showing no sign that her job was in jeopardy, two people familiar with the event said.
And the firm engaged in an aggressive effort to defend her, working with a prominent defamation lawyer, Tom Clare, who has been in contact with news organizations in recent weeks, pushing back on reporters’ descriptions of Ms. Ruemmler’s relationship with Mr. Epstein.
The firm’s defense centered on the fact that her interactions with Mr. Epstein occurred while she was working at Latham and predated her hiring at Goldman.
Many Goldman executives, the people said, were baffled that the bank continued to back Ms. Ruemmler.
Goldman’s support lasted until the moment Thursday afternoon when Ms. Ruemmler offered her resignation directly to Mr. Solomon, two people with knowledge of the matter said.
One person who spoke to Ms. Ruemmler on Thursday said she was worn out by the relentless news coverage of her personal correspondence with Mr. Epstein.
By late afternoon, Mr. Solomon convened a meeting of the bank’s board of directors to inform it of her resignation, a person briefed on the board’s activities said.
He announced her resignation in an all-staff email on Thursday evening, calling her “an extraordinary general counsel.”
Rob Copeland is a finance reporter for The Times, writing about Wall Street and the banking industry.
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