How a Secretive Firm Tried (and Failed) to Fix an Epstein Friend’s Tattered Image

[Unredacted]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/17/us/p ... =url-share

Senior members of Terakeet, a reputation management firm, huddled in April 2024 to discuss what they could do for their new and potentially biggest client, Goldman Sachs, and its general counsel. She was suddenly the subject of unwanted publicity for her association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Terakeet’s chief executive and co-founder, Mac Cummings, described the counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to the others at the meeting as a “friend of mine” and the “executive sponsor” of the Goldman Sachs account, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Cummings added with some hyperbole that Ms. Ruemmler, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration, was “the most accomplished, brilliant lawyer in the United States, possibly the world,” and that she “probably will be at some point a Supreme Court justice of the United States — she is cool, she is fun, she’s interesting.”

There was just one problem, Mr. Cummings said. After leaving the White House, Ms. Ruemmler had entered private practice and met with Mr. Epstein.

“She’s done nothing wrong,” Mr. Cummings told his subordinates. “But like the other thousands of people that met him over the course of the last 20 years, her name is on something, her name is in a news article, which isn’t really helpful when you’re trying to be in the C-suite of Goldman Sachs. So that’s probably an area that we’re going to zone in on.”