P.G. Sittenfeld

Writer and Public Speaker

Biography

P.G. Sittenfeld is a writer and public speaker whose recent work has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Free Press, The Washington Post, Esquire, Slate, Outside, The Hill, America Magazine, and Princeton Alumni Weekly. His journey has taken him from Princeton University to politics to prison to successful Supreme Court petitioner.

Previously, P.G. served for a decade on Cincinnati’s City Council, where he was the city’s top vote-getter and frontrunner to become mayor. In 2020, he was prosecuted on public corruption charges, stemming from an FBI sting operation likened in court to a “prosecutorial Truman Show.”

In 2024, P.G. was incarcerated for 4.5 months at FCI Ashland in Kentucky, until an appeals court took the rare step of ordering his early release. In 2025, he received a full and unconditional Presidential pardon. And in 2026, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated P.G.’s convictions and the trial judge permanently dismissed the case against him and ordered the government to repay a fine to his family.

Today, P.G. enjoys writing about the U.S. legal and criminal justice system, faith, and fatherhood, and he regularly speaks around the country at law schools and law firms, in private sector settings, and in American prisons. He attended Princeton University and completed his graduate studies at Oxford University, where he was a Marshall Scholar.

P.G. lives with his wife and three young sons in Cincinnati, where he coaches youth track and teaches Sunday school at St. Francis de Sales Catholic Church.