Among the thorny questions they’re asking: Who knew what, when? Did an executive commit a crime or just exhibit bad judgement? And to what standard do we hold leaders in a society that has developed a high tolerance for scandal?
Now, we are starting to get answers—and some corporate heads are starting to roll.
But if Ruemmler and Sulayem have faced professional consequences for their association with Epstein, many others have not. The slow, cautious-to-the-point-of-tepid response of the business world to its leaders’ chummy correspondence with a known sex offender reveals a confounding aspect of the Epstein saga: The documents released so far don’t offer proof that all of his correspondents engaged in criminal behavior. And that grey area can make inaction the most palatable approach in a corporate governance environment in which poor judgement—even exceptionally poor judgement—is not automatically a fireable offense.
There’s public pressure on companies that employ people named in the Epstein files to act. Questions like “why haven’t they been fired?” or “why weren’t they fired sooner?” are being asked online, by customers, and by clients.
But whether bad judgment costs someone their job is not black and white; it often comes down to a cost-benefit analysis on the part of people with hiring and firing authority, says Jill Fisch, a professor of business law at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Carey Law School. “So bad judgment, but weighed against whatever we think the virtues or advantages or strengths of this particular person are.” (Ruemmler, a former counsel to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, was seen as a superstar.)
And there are a few other factors tipping the scales in favor of Epstein’s associates. For one, the number of business elites in Epstein’s network is now so vast that the public outrage and pressure on CEOs and boards to act is spread thin. “It’s kind of an obvious thing for a board to feel like, ‘Gee, lots of top executives, lots of respected people in industry and finance had some sort of connection [to Epstein]. Therefore, we don’t expect them all to be shunned from industry,” Fisch says.
There may also be a desire among decision makers to be more deliberate in defenestrations than during the MeToo era, when corporate cancellations were swift and arguably, in some cases, rash. “There was a time, possibly, when our instinct to cancel people was overly zealous, and this, in part, might be that we don’t want to keep doing that,” Fisch explains.
“There’s sort of mimicking,” he says. “There’s sort of an environment where stuff that previously would have been sanctioned is no longer being sanctioned.”
Whatever the reasons, the business world’s apparent reluctance to take its own swift, decisive action against Epstein’s inner circle risks setting the moral bar so low—that illegal acts are the only disqualifier—that it dissolves what little public trust the sector has left.
“Nobody has a right to be a CEO or a managing partner of a huge law firm; that’s an enormous privilege,” says Archon Fung, professor of citizenship and self-government at the Harvard Kennedy School. “Part of why you’re elevated to that position is people think you have really good judgment, certainly about the business part. So is it appropriate in society to say, well, judgment about character and standards of behavior is an important part of what we demand of these people? So far, in the U.S., the answer seems to be no.”
