(Headline USA) Kathy Ruemmler, the top lawyer at storied investment bank Goldman Sachs and former White House counsel to President Barack Obama, announced her resignation Thursday, after emails between her and Jeffrey Epstein showed a close relationship where she described him as an “older brother” and downplayed his sex crimes.
Ruemmler said in a statement that she would “step down as Chief Legal Officer and General Counsel of Goldman Sachs as of June 30, 2026.”
Up until her resignation, Ruemmler repeatedly tried to distance herself from the emails and other correspondence and had been defiant that she would not resign from Goldman’s top legal post, which she had held since 2020.
While Ruemmler has called Epstein a “monster” in recent statements, she had a much different relationship with Epstein before he was arrested a second time for sex crimes in 2019. Ruemmler called Epstein “Uncle Jeffrey” in emails and said she adored him.
In a statement before her resignation, a Goldman Sachs spokesperson said Ruemmler “regrets ever knowing him.”
In her statement Thursday, Ruemmler said: “Since I joined Goldman Sachs six years ago, it has been my privilege to help oversee the firm’s legal, reputational, and regulatory matters; to enhance our strong risk management processes; and to ensure that we live by our core value of integrity in everything we do. My responsibility is to put Goldman Sachs’ interests first.”
Goldman CEO David Solomon said in a separate statement: “As one of the most accomplished professionals in her field, Kathy has also been a mentor and friend to many of our people, and she will be missed. I accepted her resignation, and I respect her decision.”
During her time in private practice after she left the White House in 2014, Ruemmler received several expensive gifts from Epstein, including luxury handbags and a fur coat.
The gifts were given after Epstein had already been convicted of sex crimes in 2008 and was registered as a sex offender.
“So lovely and thoughtful! Thank you to Uncle Jeffrey!!!” Ruemmler wrote to Epstein in 2018.
Historically, Wall Street frowns on gift-giving between clients and bankers or Wall Street lawyers, particularly high-end gifts that could pose a conflict of interest. Goldman Sachs requires its employees to get preapproval before receiving gifts from or giving them to clients, according to the company’s code of conduct, partly in order to not run afoul of anti-bribery laws.
As late as December, Goldman CEO David Solomon described Ruemmler as an “excellent lawyer” and said she had his full faith and backing.
(Andrew Rice, The Center Square) The Trump administration on Thursday terminated the Environmental Protection Agency’s “Endangerment Finding,” a landmark policy that led to sweeping climate change regulations and higher costs across the country.
“This action will eliminate over $1.3 trillion in regulatory costs and help bring car prices tumbling down dramatically,” President Donald Trump said. “This radical rule became the legal foundation for the green new scam.”
Trump also said he will terminate green emissions standards on vehicle models produced between 2012 and 2027.
The finding is based on a 2009 action from the Obama administration that restricted greenhouse gas emissions including carbon dioxide and methane. The finding allowed the federal government to restrict these emissions under the Clean Air Act because it claimed the greenhouse gasses posed a threat to public health and welfare.
America’s Power President and CEO Michelle Bloodworth said in a statement provided to The Center Square that the Endangerment Finding threatened the U.S. electric grid by forcing coal plants to shutter.
“EPA’s Endangerment Finding has been used as the basis for regulations that threaten the reliability of our nation’s electric grid,” Bloodworth said . “These regulations, such as President Obama’s Clean Power Plan and President Biden’s Clean Power Plan 2.0, were designed to force the premature retirement of coal power plants across the U.S. and increase our nation’s reliance on electricity sources that are not as reliable as coal.
“Utilities have announced plans to retire more than 55,000 megawatts of coal-fired generation over the next five years,” Bloodworth said. “Reversing these retirement decisions could help offset the need to build new, more expensive electricity sources and prevent the loss of reliability attributes, such as fuel security, that the coal fleet provides. Forcing the retirement of America’s coal fleet and jeopardizing our electricity supply makes no sense because the U.S. coal fleet is responsible for just 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions while China and India’s emissions account for nearly 40%. The U.S. must take advantage of our coal assets, just as our global competitors are relying on coal to fuel their own economic growth.”
Policies like the electric vehicle and corporate average fuel economy mandates raised consumer costs and hurt the overall economy, said Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute.
“Getting rid of the bedrock, this foundation will be absolutely tremendous for our automotive manufacturing sector of our economy, which is a massive part of the economy,” Isaac said.
Isaac said the endangerment finding has led to millions of taxpayer dollars supporting electric vehicle production in the United States. In 2023, each electric vehicle sold in the United States brought in roughly $94,000 from subsidies and tax credits, according to Isaac’s research.
Isaac said without these incentives for electric vehicles, the cost of gas operated vehicles will flourish. He added that gas vehicle production has significantly reduced since incentives for electric vehicles pushed forward.
“It’s going to lower the cost of vehicles because you’re just no longer going to have these over burdensome regulations that really don’t do anything to impact the environment or the climate whatsoever,” Isaac said.
While Isaac applauded the administration’s move to loosen regulations for cars, he said this rule is only the first step in climate deregulation across the federal government.
Isaac argued that the high costs of electricity Americans are experiencing across the country is due to the endangerment finding regulations on stationary sources. He said loosening those regulations will lower energy prices.
Kevin Dayaratna, vice president of statistical modeling at Advancing American Freedom, said the scientific conclusions underpinning the endangerment finding are fundamentally flawed. He pointed out that global warming models overestimate temperature findings.
“The proposed policies aren’t going to meaningfully impact the climate because the United States, compared to other countries or compared to the rest of the world, doesn’t emit that much,” Dayaratna said.
Dayaratna explained that climate change models overstated the impacts of carbon on the global temperatures and natural disasters. One way these models did this was to predict the level of damage up to 300 years in advance.
“It is sheer hubris to believe that you could predict what the economy will look like two decades from now, let alone 300 years into the future,” Dayaratna said. “But these models attempted to make such projections about climate damages that far into the future.”
Isaac explained that these federal regulations have significantly affected operations of independently owned energy companies. He pointed to an oil and gas producer in Texas in 2024 that spent $600,000 on compliance with the greenhouse gas reporting program.
“It should be going to the employees, it should be going to building new job opportunities for more people,” Isaac said. “But instead, it was wasted on federal required compliance.”
Looking ahead, advocates for the Trump administration’s move expect legal challenges from environmental groups.
Meredith Hankins, a federal climate legal director at the National Resources Defense Council, said the organization will challenge the Trump administration’s action in court. Additionally, the Environmental Defense Fund promised to pursue legal action.
“The EPA’s slapdash legal arguments will be laughed out of court – and we are going to win,” Hankins said.
However, Isaac argued previous decisions from the U.S. Supreme Court supported actions limiting the EPA’s authority to regulate state emissions guidelines. In 2022, the nation’s high court struck down the EPA’s ability to regulate emissions under the authority of the Clean Air Act.
The Supreme Court said Congress would need to grant the EPA authority to strike down state emissions standards. Isaac also said he expects the 2007 decision in Massachusetts v. EPA to be overturned as a result of future litigation, a key decision that first upheld the endangerment finding.
Bloodworth said Thursday’s action was a good start.
“Overturning bad EPA regulations is necessary but not sufficient,” she said. “The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, Department of Energy, Congress, state utility commissions, and grid operators must also take action to prevent the closure of more coal power plants.”
(Headline USA) Yale University says a prominent computer science professor will not teach classes while it reviews his conduct, after newly released documents show he sent Jeffrey Epstein an email describing an undergraduate as a good-looking blonde while recommending her for a job.
Messages between David Gelernter — who made headlines in 1993 when he was wounded by a mail explosive sent by “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski — and the late, disgraced financier were among the trove of Epstein-related documents released by the U.S. Justice Department in late January. The documents show Gelernter and Epstein corresponding on a variety of topics including business and art.
In an email to Epstein in October 2011 — several years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl — Gelernter wrote that he had an “editoress” in mind for a job — a Yale senior whom he described as a “v small good-looking blonde.”
Gelernter defended that message in an email last week to Jeffrey Brock, dean of Yale’s School of Engineering & Applied Science, according to the Yale Daily News, which reported that Gelernter also forwarded the email to the student newspaper.
He noted that Epstein was “obsessed with girls” — “like every other unmarried billionaire in Manhattan; in fact, like every other heterosex male” — and he was keeping “the potential boss’s habits in mind.”
“So long as I said nothing that dishonored her in any conceivable way, I’d have told him more or less what he wanted,” Gelernter wrote to Brock, the paper reported. “She was smart, charming & gorgeous.
Ought I to have suppressed that info? Never!”
He added: “I’m very glad I wrote the note.”
Students in Gelernter’s computer science class were notified that he would not be teaching on Tuesday.
“The university does not condone the action taken by the professor or his described manner of providing recommendations for his students,” Yale said in a statement. “The professor’s conduct is under review. Until the review is completed, the professor will not teach his class.”
Gelernter, 70, did not respond to emails and a message left at a phone listing for him in public records. A message to Brock was returned by Yale’s Office of Public Affairs & Communications, which provided the statement by the university. Yale declined to provide a copy of Gelernter’s email to Brock.
Gelernter joins a list of people in the U.S. and Europe, including prominent politicians, facing scrutiny because of the Epstein files.
Students in his computer science class were somewhat stunned by his links to Epstein and what he wrote in the emails, said Kris Aziabor, a 21-year-old senior from Atkinson, New Hampshire.
“I think there was definitely an initial kind of like wave of shock, just because you know I think it just sounds ridiculous that one of your professors, like someone who is teaching you, is literally in these Epstein files,” Aziabor said. “But I think what really was the most surprising to me was how he was trying to defend his like past words and past actions.”
In a message to students on Tuesday, Gelernter again defended his emails to Epstein and said they were the reason he was suspended from teaching the class. The message was first reported by Hearst Connecticut Media Group and later obtained by The Associated Press.
In the message, Gelernter discussed his 2011 email to Epstein about the undergraduate student, saying he was recommending her for a summer job with Epstein’s private bank, and she wanted the recommendation. He said he and the student did not know at the time that Epstein was a convicted sex offender.
“The university’s Smoking Gun is a personal, private email, dug out of the dump of Epstein files,” Gelernter wrote. “(If someone handed you a stack of other people’s private correspondence, would you dive in and read them? Of course not. Gentlemen and ladies don’t read each other’s mail. (Courtesy 101.)”
In 2008 and 2009, Epstein served jail time in Florida after pleading guilty to state charges of soliciting prostitution from someone under the age of 18. He died by suicide in a jail cell in 2019, while awaiting trial in New York on U.S. federal charges accusing him of sexually abusing dozens of girls.
On the Yale faculty since 1982, Gelernter is known for his work in parallel computation — the use of multiple computer processes to solve complex problems — and for helping develop the Linda computer programing system, beginning when he was a doctoral candidate in the late 1970s. His 1991 book “Mirror Worlds” foreshadowed the World Wide Web and inspired the Java programming language, according to his biography on the Yale website.
On June 24, 1993, he suffered extensive wounds to his abdomen, chest, face and hands when he opened a package that exploded in his Yale office. Authorities later determined the package was mailed by Kaczynski, who ran a 17-year bombing campaign that killed three people and injured 23 others.
(Chris Wade, The Center Square) The U.S. Justice Department has fired a new top federal prosecutor for New York’s Albany division, just hours after a panel of judges appointed him to fill a vacancy.
The panel of judges in the Albany-based Northern District of New York said Wednesday they had appointed former prosecutor Donald T. Kinsella to lead the office after a Trump nominee was found to be unlawfully serving in the role.
But just hours after he was sworn into the new role, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche took to social media to rebuke the judges’ decision and declare Kinsella’s appointment unlawful.
“Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does. See Article II of our Constitution,” he posted on X. “You are fired, Donald Kinsella.”
Last month, U.S. District Judge Lorna Schofield ruled that acting U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York John Sarcone — who served as Trump’s campaign attorney — was in that role unlawfully. The judge also barred Sarcone from heading an investigation into New York Attorney General Letitia James and quashed two subpoenas issued in the DOJ’s probe into her handling of Trump’s civil fraud trial and a National Rifle Association investigation
Sarcone was appointed to the post as an interim U.S. attorney, a term that expired in July after 120 days. In response, Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Sarcone to first assistant U.S. attorney in the Northern District — the office’s second-in-command — allowing him to lead the office by serving as acting U.S. attorney. But Schofield ruled that Bondi’s move violated federal laws governing the appointment of U.S. attorneys.
On Wednesday, the federal judges in the Albany district declined to extend Sacone’s temporary posting, instead opting to appoint Kinsella as the new U.S. attorney. They cited a federal law allowing them to fill the U.S. attorney’s role if it is vacated. The DOJ’s move hours later leaves the post unfilled, and it wasn’t clear whether there would be a legal fight over Kinsella’s appointment.
The wrangling over the New York prosecutor’s office comes as the Trump administration’s picks for U.S. attorneys in New Jersey, California, Virginia, Nevada and other states have also faced pushback from federal judges.
That includes former interim U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan, whose appointment to the job led a federal judge to toss out criminal indictments against Trump critics James and former FBI Director James Comey.
While presidents traditionally nominate a new roster of federal prosecutors once they take over the White House, the posts are normally Senate-confirmed. But the Trump administration has sought to keep U.S. attorneys in several districts in those jobs on a temporary basis amid a shortage of applicants. The White House is also complaining that Democrats in the Senate have blocked key nominations.
(Chris Wade, The Center Square) A Georgia-based gunmaker has agreed to stop selling a high-capacity magazine accessory used in the 2022 Buffalo mass shooting after settling a lawsuit filed by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Under the settlement, announced Wednesday, Mean Arms, also known as Mean LLC., has also agreed to pay $1.75 million to the families of the victims, survivors and those who were injured in the “racist” mass shooting at Tops supermarket in Buffalo, according to James’ office.
“The racist mass shooting at Tops in Buffalo was an unbearable tragedy,” James, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We lost 10 beautiful lives in a horrific act of violence and hate, and no amount of money can ever return those individuals to their families or erase the devastation the community was forced to endure.”
In a 2023 lawsuit, filed in New York Supreme Court, James argues that the device Payton Gendron used to modify his AR-15 rifle in the Buffalo grocery store massacre turned it into “an even deadlier” weapon.
James alleged the company “falsely” advertised that the so-called MA Lock device makes the weapon legal in New York but included instructions on how to remove the lock. The lawsuit notes the lock can “easily be removed” so that high-capacity magazines — illegal in New York — can be inserted into an AR-15 rifle.
“That’s exactly what the shooter did,” James told reporters Wednesday. “He brought an AR-15 style with the M.A. lock, easily removed it and added 30 round detachable magazines. “With a pistol grip and the high-capacity magazines, he did not have to stop to reload his weapon, and when he did reload, he could do so quickly. As a result, he was able to kill 10 people and injure three others.”
The lawsuit was part of broader efforts by James to crack down on firearm violence and enforce New York’s gun laws following the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the N.Y. State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen case, which struck down a New York law requiring applicants to show “proper cause” to get a permit to carry a firearm.
The court’s conservative majority affirmed the constitutional right to carry firearms in public places for self-defense, which has prompted reviews of firearm licensing laws in New York and other states that heavily restrict gun ownership.
But the ruling prompted New York and other Democrat-led states to tighten their gun laws to restrict further firearm carrying, which spurred other legal challenges from Second Amendment groups. New York is facing several lawsuits over its gun control laws, the outcomes of which are still pending.
Gun control advocates praised James’ court victory, which they say will hold gun manufacturers accountable for mass shootings carried out with their products.
“Nothing will ever bring back those who were murdered at Tops, Leigh Rome, senior litigation attorney at the GIFFORDS Law Center. “These efforts can stop future acts of violence before they happen, so that no more families have to endure what our clients have been put through over the past four years.”
(Andrew Rice, The Center Square) The U.S. Department of Justice unredacted portions of documents in the Jeffrey Epstein files with mentions of high profile figures at the request of Congressional leaders.
On Monday, U.S. Reps. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., and Ro Khanna, D-Calif., visited the Department of Justice to view several documents included in its 3 million page dump on Jan. 30.
DOJ officials allowed members of Congress to meet and discuss possible redaction errors.
“To this end, though, and to ensure transparency, if any member of Congress wishes to review any portions of the responsive production in any unredacted form, they’re welcome to make arrangements with the department to do so and we’re happy to do that,” Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said.
Massie and Khanna criticized the department for several key redactions and the omission of redactions for certain victims.
The redacted material included the names of prominent figures. Khanna and Massie identified billionaire Les Wexner, who previously employed Epstein as his financial adviser.
However, newly unredacted FBI documents list Wexner as a “co-conspirator” in the investigation of Epstein’s crimes.
The new redactions also list several other high profile men, including Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, a Dubai executive who corresponded with Epstein over email, according to Massie. He said the sultan sent a video of someone being tortured to Epstein.
Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, and Leonic Leonov are also mentioned alongside the Sultan in a separate list. Names of several other women were also unredacted from the list.
It is unclear what the association between the other individuals on the list are to Epstein. The names of two victims in the same document remain redacted. Being named in the files does not necessarily implicate an individual in a crime.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche cited the victims’ names in the document as the reason for extensive redactions. A partially unredacted version of the files is now available on the Justice Department’s website.
“We have just unredacted all non-victim names from this document,” Blanche wrote. “The DOJ is committed to transparency.”
“Imagine how many men they are covering up for in those three million files,” Rep. Khanna said on the House floor Tuesday.
Khanna called for greater accountability of individuals who are named in the Epstein files. He referenced numerous mentions of U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick in the documents, as the Center Square previously reported.
“It’s time to begin with accountability for the Epstein class,” Khanna said. “Investigate them, prosecute them and let’s return to democratic accountability in the United States of America.”
(Carleen Johnson, The Center Square) The office of Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank and the Puyallup School District confirmed Tuesday they are conducting an investigation into an alleged sexual assault against a female Puyallup high school wrestler.
The Rogers High School sophomore reported the alleged assault to school officials and her coach two days after the December incident, but the family contends administration failed to take meaningful action to protect and investigate her claim of sexual assault.
The alleged victim, 16-year-old Kallie Keeler, says the incident happened during a Dec 6, 2025, match in which she was wrestling against a 190-pound transgender wrestler. She did not know he was a biological male at the time.
Video of the match taken by Keeler’s mom and featured in Brandi Kruse’s unDivided podcast, shows the teen’s face grimacing as the opponent’s hand is seen between her legs.
The alleged victim claims the opponent pressed up inside her with his fingers for several seconds, so she then gave up the match moments later.
According to Kruse, school officials did not report the incident to the Pierce County Sheriff’s office until Jan 30, 2026, nearly two months after it happened.
“This series of events suggests that a number of Rogers High School staff and employees knew about Kallie’s allegation of sexual assault and didn’t do anything with it,” Kruse wrote. “Under Washington State law, mandatory reporters are required to report allegations of sexual assault within 48 hours.”
Puyallup School spokeswoman Sarah Gillispie declined comment on the specifics in response to an inquiry from The Center Square.
“This matter is under investigation,” she wrote in the statement. “As such, we cannot share details or discuss specifics. What we can say is that student safety is a top priority and that all reports involving student safety are taken seriously.”
Pierce County Sheriff Keith Swank confirmed the investigation in a brief voicemail to the TCS Tuesday morning.
“We did take a report and it is in the hands of the prosecuting attorney’s office now for them to review for possible charges to be filed,” Swank said.
The Keeler family was unable to provide further comment for TCS on advice from their attorney.
Brian Heywood, founder of Let’s Go Washington, backing an initiative to protect girls sports and private spaces for females, issued a statement in response to the incident.
“We’re grateful to the unDivided podcast for holding the Puyallup School District accountable and forcing the case to be moved to the Pierce County Sheriff’s office for investigation,” the statement said. “How many young women have to be assaulted, violated, bullied, mocked, or even sued before the state takes action to protect them?”
Meantime, following a TCS exclusive interview with Superintendent of Public Instruction Chris Reykdal last week about the initiative, OSPI has tentatively agreed to meet with two 16-year-old girls who became the face of the fight to protect girls sports in Washington.
The families of Ahnaleigh Wilson and Frances Staudt had previously requested to meet with Reykdal but received no response. Now, the Superintendent has indicated he will hear their stories.
(José Niño, Headline USA) New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft operates a surveillance hub inside the team’s stadium that monitors over 500 million social media posts daily and sends intelligence reports on campus speech to university administrators.
Chris Menahan of Information Liberationhighlighted the operation, tweeting that Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance charity “built a ‘command center’ inside the Patriots’ stadium that’s ‘tracking hate speech online’ critical of Israel/Jews/Zionism in real time. The ‘intelligence’ they gather is sent to university administrators.”
Robert Kraft's Blue Square Alliance "charity" built a "command center" inside the Patriots' stadium that's "tracking hate speech online" critical of Israel/Jews/Zionism in real time.
The "intelligence" they gather is sent to university administrators.
The Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, formerly the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, was established in 2019 after Kraft received Israel’s Genesis Prize in Jerusalem. The organization’s 2024 IRS filings show $135 million in revenue and $211 million in total assets, with the Rales family contributing over $74 million through their foundations, according to a report by Quadzilla.
Thecommand center inside Gillette Stadium serves as the organization’s central technology hub. According to BSA’s website, it analyzes online conversations related to “antisemitism, Judaism, and Israel” using a mix of proprietary and third party software combined with artificial intelligence.
BSA President Adam Katz, a former Wayfair executive who took the role in late 2025, described the campus monitoring operation in detail during aninterview with City & State New York.
“We can look at a particular university campus and see what’s happening there, then we can isolate that and know how hate is being spread on that campus, and provide that intelligence to the administration on that campus,” Katz stated, ashighlighted by Menahan.
The organization’s website confirms it provides custom data to university presidents on online conversations related to their campus. This includes localized data on conversation volume about antisemitism, Judaism, and Israel, top used phrases and hashtags, specific social media posts reaching the most people, and the authors of posts with the most recent impact, including faculty.
Critics have raised concerns that the operation conflates political criticism of Israel with genuine hate speech. Sports journalist Dave Zirin argued BSA operates as a cover for Kraft, a well known Zionist, who is constantly “fostering disinformation”, conflating antisemitism with anti-Zionism.
José Niño is the deputy editor of Headline USA. Follow him at x.com/JoseAlNino
(Luis Cornelio, Headline USA) Newly sworn-in New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill followed through on her promise to launch a local portal for her administration to track ICE operations across the Garden State.
Sherrill, a Democrat who took office on Jan. 20, formally announced the portal on Wednesday, touting it as a way for individuals to report videos of ICE interactions in the state.
She said the portal is intended to allow the local government to monitor potential civil rights violations by President Donald Trump’s immigration officers.
“If you’re approached by an agent or see an ICE operation taking place, and you’re at a safe distance – send us your videos,” Sherrill wrote on X.
The portal is one of three actions taken by Sherrill to counter ICE operations in New Jersey, as announced in a press conference on Wednesday.
In addition to the portal, she said she signed an executive order banning ICE from launching operations from any state property and launched a website to “make sure people know their Constitutional rights when interacting with federal agents.”
The portal is housed on the website of New Jersey’s acting attorney general, Jennifer Davenport.
The portal encourages the public to submit reports of “incidents involving harmful conduct by, or negative interactions with, federal personnel conducting immigration enforcement in New Jersey.”
It added, “Federal agents have authority to enforce federal immigration laws, but they must do so lawfully. Examples of concerning activity include uses of excessive force, warrantless searches or arrests, racial profiling, wrongful detentions, interference with voting, or other civil-rights violations.”
(Headline USA) Adam Mosseri, the head of Meta’s Instagram, testified Wednesday during a landmark social media trial in Los Angeles that he disagrees with the idea that people can be clinically addicted to social media platforms.
The question of addiction is a key pillar of the case, where plaintiffs seek to hold social media companies responsible for harms to children who use their platforms. Meta Platforms and Google’s YouTube are the two remaining defendants in the case, which TikTok and Snap have settled.
At the core of the Los Angeles case is a 20-year-old identified only by the initials “KGM,” whose lawsuit could determine how thousands of similar lawsuits against social media companies would play out. She and two other plaintiffs have been selected for bellwether trials — essentially test cases for both sides to see how their arguments play out before a jury.
Mosseri, who’s headed Instagram since 2018 said it’s important to differentiate between clinical addiction and what he called problematic use. The plaintiff’s lawyer, however, presented quotes directly from Mosseri in a podcast interview a few years ago where he used the term addiction in relation to social media use, but he clarified that he was probably using the term “too casually,” as people tend to do.
Mosseri said he was not claiming to be a medical expert when questioned about his qualifications to comment on the legitimacy of social media addiction, but said someone “very close” to him has experienced serious clinical addiction, which is why he said he was “being careful with my words.”
He said he and his colleagues use the term “problematic use” to refer to “someone spending more time on Instagram than they feel good about, and that definitely happens.”
It’s “not good for the company, over the long run, to make decisions that profit for us but are poor for people’s well-being,” Mosseri said.
Mosseri and the plaintiff’s lawyer, Mark Lanier, engaged in a lengthy back-and-forth about cosmetic filters on Instagram that changed people’s appearance in a way that seemed to promote plastic surgery.
“We are trying to be as safe as possible but also censor as little as possible,” Mosseri said.
In the courtroom, bereaved parents of children who have had social media struggles seemed visibly upset during a discussion around body dysmorphia and cosmetic filters. Meta shut down all third-party augmented reality filters in January 2025. The judge made an announcement to members of the public on Wednesday after the displays of emotion, reminding them not to make any indication of agreement or disagreement with testimony, saying that it would be “improper to indicate some position.”
During cross examination, Mosseri and Meta lawyer Phyllis Jones tried to reframe the idea that Lanier was suggesting in his questioning that the company is looking to profit off of teens specifically.
Mosseri said Instagram makes “less money from teens than from any other demographic on the app,” noting that teens don’t tend to click on ads and many don’t have disposable income that they spend on products from ads they receive. During his opportunity to question Mosseri for a second time, Lanier was quick to point to research that shows people who join social media platforms at a young age are more likely to stay on the platforms longer, which he said makes teen users prime for meaningful long-term profit.
“Often people try to frame things as you either prioritize safety or you prioritize revenue,” Mosseri said. “It’s really hard to imagine any instance where prioritizing safety isn’t good for revenue.”
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is expected to take the stand next week.
In recent years, Instagram has added a slew of features and tools it says have made the platform safer for young people. But this does not always work. A report last year, for instance, found that teen accounts researchers created were recommended age-inappropriate sexual content, including “graphic sexual descriptions, the use of cartoons to describe demeaning sexual acts, and brief displays of nudity.”
In addition, Instagram also recommended a “range of self-harm, self-injury, and body image content” on teen accounts that the report says “would be reasonably likely to result in adverse impacts for young people, including teenagers experiencing poor mental health, or self-harm and suicidal ideation and behaviors.” Meta called the report “misleading, dangerously speculative” and said it misrepresents its efforts on teen safety.
Meta is also facing a separate trial in New Mexico that began this week.
