Ex-Wall Street bigwig gets 30 years for drugging, raping women — after blaming his ‘autism’

A former Citigroup bigwig was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday after admitting to drugging and raping multiple women in his luxe Central Park South digs — and blaming his “autism” for the sinister sex crimes.

Harvard-educated Edward Gene Smith, 50, called his “autism spectrum disorder” the “primary driver” of a decade-long reign of terror — a claim Manhattan federal prosecutors called “inflammatory nonsense” as they described the chilling notes he kept to document his attacks.

Smith recorded one of his depraved assaults in April 2023, when he raped an incapacitated woman after drugging her with a laced drink, according to his guilty plea in January.

Edward Gene Smith, who was arrested in 2024, worked at several banks and became a managing director at Citigroup. AFP via Getty Images

He then shared the footage with other deviants on an encrypted platform.

The ex-Wall Street hotshot was arrested in 2024 after working at several banks and rising through the ranks at Citigroup to become a managing director.

He repeatedly drugged and raped a college student he convinced to move to New York City in 2019, according his sick admission.

Smith separately kept a twisted trove in his Manhattan rental apartment of tens of thousands of images of children being sexually abused, and paid one of his victims thousands of dollars to sign a phony “letter of support,” according to Manhattan US Attorney Jay Clayton.

The disgraced former bank bigwig kept extensive notes planning how he would torture and punish his victims, prosecutors said.

“Edward Gene Smith is a sexual predator and a serial rapist,” Clayton said in a statement. “He spent years hiding behind wealth, education, and status while he committed egregious sexual crimes.”

“He is now where he belongs, in prison,” Clayton added.

After pleading guilty, Smith brought up his purported “autism spectrum disorder,” or ASD, in a bid to convince Judge Paul Engelmayer to hand him a more lenient sentence.

“Mr. Smith’s ASD is the primary driver of his offense conduct. It is the reason that his interactions crossed the line from legal, if unorthodox, to criminal,” defense lawyers Donna Newman and Clara Kalhaus wrote to the court earlier this month.

The Ivy League graduate was “devastated to learn that his understanding of his relationships with the women he thought of as his girlfriends was wrong, and that they experienced their encounters with him as non-consensual sexual abuse and even rape,” his attorneys added.

Prosecutors shot back that Smith had made “an offensive smear to those in the autism community” while shirking responsibility for the shocking crimes, which unfolded from as early as 2015 to his 2024 bust.

“There can be no mistake. The defendant knew exactly what he was doing when he drugged and sexually abused his victims. He knew exactly what he was doing when he sought out, downloaded, collected, and organized horrific images of the sexual abuse of children. And he knew exactly what he was doing when he paid a woman he raped to try to cover up his crimes,” the Manhattan US Attorney’s Office wrote.

Smith’s crimes began as early as 2015 and continued until his arrest. He has been sentenced to 30 years in prison. New Africa – stock.adobe.com

Smith has a wife, Heather Rodgers, who he married in 2012, according to his lawyers. Rodgers lives in South Carolina in a home the feds are attempting to seize in order to provide restitution to his victims, court papers show.

Smith had reached out to the victims on online platforms where he pursued “sugar dating” relationships, telling the women he would pay them to act out his sexual “fantasies,” his lawyers wrote.

“Even before he married Heather, Edward had begun looking for sexual partners who would engage in sexual activities he had viewed on the internet, including his ‘drunk girl’ fantasy, in which his partner would consume copious quantities of alcohol before intercourse,” his attorneys said.

A rep for Citi said Smith was fired as soon as the bank learned that he was being investigated by law enforcement.

“We cooperated with law enforcement as they sought justice for the victims of these heinous crimes,” a company spokesperson said.