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 largest shopper, Goldman Sachs, and its normal counsel. She was all of a sudden 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 “buddy of mine” and the “govt sponsor” of the Goldman Sachs account, based on 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 “probably the most achieved, good lawyer in america, probably the world,” and that she “most likely will probably be in some unspecified time in the future a Supreme Courtroom justice of america — she is cool, she is enjoyable, she’s attention-grabbing.”
There was only one downside, Mr. Cummings mentioned. After leaving the White Home, Ms. Ruemmler had entered personal observe and met with Mr. Epstein.
“She’s executed nothing unsuitable,” Mr. Cummings instructed his subordinates. “However like the opposite hundreds of people who 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 once you’re attempting to be within the C-suite of Goldman Sachs. In order that’s most likely an space that we’re going to zone in on.”
Zone in on Ms. Ruemmler’s troubles they did. Over the following 20 months, based on inner paperwork and interviews with people concerned within the work, Terakeet’s group went to outstanding lengths to handle what one memo characterised as her “affiliation threat downside.”
Particularly, Terakeet created and posted optimistic on-line content material about Ms. Ruemmler that was aimed toward showing above the principally unfavorable content material about her affiliation with Mr. Epstein. The purpose was that at the least 80 p.c of the primary 30 Google search outcomes could be favorable.
To tug this off, the agency, primarily based in Syracuse, N.Y., resorted to the furtive, algorithm-placating digital tradecraft that has made it probably the most unique and costly gamers within the booming world of fame administration companies that mix public relations and technical expertise to keep up a most popular narrative on-line. (Mr. Epstein himself tried to do the same sanitizing of his digital presence, though not with Terakeet, with seemingly related, unsuccessful outcomes.)
Ms. Ruemmler declined to remark for this text, and Mr. Cummings declined to be interviewed on the document. He did, nevertheless, challenge a press release 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 shopper roster has included MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Goal, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital.
Many of those have been primarily “development” purchasers who used Terakeet’s optimization experience to fortify their model. Others have been dogged by controversy and fell into the “fame” shopper class. Most wished to construct and defend their manufacturers on the identical time. One potential shopper, The New York Occasions, entered into discussions with Terakeet final 12 months about how the agency might assist fight on-line assaults aimed toward Occasions workers. The Occasions in the end determined to not enlist its providers.
Terakeet sometimes works freed from cost for causes such because the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York, however on common most purchasers can anticipate to be billed within the vary of $5 to $10 million yearly, based on individuals acquainted with 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 prior to now.
In its early years, Terakeet centered on offering search engine marketing providers to drive on-line visitors to a shopper’s web site, together with in 2007, when it assisted in digital fund-raising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential marketing campaign. The agency did related work for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama. In 2016, based on federal disclosures, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential marketing campaign paid the agency $10,000 to carry out know-how providers in battleground states.
Terakeet additionally maintained a small checklist of purchasers contending with minor blemishes on an in any other case optimistic public picture, similar to St. Jude Kids’s Analysis Hospital, which had been embarrassed by a ProPublica story in 2021 detailing how the nonprofit accrued billions of {dollars} in a reserve fund whereas the households of sufferers confronted monetary hardship.
Ms. Ruemmler offered a far completely different problem for Terakeet. The story of how the agency tried and in the end did not 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 smash it.”
This account is predicated on inner Terakeet paperwork, audio recordings of firm conferences and interviews with 20 present and former workers. 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 Consumer
Early in 2024, Terakeet had misplaced what had been its largest shopper, Rocket Mortgage, and with it greater than 25 p.c of the agency’s income. For that purpose Mr. Cummings was excited to have landed Goldman Sachs as a brand new shopper.
“I feel that they’re the largest label that we’ve, subsequent to Met Life, on the Fortune 50,” Mr. Cummings mentioned on the April assembly that 12 months, based on the recording. Sustaining the worldwide funding agency’s fame would possible not represent a heavy carry, he mentioned. Already, based on Terakeet inner information, 65 p.c of the Google search outcomes for Goldman Sachs have been favorable, with solely 12 p.c unfavorable and the remaining impartial.
Mr. Cummings went on to foretell his personal centrality in shopper 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 finest buddy.” Mr. Cummings, an avid golfer who owns residences Skaneateles, N.Y., and Palm Seaside, Fla., has typically performed a key position not solely in wooing purchasers however of their custodianship, together with personally hand-delivering stories to them.
Mr. Solomon was “commonly getting dragged within the media,” as one Terakeet govt noticed within the assembly. In the course of the Covid lockdowns of 2020, he had played disc jockey at a big live performance within the Hamptons underneath 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 occasions among the many prime 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 house within the Caribbean.
Mr. Cummings instructed his group that such accounts have been overblown. Nonetheless, “it’s essential to strategically leverage controllable content material to reinforce Kathy’s on-line narrative,” as the inner memo put it.
The Terakeet group went to work with the acquainted tips 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 possible 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 group 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 group mentioned they started to have doubts about his declare that his buddy had executed nothing unsuitable.
One member of the group concluded after going by the analysis that Ms. Ruemmler’s affiliation with Mr. Epstein had been better than what had initially been recommended and give up 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, based on 4 former workers, has been the United Arab Emirates and its ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba. A lot of Terakeet’s work, which based on Overseas Brokers Registration Act information 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 widely known determine in Washington social circles, was involved in 2017 a few 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 executed work for the U.A.E.) A small group 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 12 months 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 group first established a private internet 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, based on 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 skills. They took care to keep away from duplication, since Google solely posts what it deems to be “differentiated content material.” The group 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 fees as much as 4 thousand {dollars} a 12 months to put up 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. Right this moment for many customers, it languishes on web page 5.
One other shopper of Terakeet has been Robert F. Smith, the chief govt of Vista Fairness Companions, a worldwide funding agency. Final 12 months 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 pupil 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 revenue and evade taxes” from 2000 to 2015. (By a spokesman, Mr. Smith declined to remark.)
A part of Terakeet’s project, based on three individuals with data of the occasions, was to push this chapter of Mr. Smith’s life as far down the Google search checklist as potential. 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.
Additionally they wrote up and posted completely 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 underneath investigation for tax crimes, it used optimization strategies 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 throughout the first 100 outcomes. For the common person, the identical search outcome holds true as we speak.
‘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 aren’t defending Jeffrey Epstein, full cease,” Mr. Cummings instructed the Terakeet group a number of days after the paperwork have been disclosed, based on an individual who was current on the assembly. Although Goldman Sachs continued to face by its normal counsel, members of the group assigned to the account at Terakeet mentioned they started to marvel 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 among the exchanges, she mentioned touring to France with Mr. Epstein, expressed appreciation for the lavish presents he had purchased her and provided him authorized recommendation.
Shortly afterward, Mr. Cummings gathered shaken Terakeet group members who had labored on Ms. Ruemmler’s account. He vowed to maintain up the battle.
“I instructed Kathy, ‘We’re going to repair this for you,’” he mentioned, based on somebody with data of the assembly.
Slightly than await 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.
Right this moment once 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 baby 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 recordsdata depicts Ms. Ruemmler.
