Cullerton was caught. The Daily Mail found the lovers and the luxury apartment. Parlato calls it a victimless kiss. But everyone missed the child—and Moira Penza’s hypocrisy.
LUTHMANN NOTE: She left the EDNY US Attorney’s Office for private practice, and the first order of business was to sue Donald Trump. Moira Kim Penza helped build the Summer Zervos case against the 45th and 47th President and the government’s case against me by stacking accusations, inferences, and ugly suppositions until they resembled a verdict. Now the spotlight has reached her household, and suddenly the lawfare-media cartel wants velvet ropes around the uncomfortable questions. No. Nathan Cullerton’s conduct belongs to Cullerton, but Penza owns the public brand she sold: fearless examiner of sex, secrecy, credibility and unequal power. Penza does not get to declare supposition admissible against defendants and forbidden when it reaches her own door. Same microscope. Same inferences. Same rules. This piece is “The Kid the Scandal Erased.”
By Richard Luthmann
The Child Erased From the Scandal
(NEW YORK, NEW YORK) – Everybody reported the kiss. Almost nobody reported the kid. Maybe we’ll have to wait for the divorce papers in New York Supreme.
Nathaniel D. Cullerton, 45, a married Wachtell litigation partner, was identified by the Daily Mail, New York Post, and other outlets as the man filmed passionately kissing 29-year-old associate Kelsey A. Borenzweig on a Central Park bench. Wachtell lists them in the same department and credited both on the OpenAI team that defeated Elon Musk‘s blockbuster lawsuit.
The Daily Mail tracked Cullerton to the $2.3 million Upper East Side co-op he shares with Moira Kim Penza, called Borenzweig his underling and presented Penza as the accomplished, humiliated wife.
It found the lawyers, the apartment, the marriage and the money. Yet the family portrait still had a person missing.
I state from firsthand knowledge that Penza and Cullerton have a son, now roughly 8 or 9 years old. I will not publish his name, school, photograph, exact birthday, or any detail that could expose him. My assertion can be independently confirmed and corroborated by dozens of New York attorneys who know the scandal-engulfed (soon-to-be-former) couple, and no reliable source has established that the couple is childless, either because they can’t.
If my firsthand account is correct, Cullerton was not merely gambling with a marriage and a reported $4 million income. He was detonating the stability, privacy, and financial security of a child’s home.
The Financial Times and Post reported that Wachtell placed him on leave and that Gibson Dunn abandoned or rescinded a lucrative offer. A story sold as elite-lawyer sex gossip may therefore be a family-court prequel with a child absorbing consequences he never created.
The kid is not tabloid garnish. He is the moral center every glossy recap managed to crop out.
The Kid The Scandal Erased: Parlato Says Just a Kiss
Renowned investigative reporter Frank Parlato sees a different scandal. In Frank Report, he argues that Jay Guapo monetized humiliation, that no child appears in the 39-second video, and that two consenting adults committed no crime.
He stresses the chasm between NXIVM’s coercion and Cullerton’s apparently voluntary kiss.
No blackmail. No starvation. No branding. No complainant. Parlato says Wachtell and Gibson Dunn counted views before finding facts and let an influencer’s camera become judge, jury and economic executioner.
His civil-libertarian point is serious. Public shaming can become digital vigilantism, and a lawful kiss does not become unlawful at 10 million views.
Parlato also argues that Penza is accused of nothing in the Central Park bench episode and was trapped into three losing choices: stay, leave, or remain silent.
I disagree because Parlato answers the criminal-law question and ducks the family and workplace questions. Cullerton did not get caught violating a kissing statute. He got caught behaving like a cheater: a married partner kissing a younger associate from his department and major client team in broad daylight.
Here’s the part that no one can dispute: the incident involves a powerful partner, a junior colleague, a recent shared representation, a reported multimillion-dollar employment consequence, and the husband of a former federal prosecutor whose public reputation was built substantially through cases about sex, coercion, credibility, secrecy, exploitation, and power.
Unless some undisclosed marital arrangement changes the facts, the obvious inference is betrayal. Consent between Cullerton and Borenzweig does not supply consent from Cullerton’s wife, child, partners, clients, or colleagues who may bear the fallout. They owe fiduciary duties to others greater than the “morals of the meat market.”
Nor does consent erase hierarchy. Wachtell’s reported investigation and Gibson Dunn’s reported retreat show that the institutions saw more than romance.
Parlato asks what crime occurred. I ask what obligations were torched, what disclosures were skipped, what favoritism questions now infect the team, and which innocent family member pays when a multimillion-dollar career implodes.
A kiss can be legal and consensual yet still reveal catastrophic judgment.
The Kid The Scandal Erased: Dominatrix Claims and Dirty Fed Whispers
Moira Kim Penza has always been the hypocrisy story. She built prestige by prosecuting Keith Raniere, marketing herself around sex trafficking and powerful abusers, and joining Summer Zervos’s politically radioactive case against Donald Trump.
Her firm says she can “go for the jugular.” I know that posture because she led the prosecution against me.
Penza and the EDNY lawfare machine portrayed me as a dangerous cartoon assembled from cooperators, insinuation, and worst-case supposition. My record is public. So is my position that prosecutors inflated the narrative, struck foul blows, and converted accusations into punishment before anyone tested the whole picture.
No one had a better bullshit detector than the late great Judge Jack Weinstein. On Moira Kim Penza, Jack called bullshit.
Penza mastered reputational prosecution. Now her household has entered the dock of public opinion. Good. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Put the claims on the record where they belong: as claims. I have long alleged that Penza engaged in dominatrix activity and that sex-related items were discovered in the Cadman Plaza desk she left behind. As an AUSA, she would show up to court in fishnet stockings, see-through pants, and greasy hair. It didn’t look like she was coming to work from Fifth Avenue, unless the co-op has a basement dungeon.
In blunt terms, I have her “banging” an FBI agent connected to the Raniere investigation. Ask her who else was up in Ithaca when Cornell Law School gave her an award. It must have been one hell of a “celebration,” but they weren’t stupid enough to do it on a bench in the quad. The public record confirms work with FBI agents like Michael Weniger, Michael Lever, Delise Jeffrey, and Maegan Rees.
Penza has not publicly answered these specific claims. The bench video proves none of them. But it reopens my longstanding question: did the celebrated sex-and-power prosecutor live by one moral code publicly while operating under another privately?
Sexual coercion and sexual-misconduct litigation are unusually prominent in Moria’s public identity: the Raniere prosecution is the centerpiece of her biography; her firm expressly credits that case with helping pave the way for later prosecutions of powerful individuals; the firm promoted her Zervos role; and it highlights her pro bono representation of sexually harassed restaurant workers.
Living by one moral code publicly while operating under another privately? It is precisely the kind of question Penza’s agents and prosecutors would have used to squeeze a target.
The Kid The Scandal Erased: The Daily Mail Halo
Then there is the Daily Mail treatment. Its reporters tracked the pair, approached Cullerton near the Fifth Avenue home and sought comment from the lawyers and Wachtell. But the narrative placed a flattering halo around Penza: star NXIVM prosecutor, elite partner, wronged wife in a $2.3 million co-op.
It reads like a crisis-communications storyboard whether or not any publicist touched it.
No evidence reviewed here shows that Penza, her firm, or an operative planted, paid for, or controlled the story. Still, its frame performs the same function. Cullerton becomes the reckless husband. Borenzweig becomes the young underling. Penza becomes the decorated innocent. The unreported child disappears, and Penza’s disputed history never enters the frame.
The hypocrisy question cannot be buried. Marriage does not transfer Cullerton’s guilt to Penza. But she owns the brand she sold: fearless truth-teller, champion of victims, examiner of secret sexual power, and prosecutor willing to infer motive from circumstances.
The lawfare-media machine demands moral discovery for defendants while requesting velvet-rope privacy for its own. I reject that privilege. Cullerton was caught in conduct outlets treated as cheating. Parlato calls it consensual and victimless.
I see it differently. I see a wife, a workplace hierarchy, a lost fortune, and a minor son the press erased. I also see unresolved allegations about Penza that deserve answers, not automatic belief.
The verdict is not that every rumor is true. It is that Moira Kim Penza cannot call supposition evidence when government uses it—and forbidden gossip when the spotlight reaches her door.
Same microscope. Same inferences. Same rules.
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