Senior members of Terakeet, a fame administration agency, huddled in April 2024 to debate what they might do for his or her new and probably greatest consumer, Goldman Sachs, and its common counsel. She was abruptly the topic of undesirable publicity for her affiliation with the intercourse trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Terakeet’s chief govt and co-founder, Mac Cummings, described the counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to the others on the assembly as a “good friend of mine” and the “govt sponsor” of the Goldman Sachs account, in keeping with an audio recording of the assembly obtained by The New York Occasions.
Mr. Cummings added with some hyperbole that Ms. Ruemmler, a former White Home counsel within the Obama administration, was “essentially the most achieved, good lawyer in the US, presumably the world,” and that she “in all probability will probably be sooner or later a Supreme Court docket justice of the US — she is cool, she is enjoyable, she’s fascinating.”
There was only one drawback, Mr. Cummings mentioned. After leaving the White Home, Ms. Ruemmler had entered non-public apply and met with Mr. Epstein.
“She’s completed nothing mistaken,” Mr. Cummings instructed his subordinates. “However like the opposite 1000’s of those that met him over the course of the final 20 years, her identify is on one thing, her identify is in a information article, which isn’t actually useful if you’re attempting to be within the C-suite of Goldman Sachs. In order that’s in all probability an space that we’re going to zone in on.”
Zone in on Ms. Ruemmler’s troubles they did. Over the following 20 months, in keeping with inner paperwork and interviews with people concerned within the work, Terakeet’s workforce went to outstanding lengths to deal with what one memo characterised as her “affiliation danger drawback.”
Particularly, Terakeet created and posted optimistic on-line content material about Ms. Ruemmler that was aimed toward showing above the largely unfavorable content material about her affiliation with Mr. Epstein. The aim was that at the least 80 % of the primary 30 Google search outcomes could be favorable.
To tug this off, the agency, based mostly in Syracuse, N.Y., resorted to the furtive, algorithm-placating digital tradecraft that has made it one of the unique and costly gamers within the booming world of fame administration companies that mix public relations and technical abilities to take care of a most popular narrative on-line. (Mr. Epstein himself tried to do the similar sanitizing of his digital presence, though not with Terakeet, with seemingly comparable, unsuccessful outcomes.)
Ms. Reummler declined to remark for this text, and Mr. Cummings declined to be interviewed on the report. He did, nonetheless, problem an announcement describing his agency’s work. “Terakeet’s know-how is constructed on a easy mandate: organizations should inform their very own story,” the assertion mentioned. “If they don’t, third-party bias mixed with generative AI will form it for them.”
Over time, his firm’s consumer roster has included MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Goal, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital.
Many of those had been primarily “progress” purchasers who used Terakeet’s optimization experience to fortify their model. Others had been dogged by controversy and fell into the “fame” consumer class. Most wished to construct and shield their manufacturers on the similar time. One potential consumer, The New York Occasions, entered into discussions with Terakeet final yr about how the agency might assist fight on-line assaults aimed toward Occasions staff. The Occasions in the end determined to not enlist its companies.
Terakeet sometimes works freed from cost for causes such because the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York, however on common most purchasers can count on to be billed within the vary of $5 to $10 million yearly, in keeping with folks accustomed to the corporate. The charges are significantly greater than what different fame administration companies cost.
“We cost excessive charges, however nothing like that,” mentioned Sam Michelson, the chief govt of 5 Blocks, a New York agency that has competed with Terakeet for purchasers previously.
In its early years, Terakeet centered on offering search engine marketing companies to drive on-line visitors to a consumer’s web site, together with in 2007, when it assisted in digital fund-raising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential marketing campaign. The agency did comparable work for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama. In 2016, in keeping with federal disclosures, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential marketing campaign paid the agency $10,000 to carry out know-how companies in battleground states.
Terakeet additionally maintained a small listing of purchasers contending with minor blemishes on an in any other case optimistic public picture, reminiscent of St. Jude Kids’s Analysis Hospital, which had been embarrassed by a ProPublica story in 2021 detailing how the nonprofit gathered billions of {dollars} in a reserve fund whereas the households of sufferers confronted monetary hardship.
Ms. Ruemmler introduced a far totally different problem for Terakeet. The story of how the agency tried and in the end didn’t diminish Mr. Epstein from her public profile represented an all-out effort to mute the immutable. Ultimately, all Terakeet might do was show the adage coined by the billionaire Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to construct a fame and 5 minutes to destroy it.”
This account relies on inner Terakeet paperwork, audio recordings of firm conferences and interviews with 20 present and former staff. Since those that work at Terakeet are required to signal nondisclosure agreements, they described their confidential work on the situation of anonymity.
Reeling in a New Shopper
Early in 2024, Terakeet had misplaced what had been its greatest consumer, Rocket Mortgage, and with it greater than 25 % of the agency’s income. For that motive Mr. Cummings was excited to have landed Goldman Sachs as a brand new consumer.
“I feel that they’re the most important label that we have now, subsequent to Met Life, on the Fortune 50,” Mr. Cummings mentioned on the April assembly that yr, in keeping with the recording. Sustaining the worldwide funding agency’s fame would seemingly not represent a heavy elevate, he mentioned. Already, in keeping with Terakeet inner knowledge, 65 % of the Google search outcomes for Goldman Sachs had been favorable, with solely 12 % unfavorable and the remaining impartial.
Mr. Cummings went on to foretell his personal centrality in consumer relations. He mentioned of David M. Solomon, Goldman’s chairman and chief govt, that “I’ll have his cellphone quantity, I’ll golf with him, and he will probably be our new greatest good friend.” Mr. Cummings, an avid golfer who owns residences Skaneateles, N.Y., and Palm Seashore, Fla., has usually performed a key function not solely in wooing purchasers however of their custodianship, together with personally hand-delivering reviews to them.
Mr. Solomon was “repeatedly getting dragged within the media,” as one Terakeet govt noticed within the assembly. Throughout the Covid lockdowns of 2020, he had performed disc jockey at a big live performance within the Hamptons beneath the identify DJ D-Sol. That alter ego, the Terakeet inner doc mentioned, might end in “fame fragmentation.”
Minimizing Ms. Ruemmler’s affiliation with Mr. Epstein was a extra daunting activity. On the time, mentions of the deceased intercourse offender appeared 4 instances among the many high 20 Google searches for Ms. Ruemmler. Amongst these 4 mentions was a 2023 Wall Avenue Journal account of how Ms. Ruemmler had “dozens of conferences” with Mr. Epstein and had deliberate to go to him at his island residence within the Caribbean.
Mr. Cummings instructed his workforce that such accounts had been overblown. Nonetheless, “it’s essential to strategically leverage controllable content material to reinforce Kathy’s on-line narrative,” as the interior memo put it.
The Terakeet workforce went to work with the acquainted methods of the commerce. They arrange a private web site and a LinkedIn web page for Ms. Ruemmler. They wrote a number of variations of her profile web page after which situated seemingly touchdown spots for them on web sites belonging to the College of Washington, the Salzburg International Seminar and different establishments. They developed a “monitoring and monitoring” technique to survey the shifting panorama of Google searches of Ms. Ruemmler.
Such efforts met with resistance from Goldman Sachs, whose traditions included an insistence on a single boilerplate biography for every of the agency’s executives. Requested about Terakeet’s intention of publishing quite a few differing profiles of Ms. Ruemmler on the web, the agency’s communications director, Tony Fratto, mentioned in an interview, “My workforce manages the bios. We simply wouldn’t tolerate a number of bios.”
Whereas the funding agency spent a lot of 2024 and 2025 pumping the brakes on Terakeet’s efforts to buttress Ms. Ruemmler’s fame, some members of Mr. Cummings’s workforce mentioned they started to have doubts about his declare that his good friend had completed nothing mistaken.
One member of the workforce concluded after going by the analysis that Ms. Ruemmler’s affiliation with Mr. Epstein had been higher than what had initially been prompt and stop Terakeet altogether.
$6 Million From the U.A.E.
Terakeet’s experience in fixing reputations like that of Ms. Ruemmler had been years within the making.
One profitable account for Terakeet, in keeping with 4 former staff, has been the United Arab Emirates and its ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba. A lot of Terakeet’s work, which in keeping with International Brokers Registration Act data started in July 2019 and continues to at the present time, focuses on optimizing Google searches in an effort to advertise tourism within the U.A.E.
However Mr. al-Otaiba, a well known determine in Washington social circles, was involved in 2017 a couple of story printed in The Intercept that reported he as soon as had ties to intercourse staff and traffickers. (Mr. al-Otaiba declined to remark, past confirming that Terakeet has completed work for the U.A.E.) A small workforce at Terakeet set to work to push the damaging story off the primary web page of Google search outcomes.
The account’s supervisor, Kenneth Schiefer, relocated from Syracuse to Washington for greater than a yr to work in individual with the ambassador on the U.A.E. embassy with out leaving a digital path of emails and textual content messages between the 2 of them.
Terakeet’s workforce first established a private net web page for Mr. al-Otaiba. The agency then used an nameless editor deal with referred to as VentureKit to create a fraudulent, sock puppet account, Quorum816, so as to add optimistic details about Mr. al-Otaiba on his Wikipedia web page in 2020, in keeping with two people with data of the occasions. (In August 2021, Wikipedia reversed the edits made by Quorum816 and suspended the account in addition to VentureKit. )
Terakeet’s content material writers additionally wrote a number of profiles of Mr. al-Otaiba that emphasised his management talents. They took care to keep away from duplication, since Google solely posts what it deems to be “differentiated content material.” The workforce then provided the profiles to establishments with which the ambassador had affiliations — together with the Milken Institute, the Particular Olympics and Harvard’s Kennedy College — in addition to to a digital listing referred to as The Marque, which prices as much as 4 thousand {dollars} a yr to submit a person’s profile web page.
The profiles contained hyperlinks to favorable U.A.E.-related blogs written by Terakeet staffers, with the impact of giving the profiles added authority and pushing them up the Google search pipeline.
For these efforts, the United Arab Emirates paid Terakeet greater than $6 million from 2020 by 2022. By 2023, the mission had been achieved. The Intercept story had sunk to web page 2 within the Google search outcomes. At the moment for many customers, it languishes on web page 5.
One other consumer of Terakeet has been Robert F. Smith, the chief govt of Vista Fairness Companions, a world funding agency. Final yr Mr. Smith was listed by Forbes because the third richest Black particular person in America, with a internet price of $10 billion. In 2019, he shocked some 400 graduates of Morehouse School when he pledged in a graduation handle to repay all their scholar loans. He then did precisely that.
However his fame was marred by a single act of malfeasance. In 2020, he signed a non-prosecution settlement with the Division of Justice acknowledging that he had “engaged in an unlawful scheme to hide earnings and evade taxes” from 2000 to 2015. (Via a spokesman, Mr. Smith declined to remark.)
A part of Terakeet’s task, in keeping with three folks with data of the occasions, was to push this chapter of Mr. Smith’s life as far down the Google search listing as attainable. First, the agency took management of Mr. Smith’s private and company web sites in addition to his social media accounts and maximized the favorable content material in them. Terakeet then arrange a separate private web site for Mr. Smith dedicated to his philanthropic work.
In addition they wrote up and posted totally different management profiles wherever Mr. Smith had an affiliation or had made a donation: StudentFreedomInitiative.org, TheHistoryMakers.org, WEForum.org, PointsOfLight.org, CarnegieHall.org and the websites of a number of universities. Although Terakeet couldn’t erase a 2020 story in Forbes about Mr. Smith being beneath investigation for tax crimes, it used optimization methods to trigger different Forbes tales emphasizing Mr. Smith’s wealth to seem above the extra unfavorable Forbes article in Google searches.
Terakeet’s efforts paid off. By 2023, a Google seek for “Robert F. Smith” didn’t yield outstanding point out of Mr. Smith’s tax fraud inside the first 100 outcomes. For the common person, the identical search end result holds true at the moment.
‘We’re Going to Repair This for You’
Terakeet’s grip on Ms. Ruemmler’s fame started to slide final November, when the Home Oversight Committee made public a number of thousand paperwork it had obtained from the property of Mr. Epstein. The tranche included emails from Ms. Ruemmler referring to the convicted intercourse offender as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.”
“We’re not defending Jeffrey Epstein, full cease,” Mr. Cummings instructed the Terakeet workforce a couple of days after the paperwork had been disclosed, in keeping with an individual who was current on the assembly. Although Goldman Sachs continued to face by its common counsel, members of the workforce assigned to the account at Terakeet mentioned they started to surprise if extra bother was coming.
They didn’t have to attend lengthy. On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 30, the Justice Division launched 3.5 million pages pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Ms. Ruemmler’s identify appeared in over 10,000 of them. In a number of the exchanges, she mentioned touring to France with Mr. Epstein, expressed appreciation for the lavish items he had purchased her and supplied him authorized recommendation.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Cummings gathered shaken Terakeet workforce members who had labored on Ms. Reummler’s account. He vowed to maintain up the combat.
“I instructed Kathy, ‘We’re going to repair this for you,’” he mentioned, in keeping with somebody with data of the assembly.
Somewhat than look ahead to this to occur, Ms. Ruemmler introduced on Feb. 12 that she could be resigning from Goldman Sachs. Her departure date will probably be someday in June.
Within the meantime, she continues to be coated by Goldman Sach’s account with Terakeet, and the fame administration agency continues to trace and survey what Google says about her.
At the moment if you seek for Ms. Ruemmler, the primary entry is her Wikipedia web page. Its first paragraph states that she resigned from Goldman Sachs “over her hyperlinks to youngster intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Hassan Ugail, a professor on the College of Bradford in Britain who makes a speciality of facial recognition, confirmed that the picture included within the Justice Division’s Epstein information depicts Ms. Ruemmler.
