Evelyn Y. Davis’ widower is demanding an apology from Lloyd Blankfein after the former Goldman Sachs CEO slammed the shareholder activist’s newsletter as “expensive and worthless” in his new memoir.
James Patterson, the fourth and final husband of the late Wall Street gadfly, ripped Blankfein for allegedly disrespecting Davis, who spent decades confronting corporate power — including Blankfein himself.
“Blankfein made a disrespectful comment about my late wife,” Patterson wrote in an email to The Post.
Patterson noted that Blankfein’s book “Streetwise: Getting to and Through Goldman Sachs,” released March 3 by Penguin Press, described Davis as a “relentless and ambitious” businesswoman.
“As her fourth husband, I agree with that assessment,” Patterson wrote, adding that her persistence was precisely why many executives disliked her.
But he drew the line at Blankfein’s dismissal of her long-running newsletter, “Highlights and Lowlights,” which chronicled her encounters in corporate boardrooms and shareholder meetings.
“The gadflies I later had to deal with as CEO included rejected job applicants, socialist nuns, and Evelyn Davis, who was relentless, especially if you failed to subscribe to her expensive and worthless newsletter,” Blankfein wrote in the passage at issue.
Blankfein declined to comment when reached by The Post.
Davis, a Dutch Holocaust survivor and longtime shareholder activist, was a recurring presence at corporate annual meetings, including Goldman’s, for decades. She died in 2018 at the age of 89.
At a 2011 Goldman Sachs annual meeting, she publicly called on Blankfein to step down, accusing the firm of misleading investors during the subprime mortgage meltdown. Goldman paid $550 million to settle related SEC charges the year before.
At one meeting, Davis mockingly dubbed Blankfein “Lord Goldmine” as she pressed him to resign.
Despite the barbs, the exchanges sometimes veered into strange familiarity, with Davis mixing criticism with personal asides during the Q&A sessions that became must-watch moments for reporters covering Wall Street.
Patterson noted that in 2006, then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson appeared on the cover of the publication — evidence, he argued, that the firm took Davis seriously despite any public eye-rolling.
“Goldman Sachs subscribed to it for many years,” Patterson said of the newsletter.
Patterson said Davis believed Blankfein failed to listen to shareholder concerns following the financial crisis — a frustration she aired publicly when given the microphone.
Still, he pointed to a comment Blankfein himself made upon her retirement from attending meetings in 2012.
“When she retired in 2012, Blankfein said: ‘Without Evelyn, it [the annual meeting] just wasn’t the same,’” Patterson wrote.
Now, Patterson is calling on the former CEO to go further.
“Blankfein owes Mrs. Davis an apology. I am waiting for it,” he wrote. “Her work was important.”
Davis used small stakes in major companies to gain access to annual meetings, where she would submit shareholder proposals and confront executives directly.
Her activism stretched back to the 1950s and focused in part on pushing for greater inclusion of minority and female shareholders.
