Widower of Wall Street activist Evelyn Davis demands apology from ex-Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein

Evelyn Y.Davis’ widower is demanding an apology from Lloyd Blankfein after the former Goldman Sachs CEO slammed the shareholder activist’s newsletter as “expensive and worthless” in his new memoir.James Patterson, the fourth and final husband of the late Wall Street gadfly, ripped Blankfein for allegedly disrespecting Davis, who spent decades confronting corporate power — including Blankfein himself.“Blankfein made a disrespectful comment about my late wife,” Patterson wrote in an email to The Post.Patterson noted that Blankfein’s book “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs,” released March 3 by Penguin Press, described Davis as a “relentless and ambitious” businesswoman.“As her fourth husband, I agree with that assessment,” Patterson wrote, adding that her persistence was precisely why many executives disliked her.But he drew the line at Blankfein’s dismissal of her long-running newsletter, “Highlights and Lowlights,” which chronicled her encounters in corporate boardrooms and shareholder meetings.“The gadflies I later had to deal with as CEO included rejected job applicants, socialist nuns, and Evelyn Davis, who was relentless, especially if you failed to subscribe to her expensive and worthless newsletter,” Blankfein wrote in the passage at issue.Blankfein declined to comment when reached by The Post.Davis, a Dutch Holocaust survivor and longtime shareholder activist, was a recurring presence at corporate annual meetings, including Goldman’s, for decades.

She died in 2018 at the age of 89.At a 2011 Goldman Sachs annual meeting, she publicly called on Blankfein to step down, accusing the firm of misleading investors during the subprime mortgage meltdown.Goldman paid $550 million to settle related SEC charges the year before.At one meeting, Davis mockingly dubbed Blankfein “Lord Goldmine” as she pressed him to resign.Despite the barbs, the exchanges sometimes veered into strange familiarity, with Davis mixing...