Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz has placed 45-year-old partner Nathaniel Cullerton on leave amid an internal investigation tied to a viral TikTok video showing him kissing a 29-year-old associate on a Central Park bench.
The firm, widely regarded as one of the most prestigious litigation shops in Manhattan, moved to sideline Cullerton after a TikTok clip filmed by user Jay Guapõ racked up four million views and turned a private moment into a very public professional crisis. Cullerton, a married father who shares a $2.3 million Upper East Side co-op with his wife, was filmed in what the New York Post described as "a heated smoochfest" with colleague Kelsey Borenzweig, an associate in the same litigation department.
People familiar with the matter told the Financial Times that Cullerton was placed on leave and that an expected lateral move to rival firm Gibson Dunn had been quashed in the wake of the video's spread. More than half a dozen Wachtell attorneys reportedly jumped to Gibson Dunn the same week, but Cullerton will not be among them.
The video, posted by Guapõ under the handle @jayguap3, shows Cullerton and Borenzweig sitting together on a Central Park bench. Guapõ approached the pair and began filming, calling out:
"Get a room. There's kids around."
Borenzweig responded by telling Guapõ to "put the phone down." Cullerton stood up with a smile and tried to wave the TikTokker away. The exchange escalated briefly when Guapõ warned Cullerton off any physical contact:
"Don't touch me, don't touch, if you touch me I'll have to touch you."
Guapõ, whom the Post noted has a history of posting antagonizing content, uploaded the clip to TikTok, where it exploded across social media last week. Within days, internet sleuths identified both lawyers, and the professional fallout began.
The New York Post first identified the pair on July 25, confirming that both Cullerton and Borenzweig work in Wachtell's litigation department and that both were reportedly in relationships with other people at the time.
Cullerton is no obscure associate. He and Borenzweig both worked on the legal team that defended OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman against Elon Musk's $150 billion lawsuit this year, one of the highest-profile technology cases in recent memory. That kind of casework puts a lawyer on the short list at every major firm in the country. Now it is footnote material in a tabloid scandal.
Cullerton married Moira Penza, 42, a partner at another Manhattan law firm, in 2016. The couple purchased their Upper East Side co-op together. Borenzweig, meanwhile, had recently been in a relationship with a 35-year-old judicial law clerk, though a source told the Daily Mail the pair had recently split.
The contrast between the professional stature and the park-bench spectacle is hard to miss. Wachtell partners routinely handle billion-dollar transactions and bet-the-company litigation. The firm's culture is famously intense, insular, and selective. A viral video of two colleagues from the same department kissing in public, while at least one is married, is the kind of reputational damage that no billable hour can undo.
Personal scandals among powerful professionals are hardly new in public life. Recent revelations about former lawmakers allegedly using taxpayer funds to cover up sex scandals have reminded Americans that misconduct at the top rarely stays hidden forever, and that the cover-up often costs more than the act itself.
Whether Borenzweig faces any professional consequences is an open question. Her attorney profile remained on the Wachtell website as of Tuesday, and the firm has not publicly addressed her status. Cullerton's profile was also still listed.
The Post reached out to Wachtell, Gibson Dunn, and Cullerton for comment but did not immediately hear back from any of them. That silence is itself telling. Firms of this caliber employ entire communications teams. When none of them returns a call, the lawyers are doing what lawyers do, saying nothing until they know what they are dealing with.
The episode raises a question that corporate America has wrestled with for years: where does an employer's authority end and an employee's private life begin? Cullerton was not on firm premises. He was not, so far as the reporting shows, engaged in any illegal conduct. But he was kissing a colleague from his own department in a public park in broad daylight, and someone was recording.
In an era when personal scandals can upend even the most prominent careers, the calculation for employers is straightforward: client confidence matters more than any single partner's feelings. Wachtell's clients pay top dollar for discretion, judgment, and credibility. A four-million-view TikTok undermines all three.
The timing made things worse. Cullerton was reportedly set to join a wave of Wachtell litigators heading to Gibson Dunn, a move that would have been a significant lateral hire in the legal industry. That plan collapsed once the video went viral. Gibson Dunn, like Wachtell, declined to comment.
So Cullerton now sits in a kind of professional limbo: on leave from the firm he was about to leave, and unwelcome at the firm he was about to join. His wife is a partner at yet another Manhattan firm. The legal community in New York is small enough that everyone involved will be seeing each other at bar events for years.
The broader pattern is familiar. When people in positions of trust and authority behave recklessly, the institutions they represent bear the cost. Taxpayers, clients, and ordinary citizens end up paying, in lost confidence, in reputational damage, in the quiet erosion of standards that were supposed to mean something. Whether it is a former congressman funneling campaign cash to a defense lawyer or a corporate litigator making headlines for all the wrong reasons, the dynamic is the same: the people at the top assume the rules do not apply to them, and the rest of us watch the fallout.
Guapõ, for his part, got exactly what he wanted: millions of views and a moment of viral fame. Whether he set out to expose an affair or simply stumbled onto content gold, the result is the same. Two careers are now in jeopardy, a marriage is under public scrutiny, and a prestigious firm is conducting an internal investigation, all because a man with a phone walked through Central Park at the wrong moment.
Or, depending on your perspective, at exactly the right one. Accountability has a way of arriving uninvited, and in 2026, it usually arrives with a camera.
Judgment and discretion are supposed to be what elite lawyers sell. When they cannot manage either one on a park bench, clients have every reason to wonder what else is slipping.
