Summarize and humanize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in EnglishSenior members of Terakeet, a reputation management firm, huddled in April 2024 to discuss what they could do for their new and potentially biggest client, Goldman Sachs, and its general counsel. She was suddenly the subject of unwanted publicity for her association with the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.Terakeet’s chief executive and co-founder, Mac Cummings, described the counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, to the others at the meeting as a “friend of mine” and the “executive sponsor” of the Goldman Sachs account, according to an audio recording of the meeting obtained by The New York Times.Mr. Cummings added with some hyperbole that Ms. Ruemmler, a former White House counsel in the Obama administration, was “the most accomplished, brilliant lawyer in the United States, possibly the world,” and that she “probably will be at some point a Supreme Court justice of the United States — she is cool, she is fun, she’s interesting.”There was just one problem, Mr. Cummings said. After leaving the White House, Ms. Ruemmler had entered private practice and met with Mr. Epstein.“She’s done nothing wrong,” Mr. Cummings told his subordinates. “But like the other thousands of people that met him over the course of the last 20 years, her name is on something, her name is in a news article, which isn’t really helpful when you’re trying to be in the C-suite of Goldman Sachs. So that’s probably an area that we’re going to zone in on.”Zone in on Ms. Ruemmler’s troubles they did. Over the next 20 months, according to internal documents and interviews with individuals involved in the work, Terakeet’s team went to remarkable lengths to address what one memo characterized as her “association risk problem.”Specifically, Terakeet created and posted positive online content about Ms. Ruemmler that was aimed at appearing above the mostly negative content about her association with Mr. Epstein. The goal was that at least 80 percent of the first 30 Google search results would be favorable.To pull this off, the firm, based in Syracuse, N.Y., resorted to the furtive, algorithm-placating digital tradecraft that has made it one of the most exclusive and expensive players in the booming world of reputation management firms that combine public relations and technical skills to maintain a preferred narrative online. (Mr. Epstein himself tried to do the same sanitizing of his digital presence, although not with Terakeet, with seemingly similar, unsuccessful results.)Ms. Ruemmler declined to comment for this article, and Mr. Cummings declined to be interviewed on the record. He did, however, issue a statement describing his firm’s work. “Terakeet’s technology is built on a simple mandate: organizations must tell their own story,” the statement said. “If they do not, third-party bias combined with generative AI will shape it for them.”Over the years, his company’s client roster has included MetLife, JP Morgan Chase, Oracle, Target, Walmart, Disney and Bain Capital.Many of these were primarily “growth” clients who used Terakeet’s optimization expertise to fortify their brand. Others were dogged by controversy and fell into the “reputation” client category. Most wished to build and protect their brands at the same time. One prospective client, The New York Times, entered into discussions with Terakeet last year about how the firm could help combat online attacks aimed at Times employees. The Times ultimately decided not to enlist its services.Terakeet occasionally works free of charge for causes such as the American LGBTQ+ Museum in New York, but on average most clients can expect to be billed in the range of $5 to $10 million annually, according to people familiar with the company. The fees are considerably more than what other reputation management firms charge.“We charge high fees, but nothing like that,” said Sam Michelson, the chief executive of Five Blocks, a New York firm that has competed with Terakeet for clients in the past.In its early years, Terakeet focused on providing search engine optimization services to drive online traffic to a client’s website, including in 2007, when it assisted in digital fund-raising for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. The firm did similar work for the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns of Barack Obama. In 2016, according to federal disclosures, Mrs. Clinton’s second presidential campaign paid the firm $10,000 to perform technology services in battleground states.Terakeet also maintained a small list of clients contending with minor blemishes on an otherwise positive public image, such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which had been embarrassed by a ProPublica story in 2021 detailing how the nonprofit accumulated billions of dollars in a reserve fund while the families of patients faced financial hardship.Ms. Ruemmler presented a far different challenge for Terakeet. The story of how the firm tried and ultimately failed to diminish Mr. Epstein from her public profile represented an all-out effort to mute the immutable. In the end, all Terakeet could do was prove the adage coined by the billionaire Warren Buffett: “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”This account is based on internal Terakeet documents, audio recordings of company meetings and interviews with 20 current and former employees. Since those who work at Terakeet are required to sign nondisclosure agreements, they described their confidential work on the condition of anonymity.Reeling in a New ClientEarly in 2024, Terakeet had lost what had been its biggest client, Rocket Mortgage, and with it more than 25 percent of the firm’s revenue. For that reason Mr. Cummings was excited to have landed Goldman Sachs as a new client.“I think that they’re the biggest label that we have, next to Met Life, on the Fortune 50,” Mr. Cummings said at the April meeting that year, according to the recording. Maintaining the global investment firm’s reputation would likely not constitute a heavy lift, he said. Already, according to Terakeet internal data, 65 percent of the Google search results for Goldman Sachs were favorable, with only 12 percent unfavorable and the rest neutral.Mr. Cummings went on to predict his own centrality in client relations. He said of David M. Solomon, Goldman’s chairman and chief executive, that “I will have his cellphone number, I will golf with him, and he will be our new best friend.” Mr. Cummings, an avid golfer who owns residences Skaneateles, N.Y., and Palm Beach, Fla., has often played a key role not only in wooing clients but in their custodianship, including personally hand-delivering reports to them.Mr. Solomon was “regularly getting dragged in the media,” as one Terakeet executive observed in the meeting. During the Covid lockdowns of 2020, he had played disc jockey at a large concert in the Hamptons under the name DJ D-Sol. That alter ego, the Terakeet internal document said, could result in “reputation fragmentation.”Minimizing Ms. Ruemmler’s association with Mr. Epstein was a more daunting task. At the time, mentions of the deceased sex offender appeared four times among the top 20 Google searches for Ms. Ruemmler. Among those four mentions was a 2023 Wall Street Journal account of how Ms. Ruemmler had “dozens of meetings” with Mr. Epstein and had planned to visit him at his island home in the Caribbean.Mr. Cummings told his team that such accounts were overblown. Still, “it’s crucial to strategically leverage controllable content to enhance Kathy’s online narrative,” as the internal memo put it.The Terakeet team went to work with the familiar tricks of the trade. They set up a personal website and a LinkedIn page for Ms. Ruemmler. They wrote several versions of her profile page and then located likely landing spots for them on websites belonging to the University of Washington, the Salzburg Global Seminar and other institutions. They developed a “tracking and monitoring” strategy to survey the shifting landscape 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 each of the firm’s executives. Asked about Terakeet’s intention of publishing numerous differing profiles of Ms. Ruemmler on the internet, the firm’s communications director, Tony Fratto, said in an interview, “My team manages the bios. We just wouldn’t tolerate multiple bios.”While the investment firm spent much of 2024 and 2025 pumping the brakes on Terakeet’s efforts to buttress Ms. Ruemmler’s reputation, some members of Mr. Cummings’s team said they began to have doubts about his claim that his friend had done nothing wrong.One member of the team concluded after going through the research that Ms. Ruemmler’s association with Mr. Epstein had been greater than what had originally been suggested and quit Terakeet altogether.$6 Million From the U.A.E.Terakeet’s expertise in fixing reputations like that of Ms. Ruemmler had been years in the making.One lucrative account for Terakeet, according to four former employees, has been the United Arab Emirates and its ambassador to Washington, Yousef al-Otaiba. Much of Terakeet’s work, which according to Foreign Agents Registration Act records began in July 2019 and continues to this day, focuses on optimizing Google searches in an effort to promote tourism in the U.A.E.But Mr. al-Otaiba, a well-known figure in Washington social circles, was concerned in 2017 about a story published in The Intercept that reported he once had ties to sex workers and traffickers. (Mr. al-Otaiba declined to comment, beyond confirming that Terakeet has done work for the U.A.E.) A small team at Terakeet set to work to push the damaging story off the first page of Google search results.The account’s manager, Kenneth Schiefer, relocated from Syracuse to Washington for more than a year to work in person with the ambassador at the U.A.E. embassy without leaving a digital trail of emails and text messages between the two of them.Terakeet’s team first established a personal web page for Mr. al-Otaiba. The firm then used an anonymous editor handle called VentureKit to create a fraudulent, sock puppet account, Quorum816, to add positive information about Mr. al-Otaiba on his Wikipedia page in 2020, according to two individuals with knowledge of the events. (In August 2021, Wikipedia reversed the edits made by Quorum816 and suspended the account as well as VentureKit. )Terakeet’s content writers also wrote several profiles of Mr. al-Otaiba that emphasized his leadership abilities. They took care to avoid duplication, since Google only posts what it deems to be “differentiated content.” The team then supplied the profiles to institutions with which the ambassador had affiliations — including the Milken Institute, the Special Olympics and Harvard’s Kennedy School — as well as to a digital directory called The Marque, which charges up to four thousand dollars a year to post an individual’s profile page.The profiles contained links to favorable U.A.E.-related blogs written by Terakeet staffers, with the effect of giving the profiles added authority and pushing them up the Google search pipeline.For these efforts, the United Arab Emirates paid Terakeet more than $6 million from 2020 through 2022. By 2023, the mission had been accomplished. The Intercept story had sunk to page 2 in the Google search results. Today for most users, it languishes on page 5.Another client of Terakeet has been Robert F. Smith, the chief executive of Vista Equity Partners, a global investment firm. Last year Mr. Smith was listed by Forbes as the third richest Black individual in America, with a net worth of $10 billion. In 2019, he stunned some 400 graduates of Morehouse College when he pledged in a commencement address to pay off all their student loans. He then did exactly that.But his reputation was marred by a single act of malfeasance. In 2020, he signed a non-prosecution agreement with the Department of Justice acknowledging that he had “engaged in an illegal scheme to conceal income and evade taxes” from 2000 to 2015. (Through a spokesman, Mr. Smith declined to comment.)Part of Terakeet’s assignment, according to three people with knowledge of the events, was to push this chapter of Mr. Smith’s life as far down the Google search list as possible. First, the firm took control of Mr. Smith’s personal and corporate websites as well as his social media accounts and maximized the favorable content in them. Terakeet then set up a separate personal website for Mr. Smith devoted to his philanthropic work.They also wrote up and posted different leadership profiles wherever Mr. Smith had an affiliation or had made a donation: StudentFreedomInitiative.org, TheHistoryMakers.org, WEForum.org, PointsOfLight.org, CarnegieHall.org and the sites of several universities. Though Terakeet could not erase a 2020 story in Forbes about Mr. Smith being under investigation for tax crimes, it used optimization techniques to cause other Forbes stories emphasizing Mr. Smith’s wealth to appear above the more negative Forbes article in Google searches.Terakeet’s efforts paid off. By 2023, a Google search for “Robert F. Smith” did not yield prominent mention of Mr. Smith’s tax fraud within the first 100 results. For the average user, the same search result holds true today.‘We’re Going to Fix This for You’Terakeet’s grip on Ms. Ruemmler’s reputation began to slip last November, when the House Oversight Committee made public several thousand documents it had obtained from the estate of Mr. Epstein. The tranche included emails from Ms. Ruemmler referring to the convicted sex offender as “sweetie” and “Uncle Jeffrey.”“We are not defending Jeffrey Epstein, full stop,” Mr. Cummings told the Terakeet team a few days after the documents were disclosed, according to a person who was present at the meeting. Though Goldman Sachs continued to stand by its general counsel, members of the team assigned to the account at Terakeet said they began to wonder if more trouble was coming.They did not have to wait long. On the afternoon of Friday, Jan. 30, the Justice Department released 3.5 million pages pertaining to Mr. Epstein. Ms. Ruemmler’s name appeared in over 10,000 of them. In some of the exchanges, she discussed traveling to France with Mr. Epstein, expressed appreciation for the lavish gifts he had bought her and offered him legal advice.Shortly afterward, Mr. Cummings gathered shaken Terakeet team members who had worked on Ms. Ruemmler’s account. He vowed to keep up the fight.“I told Kathy, ‘We’re going to fix this for you,’” he said, according to someone with knowledge of the meeting.Rather than wait for this to happen, Ms. Ruemmler announced on Feb. 12 that she would be resigning from Goldman Sachs. Her departure date will be sometime in June.In the meantime, she continues to be covered by Goldman Sach’s account with Terakeet, and the reputation management firm continues to track and survey what Google says about her.Today when you search for Ms. Ruemmler, the first entry is her Wikipedia page. Its first paragraph states that she resigned from Goldman Sachs “over her links to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”Hassan Ugail, a professor at the University of Bradford in Britain who specializes in facial recognition, confirmed that the image included in the Justice Department’s Epstein files depicts Ms. Ruemmler.
