Risa Heller

Risa Heller graduated from the University of Michigan in 2001, having majored in psychology and in Hebrew and Jewish cultural studies, and later took a master's degree in communications at Johns Hopkins University.¹² After an internship at the Washington office of the Anti-Defamation League, she worked for Representative Jane Harman of California from 2004 to 2005 and then, from 2005, as the New York City press secretary of Senator Chuck Schumer; she later held a similar post under Governor David Paterson of New York.¹²³ "I would be nobody, nothing, nowhere without Chuck," she told New York magazine in 2023. She also worked at the Democratic consulting firm Global Strategy Group, where she came to know her husband, Ryan Toohey, a former aide to Eliot Spitzer who became a partner at Dentons Global Advisors.¹

Risa Heller Communications

Heller founded Risa Heller Communications in 2010. It had eighteen employees in early 2023. It trades as Heller and has offices in New York and Los Angeles.¹²

Its first crisis client, in 2011, was Representative Anthony Weiner, then under scrutiny for sending an explicit photograph; she continued to advise him through his 2013 mayoral campaign and his 2017 case over messages to a minor.¹⁴ Jared Kushner and Kushner Companies were long-standing clients. The engagement began before the 2016 presidential campaign to handle press on Kushner's divestiture from the family business, and in January 2017 she defended him against a New York Times report on his dealings with a Chinese businessman. She then worked on the public image of Ivanka Trump as Ivanka Trump took up a White House role. Schumer said: "I told her I didn't approve of that."¹⁴

In 2015 Harvey Weinstein retained her against the accusation of the model Ambra Battilana, and she gave the Times his statement: "We are pleased this episode is behind us." Other clients recorded by New York magazine include Kevin Clash, the puppeteer of Elmo, against allegations of sex with teenagers (the cases were dismissed); the chef Mario Batali, accused of groping women; Win Butler of Arcade Fire; the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin; and the former Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. in his divorce.¹ In January 2022 she represented Jeff Zucker when his relationship with his deputy, Allison Gollust, ended his presidency of CNN; he had been introduced to her by Gary Ginsberg, a former adviser to Rupert Murdoch. In 2023 she represented Jeff Shell on his dismissal as chief executive of NBCUniversal.¹³

She was reported to have helped Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted founder of Theranos, to place the New York Times profile "Liz Holmes Wants You to Forget About Elizabeth," published on May 7, 2023, three weeks before Holmes reported to prison.⁵ In February 2021 the spokesperson for GPB Capital Holdings, whose founder David Gentile had been arrested, was Linden Zakula of Heller's firm; he denied on GPB's behalf any part in 103 million dollars of land purchases in Clearwater, Florida, by limited liability companies owned by Scientologists.⁶ The surveillance-camera maker Verkada retained the firm in about 2021.⁷

New York magazine described her closeness to the reporters who cover her clients: she hosted a book party for Maggie Haberman of the Times, and when a New Yorker writer began a profile of Jon Kelly of Puck, Kelly "called up Heller to run interference."¹

Epstein

In 2026 The Hollywood Reporter, surveying the crisis-communications consultants who had worked for Jeffrey Epstein (among them Dan Klores, to whose firm Epstein's company paid 10,000 dollars in January 2007), reported that Heller "never herself had any dealings with Epstein" and was then handling the fallout for Casey Wasserman, chairman of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic organizing committee, after the release of his correspondence with Ghislaine Maxwell.⁸