WHAT'S IN A KISS
On July 23, Jay Guapõ, a so-called comedian and TikTok influencer, walked up on two adults kissing on a bench in Central Park and pointed his phone at them.
"Get a room," he said. "There's kids around."
The man stood up smiling because he still believed this was a small misunderstanding between one human being and another.
He asked Guapõ to put the phone down.
Guapõ did not put it down. He published the recording to his 3.5 million followers.
Within days, the New York Post put the count near 10 million views across platforms.
The man on the bench was Nathaniel D. Cullerton, 45, a litigation partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz — one of the most selective and richly compensated law firms on earth.
He had spent much of his life becoming difficult to replace, and then he sat on a bench and kissed someone.
The woman was Kelsey Borenzweig, a 29-year-old associate in his department.
THE CONSEQUENCES.
By July 28, the Financial Times reported that Cullerton had been placed on leave pending investigation, and that his planned move to Gibson Dunn — part of a seven-partner defection following star trial lawyer Bill Savitt out the door — had been scrapped.
No investigation had publicly established misconduct. The recording had already supplied the verdict.
Seven partners had planned to leave together. Six could still be lawyers who changed firms. Cullerton had become the man on the bench.
Wachtell's average partner makes roughly $12 million a year. Sources told the New York Post that Cullerton, a junior partner, was likely at $4 million or better, and would have been offered more to join Gibson Dunn.
The figures gave the humiliation a market value.
WHAT WAS THE CRIME?
I watched the video. The recording lasted 39 seconds. Guapõ pans. No children appear in the frame at any point.
Central Park on a summer afternoon surely had children in it somewhere. But in 39 seconds of footage shot by a man who said there were kids around, he never once shows you one.
Two lawyers kissed each other on a bench in a public park. They stood up and objected to being filmed. That was the whole act.
No one alleged that Borenzweig was pressured. No one alleged drugs, coercion, or incapacity.
Both were adults. They wanted to kiss, and so they kissed.
The only person claiming offense was the person profiting from the recording.
A legitimate employment question may exist. A relationship between a partner and an associate can create a conflict, particularly where the partner controls the associate's work.
That question could have been investigated privately. That was not the process used.
Gibson Dunn concluded that Cullerton had become radioactive. Wachtell, already confronting his planned departure, concluded that he had become a problem.
The danger was not what he had done. The danger was that millions of people had seen it.
THE ASSOCIATE
Kelsey Borenzweig, 29, is an associate in Wachtell's Litigation Department — USC, NYU Law, a clerkship, then part of the team that beat Elon Musk's $150 billion suit against OpenAI this spring.
She has a real record. The public knows her because she kissed a man in a park.
As of Friday, her profile remained on the Wachtell website.
It remains unclear whether Borenzweig is under investigation, on leave, or has been formally questioned by the firm.
For the rest of her life, anyone who searches for her may find the bench before the case she helped win.
THE RULE THAT WASN'T THE REASON
Law firms maintain rules concerning relationships between partners and associates. The rationale is apparent.
Partners vote on admission to partnership, and a 45-year-old earning $4 million occupies a position different from that of a 29-year-old six years out of law school.
A partner can help make an associate a partner.
No report, however, has established that Cullerton supervised Borenzweig's reviews, assignments, or advancement.
Firms adopt such rules in part to limit their own exposure in harassment litigation.
But Wachtell did not place Cullerton on leave because Borenzweig complained. It acted after an influencer with 3.5 million followers published the video.
Within five days, two of the most sophisticated law firms in America had made potentially permanent career decisions. They did not first determine what had happened. They counted how many people had seen it.
The rule said she was the person to protect. The outcome ensured she was not.
THE MAN WITH THE PHONE
Guapõ said he was concerned about children. A person actually concerned about children might quietly alert the couple, wait for them to stop, and continue walking.
It would have taken four seconds and left everyone with their dignity. It would also have produced no content.
He makes money by surprising people and showing their surprise to strangers. That is the business.
The children were a pretext. The product was humiliation.
The point was to make someone small in front of a crowd. There has always been a market for that.
THE PROSECUTOR'S HUSBAND
Cullerton has been married since 2016 to Moira Kim Penza, the former assistant United States attorney who first-chaired the prosecution of Keith Raniere.
Raniere, the leader of NXIVM, received 120 years for racketeering, sex trafficking and forced-labor conspiracy.
I broke the DOS branding story in 2017. Penza took it to a jury and won.
Penza built her national reputation on a distinction the law is expected to make precisely: the distinction between consent and coercion.
Raniere maintained that everything had been consensual.
The prosecution showed that Raniere collected blackmail material, restricted food, imposed secrecy, and had his initials burned into women's bodies.
Under those conditions, the word "consent" concealed coercion. A person may say yes because she is free, or because she is afraid of what will happen if she says no.
Now Penza's husband's career has been detonated over conduct at the opposite end of that spectrum — unambiguously consensual and entirely legal.
No blackmail. No hunger. No fear.
Just two people kissing because both wished to kiss.
Penza is accused of nothing. She has not been a prosecutor since 2019 and now works as a defense partner at Wilkinson Stekloff.
WHAT A REPUTATION IS WORTH
For elite lawyers, reputation is capital. Lawyers like Cullerton or Penza do not sell shoes or steel. They sell the belief that they are the ones to call when everything is at stake.
Raniere's conviction was a career-making result for Penza. So was the OpenAI defense against Elon Musk's $150 billion suit, which both Cullerton and Borenzweig worked on.
Ten million views of a kiss produced the opposite result.
Then came pickup in India, aggregation in Britain, a Bloomberg Law newsletter item, and a Daily Mail reporter waiting outside an Upper East Side apartment building.
For a kiss.
A man and a woman had kissed on a bench in a park in the middle of the afternoon. The event remained remarkably small.
There was no victim, no complainant, no applicable statute, and no injury. Punishment followed anyway.
Guapõ did not invent the crowd. The crowd was waiting.
It watched like schoolchildren who had found two classmates kissing behind the gym and could not wait to tell everyone.
I have written about prosecutors hiding evidence and judges looking away. Those stories are hard.
A kiss is easy. Everybody understands a kiss, and too many people enjoy seeing one turned against the people who shared it.
STUPID IS NOT A CRIME
It was foolish.
A married partner at the most conspicuous law firm in America might reasonably understand that a Central Park bench in daylight was not the optimal place to kiss another lawyer. Manhattan contains hotel rooms, apartments and doors.
But people are not always lawyers when they kiss.
Two people who make their living anticipating risk failed to anticipate a stranger with a telephone — reckless in the way people become reckless when they forget the rest of the world for a moment.
Stupidity is not ordinarily a complete theory of professional discipline.
It does not ordinarily cost a man tens of millions of dollars.
Kissing on a park bench in Central Park is not illegal. This remains true regardless of the view count.
There should not need to be a defense beyond that.
WHAT WE DON'T KNOW, WHICH IS EVERYTHING
Nobody knows how long the two lawyers knew each other. They tried the OpenAI case together this spring, which means months of war rooms and midnight drafts and the peculiar intimacy of high-stakes litigation.
Nobody knows whether anything had happened before. Nobody knows the state of Cullerton's marriage.
Nobody knows what Cullerton had told his wife, what she already knew or what two married people had arranged between themselves.
Nobody knows whether these are two people falling in love or two people making a mistake or two people who couldn't yet tell the difference.
Perhaps it was the first time.
They sat down on a bench. One leaned toward the other. The other did not move away. The feeling had been there without a name.
Perhaps neither remembered who began it. Then they kissed. Maybe they kissed again because one kiss sometimes asks for another.
Maybe what the crowd saw was not a scandal. Maybe it was the instant two people discovered something about themselves.
It might have gone nowhere. He might have gone home and never mentioned it. He might have told his wife. He might have left her.
Before the video, those choices belonged to them. It might have been the beginning of the rest of their lives. It may have been forgotten within weeks.
The one thing taken from them was the right to find out for themselves.
THE TRAP SET FOR THE WIFE
Consider Moira Kim Penza.
She has been accused of nothing. She has made no public statement. Her role was limited to being married to the man in the video.
She has choices.
She can stay, and be the wife who stood by her man — a phrase that has never once been used to describe a woman without a faint condescension riding underneath it.
She can leave, and it's a bigger story, not a smaller one: the NXIVM prosecutor's divorce, covered with the same enthusiasm as everything else in this case.
She can say nothing at all and let the vacuum fill with whatever strangers care to put in it.
There is no version where she comes out of this at the place she started.
Penza is a trial lawyer. Her product is the confidence of a jury and the deference of a courtroom — twelve strangers who believe her, judges who take her seriously, corporate clients who bet nine figures on her judgment.
That authority is made of how she is perceived.
Ridicule is uniquely corrosive to this form of authority. Defeat can be explained. A bad verdict can be appealed or absorbed.
Ridicule is harder to answer because it does not require an argument. It is there in the room before the lawyer arrives.
The same is true of her husband, and of the 29-year-old associate.
The injury is not the kiss itself. The injury is that all three have been made to appear ridiculous in professions where seriousness is the principal asset.
And the man with the telephone is paid.
WHAT I WOULD SAY
If I were Cullerton, I think I might make a statement like this:
To all of you, a kiss might be a big thing. But what's in a kiss? It's a way to express affection.
It shows something like love, and frankly, I thought we were alone. Humans do have attraction for one another, and humans are needy.
I kissed her, and she kissed me, and now you all got to see our affection. We intended it to be private. But no matter — we kissed, and we stand by it. Maybe we will kiss again.
Maybe you've seen kisses before. Maybe you saw them in a movie. Or maybe once, when the day was good, and another person sat beside you, you kissed someone on a bench in a park.
I don't need the job at Gibson Dunn or Wachtell. I am a lawyer, and if you see me in court, know that I am human.
That is not misconduct.
If you see me in court, you will know I am also a man.
A man may study the law, argue before judges, earn millions of dollars, and still want to kiss someone.
He may even think of kissing someone when he ought to be thinking of something else.
Maybe one day you will too.
Maybe you already have.