When You Cheat On Your Information Diet
Lately I’ve become obsessed with optimizing my information diet. What you read, watch, and listen to form who you are. I desire a nutritious mix of things that spark joy, aid my creativity, educate me about the writing industry, with a little mindless content thrown in from time to time (how else will I know what kind of jeans to wear this Spring but for following Kendall Jenner?)
Since leaving the law in 2023, I completely restricted my ingestion of the news. I do not seek it out or subscribe to any news-related newsletters, I don’t listen to news-related podcasts (besides Pivot, very occasionally), and I deleted all my news apps. Reading the news only makes me anxious about end times and writers really need not stay atop of everything in order to do their jobs (what bliss compared to law!)
And then the Epstein files happened. I was already deep in research mode for my novel about two sisters battling over a paper mill fortune, one of whom is a New York City superlawyer. I had spent hours drafting scenes of the lawyer sister in courtrooms arguing an appellate case and later, the probate battle and I had interviewed one of my best friends, a real-life appellate powerhouse, about arguing in federal circuit court and the Supreme Court (I was so lucky she had an argument in the 7th Circuit in Chicago and then made time to play with me afterwards!)
I was immersed in thinking about lady lawyers’ ambition, power, and the emotional cost of both, crafting this fictional, complicated character who loves luxury goods (I promise, she is not autobiographical) and then my phone lit up with texts last Wednesday forwarding an article about Jeffrey Epstein buying an Hermes bag for Kathy Ruemmler (the General Counsel of Goldman Sachs and one of my former colleagues). I am obsessed with many things, but bad ass boss ladies and Hermes bags are in the top five (the novel I wrote about female founders features both!)
Madison Avenue Hermes circa 2013
In case you haven’t followed this, Kathy Ruemmler is a superlawyer who served as Obama’s White House Counsel and co-chaired my former law firm’s white collar crime practice. We worked together in the Latham DC office before she went into the Obama administration and then crossed paths a few times when she returned to Latham afterwards. I didn’t know her well but she always wore amazing shoes. She was always nice to me.
I hadn’t followed the earlier Epstein file releases due to my news blackout and didn’t know she was front page news for her Epstein ties back in 2023 (this timeline helped bring me up to speed). And even though I’d sworn off the news long ago, still I opened the first article about Kathy and the Hermes bag with the naïve confidence of someone who thinks she can eat just one Thin Mint after depriving herself of chocolate.
Reader, I could not skim simply one article.
I clicked another. And another. And then I found myself pulling a hundred articles into OneNote and skimming what felt like a thousand emails from the latest tranche of released files, at first to search for “Hermes” and figure out what kind of bag (was it a Birkin? A Kelly? A special order?), then what boutique did he shop at (Madison Ave.? Wall Street?) and who was his sales associate?? All under the banner of “research” for my novel, but then I got sucked into the dark underbelly of it all.
Some of the emails brought me back to the BigLaw days of working with and for mostly men: the inappropriate emails referring to one’s anatomy; the boundary-pushing clients demanding meetings at their convenience; the complicated power dynamics of trying to stay professional when the client keeps pushing the line. In some of the messages, Kathy seems chummy; in others, she sets boundaries.
She has repeatedly said she regrets every knowing him and if she knew what he was up to, she would have never been associated with him. As a criminal defense attorney, she and every other criminal defense attorney are likely to associate with criminals.
But underneath it all, all I could think about were the many girls and young women who were victimized by a pedophilic sociopath and his circle of high-powered advisors, which sadly (shockingly?) included high-powered lady lawyers.
Around email number 847, and long after I had determined the specific make and model of the Hermes bag: a Jypsiere ordered from the Hermes website which, in 2016, was rather crude—at the time, ”real” Hermes customers only shopped in-person at the boutique(s) with their sales associate(s)). At that point, I realized I wasn’t reading for novel research. I was obsessed and binging on a disturbing record of a name-dropping, sex-trafficking, pedophilic social climber who literally did not understand how to spell-check emails. I had clearly crossed the line from nourishment into compulsion.
The Jypsiere is practical and not a “quota” bag like a Birkin or Kelly
All week, the group chats with my lawyer friends exploded. Not only about Kathy and the lavish gifts (note there aren’t specific ethics rules barring lawyers from accepting presents from clients and non-clients, and she has been clear he was a non-client—that said, despite hinting constantly, all the time, to everyone that would listen, how much I LOVED Hermes, I am pretty sure no client bought ME one), but also other BigLaw partners and politicians and executives who were resigning left and right. The emotional cocktail was… complicated. Shock, sadness, schadenfreude, compassion, disbelief, disgust.
Kathy’s resignation hit the news late night February 13, 2026; she’ll resign in June. I’m sure the fallout will continue (she’s already been called to testify in front of Congress as of the date of this post). And I genuinely don’t know whether I’ll keep reading or cut myself off again. That’s the uncomfortable truth of any diet: the thing you swear off has a way of calling your name. . .but the only one who can take charge of how I nourish my brain is me.
I can delete all the news again.
Or maybe the point isn’t to eliminate information entirely? Maybe it’s to notice when I’ve stopped being informed and started being consumed, and going forward, to choose, extremely deliberately, what I let shape me.
And when I next conduct deep dive research for my novels, set a timer.
