Goldman Sachs says its general counsel Kathryn Ruemmler (pictured above) will step down this summer, a major reversal after months of public support from CEO David Solomon and the bank’s leadership amid renewed scrutiny of her ties to Jeffrey Epstein. According to the Wall Street Journal:
Ruemmler had risen to the top ranks of Wall Street and become a key adviser to Goldman Chief Executive David Solomon after a storied legal career. As a prosecutor, she helped try Enron executives. She was picked as White House counsel by former President Barack Obama and was once considered a candidate to be U.S. attorney general.
The Wall Street Journal revealed Ruemmler’s relationship with Epstein in 2023 when it reported she was among the powerful people regularly meeting with him in the years after he pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution.
In the past several months, batches of documents released by Congress and the Justice Department added more detail to the relationship, deepening concerns among some inside the bank about her position. Documents showed that Epstein had listed Ruemmler as a backup executor in a version of his will and called her the night he was arrested in 2019. They also detailed their extensive chatty emails and the luxury gifts he showered on her…
The bank and Solomon had been steadfast in their support for Ruemmler for months, saying they considered her a valuable member of management. The bank denied the Journal’s reporting in January that a top Goldman executive told a few close associates he was formulating a contingency plan in which Ruemmler would leave later this year. Bank spokesman Tony Fratto told the Journal at the time that Goldman’s board had complete confidence in Ruemmler. He later said Epstein had given many people unsolicited gifts.
Since the Epstein document dump from the Justice Department commenced weeks ago, more revelations have come out about the depth of Ruemmler’s relationship to Epstein, which included joking exchanges about him naming his genitals, signing emails to him with “xoxo,” and discussing visits to his island. As the New York Post reported yesterday:
The latest batch of emails show that Ruemmler helped Epstein coordinate a response when ABC News was preparing a segment on “Good Morning America” featuring one of his accusers, Virginia Roberts Giuffre.
Giuffre had alleged that Epstein and his friend Ghislaine Maxwell sexually abused her and trafficked her to other powerful men.
In one email from April 2015, Ruemmler wrote to Epstein that Giuffre’s “fantastical claims are — on their face — not credibl[e].”…
As NLPC recently noted, Solomon defended Ruemmler even as the controversy intensified, a testament to his judgment, which NLPC has called into question before. His defense did not—and ultimately could not—save her job.
A more effective intervention from the Board of Directors to deal with Solomon and his team, just as NLPC has called for, could have saved the company and its shareholders from the reputational damage brought by this scandal.
