The move to drop Kushner Companies, the family real estate company of Jared Kushner (pictured), came amid widespread outrage over Trump's response to protests in Charlottesville. | Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo. New York PR maven Risa Heller drops Kushner Cos.

Crisis management consultant Risa Heller has dropped Kushner Cos., the family real estate company of President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as a client, according to two sources familiar with the arrangement.

Heller dropped the client earlier this week after representing the company for just over a year and a half. That's longer than many of her predecessors working in media relations with Charlie Kushner, Jared's father and the family patriarch, have lasted in a job representing a famously acerbic boss and convicted felon.


A new spokesman for Kushner Companies, however, disputed that account and said the company decided to replace Heller this week. Heller declined to comment.

The split came amid widespread outrage over Trump's response to neo-Nazi and white nationalist protests in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Heller’s work with a real estate client was not political — but it bled into that realm after the election, when she served as a spokeswoman for Jared Kushner, before he joined the White House, and then for his wife, Ivanka Trump.

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Heller was hired separately by the president’s daughter last Christmas, before Ivanka Trump expected to take an official role in the administration. Heller helped oversee the rollout of Ivanka Trump’s self-help book, “Women Who Work,” earlier this year, and helped handle her ethics disclosures, but wrapped up her work with her client in July.

Heller’s involvement with two of the most prominent members of the Trump family and administration has roiled New York City political circles, where the one-woman crisis management machine has long been known as a straight-talking Democratic operative, known best as a former spokeswoman for New York Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer and as a close friend and adviser to former New York Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner. She now heads up her own firm, Risa Heller Communications.

Her departure from Kushner Companies comes as the real estate company is facing a PR crisis on multiple fronts. The Baltimore Sun reported this week that the company used judges to order the arrest of tenants who hadn’t paid their debt.

Meanwhile, the Chinese company Anbang Insurance Group has recently pulled out of negotiations to redevelop Kushner’s flagship Manhattan skyscraper, 666 Fifth Avenue.

"Risa is incredibly talented, driven and passionate,” Ivanka Trump told BuzzFeed last April. “She is a formidable advocate and respected by all as a trustworthy and honest broker of facts.”

Heller, a source familiar with the arrangement said, is leaving on good terms with Trump's adult children.

Kushner Companies, meanwhile, has retained a new public relations firm to represent it: Finsbury Communications, a global strategy firm based in London and New York.