Goldman’s Most Senior Lawyer Resigns as Epstein Fallout Claims Another Career

QUICK ANSWER What’s happening? Kathy Ruemmler, Goldman Sachs’ general counsel and former White House counsel to Barack Obama, is resigning effective 30 June 2026 after DOJ documents revealed extensive communications with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein between 2014 and 2019. Emails show she called Epstein “Uncle Jeffrey,” received luxury gifts from him, and was one of three people he called after his 2019 arrest. She is the second major corporate departure in a week, after Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp stepped down over similar revelations. Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon stood by Ruemmler for two years. The Epstein files made that position untenable — and the fallout from Wall Street to Westminster is far from over.

Kathy Ruemmler, the chief legal officer and general counsel of Goldman Sachs, announced her resignation on Thursday night after a cascade of Department of Justice document releases exposed the depth of her personal relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. She will leave the bank on 30 June 2026, ending a tenure that began in 2020 and that Goldman’s leadership had repeatedly defended even as the evidence against her mounted.

“I made the determination that the media attention on me, relating to my prior work as a defence attorney, was becoming a distraction,” Ruemmler said in a statement. CEO David Solomon said she “will be missed,” calling her “an extraordinary general counsel.”

The language of regret and professional courtesy cannot disguise what the documents show.

From White House Counsel to ‘Uncle Jeffrey’

Ruemmler served as White House counsel to President Barack Obama before moving into private practice in 2014. It was during this period — after Epstein had already pleaded guilty in 2008 to state charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor and was a registered sex offender — that the relationship intensified.

Emails released by the DOJ reveal that Ruemmler held extensive discussions with Epstein between 2014 and 2019. She described him as an “older brother” in correspondence. In one 2018 email, after receiving luxury gifts including designer handbags and a fur coat, she wrote: “So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!”

The gifts alone raise questions under Goldman Sachs’ own code of conduct, which requires employees to seek preapproval before accepting gifts from clients or business contacts, in part to avoid conflicts of interest and anti-bribery concerns. Ruemmler joined Goldman in 2020 — after her correspondence with Epstein — but the nature of the relationship was well within the period that corporate due diligence would typically cover.

Perhaps most damaging was the revelation that Ruemmler was one of three people Epstein called on 6 July 2019, immediately after his arrest by federal authorities on child sex trafficking charges at a New Jersey airport. That detail, reported by The Wall Street Journal this week, appears to have been the final trigger for her departure.

Solomon’s Long Defence

Goldman Sachs’ handling of the Ruemmler situation has been a case study in corporate crisis management — and its limits. CEO David Solomon stood by his general counsel when her association with Epstein first emerged in 2023. At the time, a Goldman spokesperson said the emails were “private correspondence well before Kathy Ruemmler joined Goldman Sachs” and called her “an exceptional general counsel.”

That position held through the initial wave of disclosures. It held through congressional committee releases in November 2025. It held through escalating media scrutiny and calls for her departure. What it could not survive was the sheer volume and specificity of the DOJ document releases in late January and early February 2026, which painted a picture not of casual acquaintance but of genuine intimacy with a convicted sex offender.

For Goldman — a bank that has spent years rebuilding its reputation and repositioning its investment strategy — the reputational cost of continuing to defend Ruemmler had become unsustainable. The same institution that recently disclosed a $1.1 billion Bitcoin ETF position as part of a forward-looking strategy could not afford to have its top lawyer dominating headlines for the wrong reasons.

A Pattern of Downfalls

Ruemmler’s resignation is not an isolated event. It is the latest and most prominent in a series of high-profile corporate departures triggered by the sweeping Epstein file disclosures.

Last week, Brad Karp stepped down as chairman of Paul Weiss, one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the United States, after emails showed he maintained communications with Epstein until early 2019. In one exchange, Karp reviewed a draft court filing on Epstein’s behalf and commented approvingly on an argument that Epstein’s victims had “lied in wait and sat on their rights for their strategic advantage.” In another, he asked Epstein to help his son get a job on a Woody Allen film. Karp remains at the firm as a partner.

David Ross, the former director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, also resigned from his position at the School of Visual Arts after emails revealed years of correspondence with Epstein. In one email sent while Epstein was serving a 13-month jail sentence, Ross asked: “Are you finished with the special sleep-away camp yet?”

The pattern across all three cases is consistent: years of documented contact with a convicted sex offender, maintained or deepened after his 2008 conviction, characterised as casual or professional when first exposed, then rendered untenable by the accumulation of documentary evidence.

What This Means for Corporate Governance

The Epstein files are testing a question that boardrooms across Europe and the United States are increasingly having to confront: how far does due diligence extend into the personal histories and associations of senior executives?

Goldman Sachs hired Ruemmler in 2020, two years after Epstein’s arrest on federal charges and a year after his death. The bank would have conducted background checks. Yet the depth of the relationship — the gifts, the affectionate language, the phone call after arrest — either was not flagged or was deemed acceptable. Neither outcome reflects well on the process.

For companies navigating an environment where reputational risk can materialise overnight, the Ruemmler case is a warning. The DOJ has released millions of pages of Epstein-related documents, and more names are expected to emerge. The disclosures have already reverberated from Wall Street to Westminster, with political figures, business leaders, and cultural institutions all facing scrutiny.

Ruemmler’s departure will not end Goldman’s exposure to the Epstein fallout. But it removes the most visible liability from the firm’s leadership team — and sends a clear signal that even the most powerful institutions on Wall Street cannot outrun the documentary record when it finally arrives.