A steamy Central Park make-out caught on video has snowballed from viral curiosity into what looks like a very real workplace problem for a Wachtell partner whose planned jump to another top-tier firm has reportedly been iced. The attorney is said to be on leave while the firm looks into the incident, turning a few seconds on a park bench into a very pricey HR migraine.
According to The New York Post, 45-year-old Nathaniel Cullerton was placed on leave from Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz after video surfaced of him kissing colleague Kelsey Borenzweig, 29, in Central Park. The report noted it is not clear whether Borenzweig has also been placed on leave or is under investigation.
Public profiles on the firm’s website list Cullerton as a partner in Wachtell’s litigation department and Borenzweig as an associate in the same group, highlighting the power dynamic now under scrutiny. Cullerton is identified as a litigation partner on a Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz profile, while Borenzweig is listed as a litigation associate on a separate Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz page.
The New York Post also reported that Cullerton’s anticipated move to Gibson Dunn was shelved after the clip went viral. He had reportedly been set to join more than half a dozen other Wachtell attorneys making the switch, and both he and Borenzweig had worked on the legal team defending OpenAI and Sam Altman in the lawsuit brought by Elon Musk.
Park Bench PDA Becomes A BigLaw Headache
The clip, posted by TikTok creator Jay Guapõ, racked up roughly 4 million views. In the video, Guapõ approaches the pair and tells them, “There’s kids around” and “Get a room,” while Borenzweig tells him to put the phone down and Cullerton appears to move toward the camera.
It did not take long for online sleuths to pore over Wachtell’s public attorney pages and match the faces to names. From there, reports and comment threads spun out all kinds of speculation about their personal lives, but the footage itself does not show when it was recorded, how long any relationship may have lasted, or what, if anything, the firm knew about it before the uproar.
Leave And A Lost Lateral, But No Public Finding Yet
For now, the reported leave and the nixed move to Gibson Dunn are employment developments, not a public determination that either lawyer broke a particular rule. Wachtell has not publicly detailed the status of its review, leaving the firm’s next step, and whether this viral bench-side moment leads to lasting professional fallout, as the part of the story that is still very much unresolved.
