Even as new Epstein revelations expose finance’s deep ties to abuse, Wall Street’s entrenched power structures and profit-driven culture continue to shield perpetrators and silence survivors.
In 2010, a 28-year-old woman working at the London branch of a Wall Street bank was leaving the office around 10 p.m. when a colleague pushed her against a wall and tried to forcibly kiss her.
“A cab driver saw what was happening and physically pulled him off me,” the woman, who asked not to be named for fear of repercussions, told me. She reported the incident the next day to her manager, who told her she “should dress for the job I want” and not “like a stripper.” The women quit a month later. “I just wanted out,” she said. “I was mortified.”
What is notable about this story is how common it is. Even now, she said, you can speak to almost any woman who has spent time working in finance and she will know someone who has been harassed or assaulted. Often she has her own story.
That culture, and Wall Street’s willingness to perpetuate it, is back in the spotlight after the latest release of emails linked to Jeffrey Epstein, which are reviving scrutiny of his extensive connections across the industry.
Kelly Dermody, an employment lawyer who has represented women on Wall Street for more than 20 years, said there are “too many stories to even know where to begin.” She has worked on “alleged rapes and sexual assaults, all variety of abusive behavior at parties, groping of women in elevators, at work dinners and on trading floors.”
Ann Olivarius, another lawyer who has represented hundreds of victims of sexual harassment and assault over 25 years, puts it bluntly: “Wall Street is a sewer.”
Because incidents are frequently concealed by shame, silence and institutional mechanisms designed to keep complaints private, reliable data on the prevalence of sexual assaults and harassment in finance remains scarce. What evidence does exist, though, is sobering. A survey published in 2018, less than a year after the #MeToo hashtag went viral, found that nearly 60 percent of women in financial services had experienced sexual harassment at work. About 40 percent described it as a “common occurrence.” A 2024 U.K. government report concluded that the sector had made little progress in addressing the persistence of harassment and assault.
Research shows that sexual harassment is more common in industries where top earners are overwhelmingly male and power imbalances are severe. Finance is a prime example of both.
“It is shocking how prevalent sexual harassment and bullying, up to and including serious sexual assault and rape, still are in financial services,” the authors of the U.K. report wrote, “and how poorly firms handle allegations of such behaviors.”
Although Epstein’s network was expansive … finance accounted for the largest share of his connections.
When #MeToo ricocheted across Hollywood, media and politics, many women on Wall Street wondered whether their industry would finally confront its own culture.
The latest trove of Epstein files, which offered something like a map of the disgraced sex offender’s finance connections, revived that question.
Although Epstein’s network was expansive, analysis by The Economist of the top 500 correspondents in the most recent cache found that finance accounted for the largest share of his connections. Among those connections were Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black, whom Epstein helped manage a former partner and IRS questions about gifts to another woman, and former Barclays chief executive officer Jes Staley, who kept in touch with Epstein for years after his 2008 conviction and was later banned in the U.K. for misleading regulators about their relationship.
Prosecutors also reviewed allegations of sexual misconduct against Staley and Black, according to documents recently released by the US Justice Department. Both men, neither of whom was charged, have denied wrongdoing, with Staley calling the claims “slanderous” and Black’s attorney saying there is “absolutely no truth” to the allegations.
Kathy Ruemmler, who recently stepped down as general counsel at Goldman Sachs, was also drawn into the disclosures after the latest tranche of emails showed she had accepted tens of thousands of dollars in gifts from Epstein before joining the investment bank in 2020. Goldman has maintained that Ruemmler never advocated for him legally, and Ruemmler has said she regrets ever knowing Epstein.
The HR Myth
Wall Street today does not look exactly as it did a decade ago. In the years since #MeToo opened the door to a public reckoning over harassment and impunity, firms tightened policies, expanded reporting channels and pledged greater transparency.
Some restrictions on nondisclosure agreements have been introduced in the U.S. and the U.K. Women now lead some of the world’s largest financial institutions—including Citigroup’s Jane Fraser—and female representation in senior roles has inched upwards in some parts of the industry. Harassment is also discussed more openly than it once was. But time and again, the industry has demonstrated a remarkable resistance to accountability.
Shareholder returns and short-term performance metrics often eclipse deeper questions about power, safety and the treatment of women. So far, there is little reason to believe this moment will prove different.
I asked half a dozen women working in finance, along with lawyers, academics and human resources (HR) professionals, why they believe the industry appears immune to sustained repercussions, even in the face of criminal investigations and public disgrace. Theories varied, but several themes surfaced repeatedly. First, despite some progress in restricting their use in cases involving harassment and assault, non-disclosure agreements remain ubiquitous.
Despite moves in the U.S., the U.K. and elsewhere to restrict their use in cases involving harassment and assault, women I spoke to described NDAs as standard practice. In 2024, research conducted at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University found that the language in NDAs was “extremely broad, far-reaching and often unclear and confusing to employees,” and that “companies exploited the overly broad nature of NDAs to coerce employees into settlements and silence while protecting perpetrators.”
One of the few women who has spoken publicly about her experience of Wall Street culture is Jamie Fiore Higgins. Her 2022 book Bully Market, which she published after leaving the industry, documents her 18-year career working in sales trading at Goldman Sachs. She writes about rampant sexism—from being told she was only promoted because of her gender, to being mooed at after pumping breast milk—as well as being physically assaulted.
Goldman at the time said it disagreed with the characterization of its culture and declined to respond to allegations made without names attached. “When I came out and told my story, many people said they wished others would do the same,” Higgins said. “But they just didn’t get it. The setup on Wall Street is structured so that if you ever say anything or speak out, you get grossly punished. And at the end of the day people need a job—they need to get paid.”
A second reason for Wall Street’s impunity is that the industry’s internal power structures still prioritize revenue. In many firms, top earners are not merely employees; they are rainmakers whose departures can materially affect profits and share prices. That reality shapes corporate incentives. And legal departments are still largely designed to protect firm reputation and manage risk rather than assist individual employees who might have been wronged.
One HR executive working in finance, who asked not to be named, put it to me bluntly: “HR won’t help you if you’re in trouble. That’s a myth.”
Low trust in internal reporting mechanisms reinforces silence, she said. Speaking out about misconduct often means being pushed out of the firm—and for many, the cost of quitting a very well-paid industry is simply too high. For some women, the question of whether to quit never even becomes relevant: A first brush with the culture can turn out to be enough to dissuade them from entering the industry in the first place.
One college student I spoke to was applying to investment-banking roles in 2024 when an alumnus working at a firm she hoped to join invited her to dinner. “He pressured me to drink alcohol, even though I was 19,” she said. She felt vulnerable and frightened, especially when he tried to persuade her to take drugs. “But I wasn’t going to tell anyone about how weird it all felt; I wasn’t going to complain,” she said.
Ultimately the experience deterred her from pursuing a job in investment banking altogether. These patterns persist by design.
Melissa Fisher, a cultural anthropologist and the author Wall Street Women, which chronicles the experience of the first generation of women to establish themselves in finance, argues that the industry’s resistance to change is rooted in its foundational norms. Wall Street remains an old boys’ network, she said—a white, male, “homosocial” environment in which loyalty is reinforced through shared rituals and longstanding relationships. These networks make it difficult not only for outsiders to gain entry, she added, but to challenge insiders once they do.
Men have historically maintained dominance, Fisher notes, by grooming younger men to mirror their behaviors and values, ensuring cultural continuity. In such systems, loyalty and revenue generation are rewarded; disruption is not.
Dermody, the employment lawyer, echoes this sentiment. “The financial services industry is slow to change around gender dynamics due to its historic lack of women in any critical mass in leadership, its secretive cultures, the incredible affluence which creates feelings of untouchability for many high earners, and the insular male-segregated world,” she said. “And in sexualizing women, men perform one of the oldest rituals of masculinity for bonding and approval from other men.”
‘A Big If’
None of the women or lawyers I spoke to believe Wall Street’s culture will change anytime soon. Olivarius—who is credited with coining the term “date rape” in the early 1980s—said the industry’s power imbalances and incentive structures are so deeply embedded that only fundamental change would alter its culture.
“Sexual harassment is simply a cost of doing business. It’s priced into risk analysis,” she said. “Abuse is a line item in risk management. The accounting system already prices in the cost of silencing women.”
Dermody said things might shift when upper tiers of financial institutions are “populated with women as well as men.” When that happens, she added, men will “no longer [be] insulated from consequences,” and the women who speak up will be more likely to find themselves supported.
As it stands, research shows that women hold fewer than one-third of senior and C-suite roles in the financial services industry globally. A 2025 UK government report found that the country’s financial industry had made little progress in recruiting more women to top positions. And while female representation on boards across all industries has been steadily rising over the past few decades, research points to progress slowing, stalling and in some cases even reversing.
Legal shifts could hasten progress, Dermody added, if financial firms were required to adopt greater transparency around pay-gap reporting, the number of bias and harassment complaints filed each year, and the enforcement of anti-bias laws.
But the HR executive working in finance said such measures would only work if institutions were genuinely cooperative—“and that’s a big if,” she said.
Higgins is similarly pessimistic. She believes that as long as the large paychecks exist, so will the imbalanced power dynamics and the lawless behavior.
“When you have people in power who have been rewarded over and over again despite their bad behavior, they get conditioned to believe that rules don’t apply to them,” she said. “They develop a deluded view that they are untouchable.”
The woman who left her London bank job 16 years ago after being assaulted while leaving the office still works in financial services. She built a career despite what happened.
When asked whether she expects discourse around the latest Epstein disclosures to produce meaningful change, she doesn’t hesitate: “Why would it?”
On Wall Street, exposure is not the same thing as accountability. Unless the incentives shift, there will be no #MeToo moment, only another scandal absorbed by a system built to withstand it.
