To clarify the literature’s conflicting findings on the impact of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) controversies on firm value, this paper examines subcategory impacts within ESG pillars. We take advantage of a novel dataset to build cross-industry comparable quarterly subcategory scores. Aggregating them at different levels, our analysis of U.S. firms reveals significant impacts of controversies at both overall and sub-pillar levels, that are not systematically reduced by a higher initial ESG commitment. Conflicting subcategory effects within the same pillar explain the lack of significant pillar-level impact. This highlights the need to differentiate sub-pillar component effects to avoid premature conclusions.