Kathryn Ruemmler, Barack Obama's former White House counsel and now the top legal officer at Goldman Sachs, received a searing email from the wife of one of Jeffrey Epstein's personal lawyers — then forwarded it directly to the convicted pedophile himself.
The email, sent by former NBC News executive Cheryl Gould on June 13, 2015, confronted Ruemmler over a romantic relationship with Gould's husband, attorney Reid Weingarten, the Daily Mail reported. The message was raw, personal, and devastating. Ruemmler's response was not to the woman she'd wronged. It was to Jeffrey Epstein.
No one has explained why.
Gould — the first female executive producer of NBC Nightly News before stepping down in 2014 — did not mince words. Her email to Ruemmler laid bare a marriage in crisis and a wife demanding accountability.
"Reid has confessed his [secrets] and lies. He has told me that his relationship with you has caused him [misery]. Stay away before you manage to destroy him completely. You have no [dignity] or pride."
Gould described her husband as a man broken by his own choices, someone who had come to her for help escaping the relationship:
"Reid has told me about his addiction to you before and has asked for my help to break it. He finally found the power to do it because of the dep[t]hs of his misery and unwillingness to proceed through life as a dishonorabl[e] man."
Two days later, Gould sent a second message — longer, more measured, but no less pointed. She urged Ruemmler to apologize and described the toll on their family, including a son fighting tears over his mother's pain and his disillusionment with his father.
"I certainly do hope that this time, [you] understand the finality of your 'relationship' with my husband. I hope now you can find true happiness without having a relationship with someone else's husband."
Gould even offered grace, asking Ruemmler to seek forgiveness so she could grant it. She cast the affair not as a story of monsters but of weakness:
"He is a great man with great weakne[s]ses. That doesn't make him a monster and I don't think you are either."
Instead of responding to Gould or letting the matter stay private, Ruemmler forwarded the email to Jeffrey Epstein. In her message to him, she complained that she found it "dispositive" that Weingarten "would permit this message to stand." She expressed surprise that the wife of an attorney Epstein employed would contact her in such a manner.
The reason she sent a deeply personal marital email to a man later charged as a serial predator remains unexplained. The fact that she did tells you something about the relationship. Ruemmler has previously described Epstein as being like an "older brother." The two had seemingly known each other since around the time she left the Obama White House in 2014.
Think about the instinct at work here. A woman in crisis writes to you about the damage an affair has done to her family, her marriage, and her child. Your first move is to forward it to Jeffrey Epstein. Not a therapist. Not a lawyer. Not a friend from law school. Epstein.
Reid Weingarten wasn't just Gould's husband. He was one of Epstein's personal lawyers — and later one of the attorneys who represented Epstein in his 2019 criminal case. Sources say the romantic relationship between Weingarten and Ruemmler was "yearslong," though a source told the Daily Mail it had ended before Gould's emails.
So the former White House counsel to the President of the United States carried on a lengthy affair with one of Epstein's attorneys, maintained a close enough relationship with Epstein to forward intimate personal correspondence to him, and once described the financier as a brother figure. At the time of the emails, Ruemmler was a partner at Latham & Watkins, heading the firm's white-collar crime practice. She has said she regrets having known Epstein and has reiterated that she never legally represented him.
None of that changes the picture these files paint.
Ruemmler now serves as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel at Goldman Sachs — the top female executive at the investment bank. As new Epstein files continue to surface, her position has drawn increasing scrutiny. Rumors emerged that executives were devising a contingency plan for her departure, though Goldman Sachs spokesperson Tony Fratto called those reports "completely untrue" in a statement to the Wall Street Journal.
In a statement to the Daily Mail, Fratto was less expansive:
"We're not going to offer new comments every time someone finds a new email about Kathy's prior work or personal life. All our prior statements about her stand. The team here is focused on our business."
A spokesperson for Ruemmler dismissed the coverage entirely:
"The reporting on this is shameful, gratuitous and misogynistic."
Misogynistic. That's the defense. A woman who served as the president's top lawyer forwarded another woman's anguished plea to a predator — and we're told the real problem is the people reporting it.
Every new document dump from the Epstein files follows the same pattern. The names that surface are never strangers to power. They are White House counsels, Wall Street executives, and partners at white-shoe law firms. They moved in Epstein's orbit not at arm's length but with the ease of people who had his number on speed dial.
The institutional response is also predictable. Spokespeople issue terse denials. PR teams deploy the language of victimhood — "shameful," "gratuitous," "misogynistic" — to reframe accountability as persecution. The strategy is always deflection, never substance. Never a straightforward answer to the straightforward question: Why was Jeffrey Epstein the person you turned to?
Gould's emails, whatever their private pain, painted a picture of a woman trying to hold her family together. She appealed to Ruemmler's conscience, asked for an apology, and offered forgiveness. Ruemmler forwarded the whole thing to Jeffrey Epstein — and complained about it.
That tells you everything about who was in the room and who mattered to them.