Canoodling Central Park lawyer getting forced out of firm after being caught in viral NYC smoochfest: sources

The image everyone's seen by now: two colleagues wrapped up in each other on a park bench like nobody's watching, when of course everybody's watching, all the time, in a city with a camera on every lamppost. Nathaniel Cullerton just found out the hard way that in 2024 there's no such thing as a private moment in public. That's not a legal question. That's just physics now.

But strip away the viral footage and what you've got is a law firm dealing with exactly what law firms are supposed to deal with: a senior guy involved with a much younger colleague, and a firm deciding that's a liability they don't want walking around under their name. Wachtell didn't fire him because a clip got attention. They spent weeks investigating first. Say what you want about corporate HR culture, but that's actually the system working the way it's supposed to, slow and deliberate instead of a Twitter mob forcing a same-day resignation.

Where it gets tiresome is the framing. This becomes a "gotcha" story about a guy caught kissing someone, when the real substance is a workplace relationship with a power imbalance that a major firm decided it couldn't tolerate. That's a boring, defensible HR decision dressed up as a tabloid spectacle because it happened in Central Park instead of a conference room. The lesson here isn't about public affection. It's that if your personal life is going to end up adjudicated by your employer anyway, maybe don't let it play out where a stranger's iPhone can do the adjudicating first.