Good morning,

Welcome back to The Backstory, your weekend capsule of the best of Puck.

It was yet another fabulous week. Matt Belloni talked about the WBD deal with Ted Sarandos; Bill Cohan assessed Paramount’s potential $16 billion in synergies; Julia Alexander unearthed a Disney blind spot; Dylan Byers got to the bottom of the Colbert controversy; John Ourand presaged Roger Goodell’s next media rights package; Lauren Sherman offered a talmudic reading of the convulsions at J.Crew; Rachel Strugatz ran a market check for a once-scorching beauty brand; Sarah Shapiro scoured the luxury handbag hunger games; Ian Krietzberg documented the government’s war against Dario Amodei and Anthropic; and Marion Maneker previewed the Gund estate art-market windfall.

Meanwhile, Leigh Ann Caldwell peered inside Trump’s $1.4 billion midterm war chest; Julia Ioffe shared the Munich Security Conference scuttlebutt; Peter Hamby gave a semiotics lesson about the modern Democratic Party; and Abby Livingston captured the latest scenes from the rollicking Texas Senate primary clash.

Check out these stories, and others, via the links below. And stick around for the backstory on how it all came together.

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Lauren Sherman shares the latest J.Crew dish and offers the latest Les Wexner–Jeffrey Epstein kremlinology.
and…
Rachel Strugatz wonders if Augustinus Bader missed its ideal exit.
meanwhile…
Sarah Shapiro scours the Whatnot luxury resale market.

Marion Maneker previews the Agnes Gund gusher coming to auction.

Matt Belloni presses Ted Sarandos on the details of Netflix’s WBD deal.
and…
Julia Alexander finds a new paradigm for Disney.

Ian Krietzberg reveals how things got so thorny between Anthropic and the Department of War.

Elizabeth Beller leads a course in Carolyn Bessette Kennedy-ology.
and…
Bianca Bosker reopens the books on Van Gogh’s suicide.

Dylan Byers explains why Anderson Cooper departed Bari Weiss’s house of horrors.

John Ourand presages the networks’ blood sacrifice to Roger Goodell.
and…
Julia Alexander runs the numbers on how the NHL can leverage its Heated Rivalry momentum.

Bill Cohan sleuths the contours of Paramount Skydance’s best and final offer.

Leigh Ann Caldwell inspects the president’s $1.4 billion war chest.
and…
Julia Ioffe gathers all the congressional dish from Munich.
and…
Abby Livingston wades into Texas Senate primary season.
and…
Peter Hamby uncovers the Dems’ latest rhetorical flourish.

Dylan and Julia chew over the latest headaches at late-stage CBS on The Grill Room.
and…
NASCAR president Steve O’Donnell previews the organization’s future with Ourand on The Varsity.
and…
Lauren and Harper’s Bazaar executive editor Leah Chernikoff exchange NYFW ruminations on Fashion People.
and…
Elections lawyer Marc Elias tells John Heilemann how Democrats can stop the steal on Impolitic.
and…
Michael Lynton reflects on the Sony hack with Matt on The Town.
and…
Peter and Lauren break down the ever-puzzling Epstein–Wexner relationship on The Powers That Be.

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In their own sick and bizarre manner, the infamous Epstein files have penetrated the culture and produced a cascade of aftershocks in ways both surprising and revealing. Yes, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever have satisfactory answers regarding what the creep’s various well-heeled and influential buddies knew about his barely concealed private life—or what they should’ve gleaned from his conniving behavior and e e cummings–style coded messages, or his insatiable thirst to interstitially insert himself into wholly unrelated matters pertaining to their wealth and estates.

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I’m not Leon Black or Les Wexner, but I wouldn’t trust my sensitive T&E matters, such as they are, to a dropout former Dalton math teacher—even if he had a penchant for Harvard quarter-zips and arm-twisted Ace Greenberg and Jimmy Cayne into vouching for him after a short and undistinguished career on Wall Street. It was Greenberg, after all, who coined the term “P.S.D.” during his career atop Bear Stearns: He often recruited outer-borough hustlers who were poor but smart with a deep desire to get rich—the Epstein genotype. Anyway, as the reverberations of the files impact various industries and their denizens, it’s fascinating to see how the cultural consequences of Epstein-adjacency are doled out in inconsistent, yet wholly predictable, ways.

As Matt Belloni perspicaciously noted in The Wasserman Witch Hunt, Casey Wasserman’s decades-old creepy correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell has forced him to begin the sale process for his minority share in the representation and marketing business—all while he holds on to his august Los Angeles ’28 Olympic Games chairmanship. In A Tale of Two Brothers, in Air Mail, Stephen Bates ring-fences the blast radius around Prince Andrew.

In Les Wexner’s Last Stand, Lauren Sherman perused the schmatta mogul and notorious Epstein buddy’s recent deposition to truly understand the nature of their peculiar bond. “Early on,” Lauren wrote, “Wexner explained that Epstein was simply a friend with benefits. ‘Epstein offered me advice here and there while explaining that giving individual financial advice was not his focus and refusing to accept compensation,’ Wexner wrote in a statement prior to his deposition. ‘He said he was assisting me as a favor. Little did I realize that, from the very start, Epstein was conniving to gain my trust. As my financial resources and time demands continued to grow, I formally hired Epstein to manage my personal finances. Because my public company and other duties required my full attention, I provided Epstein with a power of attorney so he could execute transactions quickly, without constantly requiring my signature.’”

Lauren continued: “As someone who wrote a book about Wexner—a shy man who lacked confidence in his body when he was young—this tracked for me. What makes less sense is how Wexner could have worked so intimately with someone for 20 years and known nothing about his illegal activities.” Indeed, like Wasserman, Wexner’s consequences are manageable. He’s long exited his retail businesses, and his name still adorns the medical center at Ohio State, where he served as a trustee for years. The president, I might remind you, has also passed through this document dump relatively unscathed.

And yet the consequences have been more severe for Kathy Ruemmler, the former White House counsel under Obama and current G.C. at Goldman Sachs. Years ago, as a rainmaking lawyer at Latham & Watkins, she had been contacted by Epstein, peddling some business leads. Some panned out, others died on the vine, and Ruemmler managed the relationship from a savvy distance. She seemed to recognize that the guy was a nonlinear weirdo (and then some) who often tried to introduce his contacts and then somehow arbitrage their potential business dealings—a gross but familiar mooching tactic among a certain class. And, yes, the Epstein files documented that she used Epstein to make her clients money and wrote embarrassingly immature thank-you notes after he lavished her with unsolicited gifts. Sadly, too, the files kicked up some embarrassing details about her own intimate life.

Alas, Ruemmler’s name doesn’t adorn a hospital and she’s not going to march in the Opening Ceremony in L.A. in a couple years. And she’s not going to browbeat Pam Bondi into cleaning up her messes for her. Instead, despite the support of her C.E.O. and members of the Goldman board, she recently announced she was leaving the bank. “I have spent my entire career in a world where facts and evidence matter,” she told my partner Bill Cohan in an interview. “It is difficult to deal with a situation where the facts become secondary to an alternative narrative. That is what I was facing.” She continued: “I do not know what people believe the right consequence is for having dealt with Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “But I wish that I had never returned his first call.” If you have time this weekend, I suggest curling up with Kathy Ruemmler Confidential.

Don’t feel too bad for Ruemmler: She made nearly $20 million per year, and she’ll walk away with nearly $40 million in Goldman stock. But it’s still remarkable that the men who hung around Epstein’s orbit have been able to move on with their lives, while a woman who simply tried to use the user got pinched. But perhaps that’s a story as old as time, and certainly something you should expect to read about in Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon

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