When life veers off-track, how do you put the pieces back together in a way that’s not just bearable, but meaningful and beautiful?

Sittenfeld’s writing has appeared recently in The Washington Post, Esquire, Slate, America Magazine, Outside Magazine, and The Princeton Alumni Weekly, and he has also previously written for The New York Times, Huffington Post, and Cincinnati magazine. He regularly gives talks and keynote lectures at top American law schools, in private sector settings, and in U.S. prisons.

Sittenfeld is a graduate of Princeton University and Oxford University in England, where he was a Marshall Scholar. Previously, he served for nearly a decade on Cincinnati’s City Council and was widely expected to become the city’s next and youngest-ever mayor when he was prosecuted on public corruption charges in 2020, stemming from an FBI sting operation later likened in court to a “prosecutorial Truman Show.”

For four-and-a-half months in 2024, Sittenfeld was Federal Inmate 18085-509 at the Federal Correctional Institution in Ashland, Kentucky, before the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals took the highly unusual step of ordering his early release pending the final outcome of his appeal.

The law firm Jones Day took on Sittenfeld’s case pro bono, calling it “the most extreme prosecution based on lawful campaign donations in U.S. history,” and amici weighing in with the court in support of Sittenfeld’s innocence have included top White House, DOJ, and Judicial officials spanning the past four decades.

In May 2025, Sittenfeld received a full and unconditional pardon, after which Sittenfeld became the first person ever known to be in a position to and choose to move forward petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court after receiving a pardon. The Supreme Court is expected to resolve Sittenfeld’s case early in 2026.