Tom Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels Corporation on Monday, telling the company's board that his association with Jeffrey Epstein left him no choice but to go.
The resignation follows the release of Justice Department files showing Pritzker maintained close contact with Epstein for years after the financier's 2008 plea deal for procuring a minor for prostitution. Not before the conviction. After it.
In a letter to Hyatt's board, Pritzker framed the move as corporate responsibility:
"Good stewardship also means protecting Hyatt, particularly in the context of my association with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell which I deeply regret."
He continued:
"I exercised terrible judgment in maintaining contact with them, and there is no excuse for failing to distance myself sooner."
Pritzker, 75, has chaired Hyatt since 2004. He announced he would not seek reelection for the role in May. Hyatt President Mark S. Hoplamazian has been appointed to fill the seat.
Pritzker has not been accused of criminal wrongdoing. But the emails released by the Justice Department paint a picture that goes well beyond casual acquaintance.
The documents show Pritzker communicated with Epstein about his interactions with girls — the kind of detail that makes "I regret the association" land with a thud rather than a bang.
In one 2018 email, Pritzker helped facilitate travel to Asia for one of Epstein's partners who was looking to help Epstein "gain another girlfriend." That's a decade after the plea deal. A full ten years of knowing exactly who Jeffrey Epstein was and what he had done.
Another exchange, from 2010, is even more revealing. According to NBC 5 Chicago, Epstein wrote to Pritzker:
"The girl from Romania that you met at my house, is currently living in london, can we see if there is a starting position in any of the hotels."
Pritzker's reply:
"Have her send me a resume. I can have her interviewed, no idea if they are hiring."
Epstein's response was a single word:
"great."
Read that exchange again. A convicted sex offender asks a hotel magnate to find a job for a girl Pritzker met at Epstein's house. And the answer isn't "lose my number." It's "send me a resume."
Pritzker is not an isolated case. He is one of multiple prominent figures exposed by the roughly 3 million documents the Justice Department released from the Epstein files. Casey Wasserman, Larry Summers, and several European diplomats have all stepped down from their respective posts after being named.
The speed of these resignations tells you something. These aren't people fighting the accusations. People are running from the paper trail. The documents don't require interpretation or inference — they're emails, in the words of the people who wrote them, saying exactly what they meant.
For years, the Epstein story carried an unspoken subtext: the powerful people in his orbit would never truly face consequences. The legal system handled Epstein himself — eventually — and Ghislaine Maxwell sits in a federal prison. But the network of wealthy, connected individuals who kept Epstein socially viable long after his conviction? They walked through raindrops.
The Justice Department file release changed that calculus. Not through prosecution, but through exposure. Sunlight, it turns out, still works.
Pritzker's letter strikes the right notes of contrition. "Terrible judgment." "No excuse." "Deeply regret." Corporate communications teams earn their fees crafting language like this — apologetic enough to sound sincere, vague enough to avoid legal exposure.
But words like "judgment" and "association" do a lot of heavy lifting. They reframe years of active engagement with a convicted sex offender as a passive social error, like attending the wrong dinner party. The emails suggest something more deliberate. You don't help arrange international travel for a predator's associates by accident. You don't field job placement requests for girls met at a sex offender's home through absent-mindedness.
Pritzker chose not to distance himself from Epstein after the 2008 conviction. He chose to remain in contact through 2018 — a span that covers nearly the entire period between Epstein's first conviction and his 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges. That's not a lapse in judgment. That's a decade-long decision, renewed every time he opened an email.
The Epstein files have already claimed more scalps than most Washington scandals manage in a full news cycle. The question now is whether the resignations represent the end of accountability or just the beginning.
Three million documents is a staggering volume. The names that have surfaced so far came from early reporting. There are almost certainly more. And every executive, diplomat, and public figure who maintained ties to Epstein after his conviction has to be wondering whether their name sits somewhere in that pile, waiting for a journalist to find it.
Pritzker's resignation protects Hyatt from the worst of the fallout. It does nothing to answer the deeper question that hangs over every name in those files: What did these people know, what did they see and do, and why did none of them say a word?
