Former Obama counsel, Goldman Sachs lawyer admits to making extraordinarily poor taste joke about Jeffrey Epsteins massages

Kathryn Ruemmler, a former top lawyer at Goldman Sachs and White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, admitted to House lawmakers that she joked with Jeffrey Epstein about his conviction of soliciting a minor for prostitution in a 2016 email exchange. Ruemmler, who resigned from Goldman Sachs earlier this year after her extensive communications with the notorious sex fiend were released by the Justice Department, told the House Oversight Committee the joke – “Best massage ever, but not your kind of massage” –  was made in “extraordinarily poor taste,” according to a transcript of her July 15 testimony released Wednesday. “I certainly knew that he had pled guilty to two prostitution-related offenses and that those — that those involved — that conduct involved sexualized massages,” Ruemmler acknowledged during her grilling before the committee. “So what I was making here was an offhanded joke that, certainly sitting here in 2026, is in extraordinarily poor taste, but it was a joke about his prior criminal history,” she continued. Ruemmler, 55, explained that the “best massage ever” took place at The Peninsula in New York, after Epstein gifted her “a half spa day” at the five-star luxury hotel in Manhattan. “I believe I went on a Saturday morning.And so I wrote back and said, you know, ‘Best massage ever,’ meaning I had a very nice massage at the spa.

And I said ‘but not your kind of a massage.’ Yes.That was a joke to him about the fact that he had engaged in the crime of prostitution where the act, again, as I understood it, was that he had paid women to give him sexualized massages,” Ruemmler testified. Epstein’s one-word response to the former Obama lawyer’s “joke” was: “Shame.” “I wish I never dealt with the guy,” Ruemmler continued.

“ It was a mistake to deal with him.I wish I — certainly wish I’d never emailed with him. “And sitting here, you know, 10 years later, in lig...