LUTHMANN NOTE: Moira Kim Penza prosecuted me. I disclose that because readers deserve the whole field, not a cropped photograph. But this investigation does not rest on my grievance or my word. Former Loyola students came forward independently. A contemporaneous New York Post report establishes the gun threat and police response. Public FOIL requests are forcing the NYPD and Manhattan DA to search their files. If those records substantiate claims that Penza benefited from influence, manufactured blame, and institutional silence, every file she later touched deserves examination. Prosecutors do not get one evidentiary standard for defendants and another for themselves. Same microscope. Same inferences. Same rules. Giddy up, Moira. I’m your huckleberry. This piece was first available on NY News Press.
A park bench, a viral kiss and a ruined white-shoe career have opened a door Moira Kim Penza may have preferred to keep locked.
The New York Post reported Monday that Penza’s husband, Nathaniel Cullerton, is being pushed out of Wachtell Lipton after he was filmed kissing 29-year-old associate Kelsey Borenzweig in Central Park. Cullerton, 45, remains technically employed and on leave, but sources told the Post his departure is coming. His planned move to Gibson Dunn already died after the video exploded online.
Sources familiar with Wachtell’s internal calculus say the firm is not merely reacting to the park-bench video. It is bracing for what comes next: an expected divorce action by scorned wife Moira Kim Penza in New York Supreme Court.
If Penza files, Cullerton’s private disaster becomes a public legal war. Even with matrimonial records shielded from routine public inspection, every visible development will draw reporters, photographers, and courthouse sources. Custody, finances, adultery, workplace hierarchy, and the circumstances surrounding Cullerton’s relationship with Borenzweig will become tabloid targets. So will Cullerton’s partnership compensation, his aborted move to Gibson Dunn, and the cost of losing a career reportedly worth millions.
That prospect changes Wachtell’s calculation. The firm is not confronting a fading viral embarrassment. It faces the possibility of months or years of headlines tying one of the country’s most secretive law firms to a partner-associate romance, a collapsing marriage and a matrimonial knife fight featuring two elite litigators. Cullerton’s continued presence would keep Wachtell inside every new story.
Sources say Penza is expected to move soon. No divorce action has been publicly confirmed, and Penza has not announced one. But within the firm, the approaching courtroom storm is being treated as part of the risk profile. Wachtell’s answer appears increasingly clear: get Cullerton out before the divorce papers drag the firm back in.
That was Cullerton’s reckoning. It also triggered Penza’s.
Penza became famous prosecuting NXIVM. She built a public identity around sexual misconduct, coercion, deception, and the abuse of power. Now former classmates are applying that same prosecutorial lens to her. They point to a March 2001 threat against Loyola School in Manhattan, an NYPD effort to trace the sender, and a disciplinary ending they say was kept out of the press and the courts.
Several former Loyola students independently identify Penza as the student school officials determined was behind the threatening emails. They say she tried to pin responsibility on another student; Loyola later apologized to him in an assembly, and Penza was expelled, forced to withdraw, or otherwise removed.
Then comes the darker charge: sources with knowledge of the school community say Penza’s family had relationships with New York cops and figures connected to Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, and those relationships helped keep her from being charged.
That claim is no longer being ignored.
The underlying event is not rumor. It sits in black and white on March 15, 2001, in the New York Post.
Veteran police reporter Larry Celona reported that Loyola School, the Jesuit high school at 980 Park Avenue, received anonymous emails threatening seven students, Headmaster Rev. Joseph Papaj, S.J., and academic dean Sister Nora Cronin. The messages arrived on March 13. One warned that the sender knew where to obtain a gun and that some targets would not survive until spring break. Police guarded the building. Investigators were seeking a warrant to trace the emails.
Forget the softened retelling. This was not adolescent sniping or an ugly prank between classmates. Someone threatened armed violence against children and school administrators days after the Santana High School shooting. The NYPD treated it accordingly.
The contemporary record is explicit. This was a gun threat, and that is how this investigation will describe it.
But the Post story stops at the courthouse door. The coverage never identifies the sender. It never says whether police obtained the tracing warrant, found the originating account, examined a computer, interviewed Penza, or sent a case to Morgenthau’s prosecutors. There is no public follow-up explaining how a threat serious enough to put cops outside Loyola ended without a reported arrest, charge, or prosecutorial decision.
That missing ending is the story. Either the police failed to identify the sender, Loyola handled the matter privately, prosecutors declined to pursue the case, surviving records are sealed or destroyed, or someone with influence put their thumb on the scale. Former students insist it was the last one.
The former Loyola students are not merely saying Penza was unpopular, troubled, or rumored to be involved. Their account is direct and brutal: school officials identified Penza as the sender; she tried to shift blame to another student; administrators publicly cleared that student; and Penza vanished from Loyola.
One witness can misremember. A school rumor can mutate over twenty-five years. Multiple students independently describing the same accused sender, the same scapegoat, the same assembly apology, and the same abrupt departure create something else: a testable case.
The assembly is the pressure point. Loyola apologized to the student body, and dozens of people heard it, only raising more questions:
Who spoke?
Was the wrongly accused student brought forward?
Did Papaj or another administrator identify what investigators had discovered?
Was Penza present?
Did Loyola announce an expulsion, or did the family arrange a quieter withdrawal?
Those answers do not live in speculation. They live with surviving students, faculty, and administrators whom we are actively canvassing.
Penza’s polished professional biographies leave a conspicuous blank. A Binghamton University profile says she completed college in three years and graduated in 2005. It says nothing about where she completed high school, whether she remained at Loyola after March 2001 or why she may have left.
Investigators are now seeking Loyola’s 2000–2001 and 2001–2002 yearbooks, its 2002 graduation program, enrollment evidence, parent notices, and records of the reported assembly. If you have any information, please feel free to reach out to this outlet. Your confidentiality is assured under Section 79-h of the New York Civil Rights Law.
Penza was sent detailed questions on August 17 about the emails, the other student, her departure, police contact, and any criminal disposition. She was invited to deny the accounts and produce contrary records. She did not respond. Here is what we asked:
Date: On Monday, August 17th, 2026 at 3:16 PM
Subject: Request for Comment: School-Threat Claims, Central Park Scandal and Dominatrix Allegations
To: mpenza@wilkinsonstekloff.com mpenza@wilkinsonstekloff.com
CC: RALafontaine@protonmail.com ralafontaine@protonmail.com, Frankie Pressman frankiepressman@protonmail.com, Frank Parlato frankparlato@gmail.com, Modern Thomas Nast mthomasnast@protonmail.com, richard@nynewspress.com richard@nynewspress.com, msully0916@gmail.com msully0916@gmail.com, Michael Volpe mvolpe998@gmail.com, juliea005 juliea005@proton.me
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Were you questioned or investigated in connection with the emailed threat reported by the New York Post on March 15, 2001?
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Did you send, participate in sending, or have advance knowledge of that threat?
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Did you attempt to direct suspicion toward another Loyola student?
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Several former Loyola students who attended the school at the time independently told us that you were identified within the school community as the sender. Do you deny their account?
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The former students further allege that another student (James Hill) was wrongly implicated and that Loyola later apologized to him during a school assembly. Did that assembly occur? Were you present?
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Were you suspended, expelled, asked to withdraw, or otherwise disciplined in connection with the incident?
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Did you leave Loyola following the March 2001 incident and never return? If so, why did you leave, and where did you complete high school?
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Were you arrested, charged, diverted, adjudicated, or subjected to any juvenile proceeding arising from the threat?
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Do you possess any enrollment, disciplinary, police, court, or school records contradicting the former students’ accounts?
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Was there any marital arrangement or other circumstance that would make the widespread characterization of his conduct as cheating inaccurate?
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Did you know about any personal or romantic relationship between Mr. Cullerton and Ms. Borenzweig before the video became public?
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Have you separated from Mr. Cullerton, retained matrimonial counsel, commenced divorce proceedings, or decided to seek a divorce?
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If a divorce or separation is underway, do you contend that Mr. Cullerton’s reported conduct caused or contributed to it?
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Did you or anyone representing you communicate with the Daily Mail before its initial story was published?
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Did you authorize, coordinate, review, influence, or approve any portion of the Daily Mail’s coverage?
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Did you provide, directly or indirectly, information portraying yourself as the wronged spouse while omitting the existence of your child?
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Do you know who supplied the Daily Mail with the personal and residential information used in its reporting?
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Did you ask any news organization to withhold your child’s existence or remove the child from its account of the family?
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Do you believe the coverage fairly addressed the effect of the scandal on your child?
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Have you ever performed, advertised, arranged, or accepted compensation, gifts, or anything of value for dominatrix services?
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Have you ever used an alias, stage name, online account, advertisement, private venue, or commercial service in connection with dominatrix or BDSM activity?
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Did any such activity occur while you were employed by the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York?
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Were sex-related clothing, equipment, accessories, or other items ever stored in, discovered in, or removed from a desk or office you used at 271 Cadman Plaza East?
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If such items existed, were they yours? If not, how did they come to be associated with your former workspace?
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Did you have any personal, romantic, or sexual relationship with an FBI employee or agent connected to the NXIVM investigation or prosecution?
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If any private relationship existed with a federal agent involved in a matter you handled, was it disclosed to supervisors, defense counsel, or the court?
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Do you contend that these allegations are fabricated? If so, who do you believe fabricated them, and what evidence demonstrates they are false?
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Is your position that any dominatrix or BDSM activity, if it occurred, was lawful private conduct with no bearing on your professional responsibilities? If so, please state that clearly.
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Was Attorney Lindsay Gerdes your co-worker at the United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York?
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Is there any evidence, explanation, or context you believe we must review before publication?
Independent Journalist
(239) 766-5800
Silence will not convict her. It will not answer the witnesses either.
Now we reach the accusation with institutional consequences. Sources with knowledge of the Loyola community say Penza’s father was a recognized figure in New York’s bar business who knew cops and people inside then-District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s orbit. Their account is that those relationships were activated after Penza was identified, allowing a potential criminal case to be reduced to a private school exit.
No arrest. No public charge. No reported reckoning.
Those sources are not yet a documented finding. But it did not fall from the sky. The sources say it happened.
Penza’s own Binghamton profile says her father owns a New York City dive bar. Punch, The New Yorker and Patch document the Penza family’s deep roots in the city’s bar world. Billy and Mark Penza operated Billymark’s West in Chelsea. Their father, Hank Penza, owned the legendary Mars Bar and other Bowery establishments.
Robert Morgenthau ruled the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office from 1975 until 2009. His civic reach extended through the Police Athletic League and generations of prosecutors, detectives, political figures, and New York power brokers. In that city, at that time, a prominent bar owner knowing cops and courthouse people was hardly exotic.
Access, however, is not intervention, and sources may have supplied the missing link to answer the crucial questions that changed the case’s trajectory:
Who contacted whom?
Which detective had the file?
Did prosecutors receive it?
Was a suspect identified before the matter disappeared?
If the sources are right, this was not mercy. It was a fix.
The investigation has moved past reunion talk. The NYPD and Morgenthau’s former office are now on the clock.
On August 17, 2026, parallel Freedom of Information Law requests were filed with the NYPD and the New York County District Attorney’s Office. Both identify Loyola, the March 13–15, 2001 dates, the 19th Precinct, Papaj, Cronin, the substance of the gun threat, and Penza as a name that may appear in investigative records.
NYPD request FOIL-2026-056-26279 demands the complaint report, detective DD-5s, case logs, patrol deployments, copies of the threatening emails, header and subscriber data, warrant applications, subpoenas, witness interviews, suspect-identification records, communications with Loyola and prosecutors, closure codes, and any destruction documentation. NYPD acknowledged it on August 19, assigned Police Officer Corbett, and projected a response by January 6, 2027.
District Attorney’s request FOIL-2026-901-00570 seeks intake records, police referrals, warrant assistance, subpoenas, preservati…
