In a legal filing on Tuesday, an unnamed woman accused billionaire Leon Black of raping her in Jeffrey Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion in 2002. According to the documents, a woman identified as “Jane Doe” claims that Epstein paid her $300 to give a massage to the former Apollo Global Management CEO in the massage room on the third floor of his home. When she and Black entered the room, he tried to give her oral sex, which he allegedly called “the delicacy of kings.” When she refused, he allegedly bent her over the massage table and penetrated her with a “terribly painful object.”
Weeks after, she claims that Black invited her to meet him for lunch at a restaurant in the building where Apollo was located, but she left early after, breaking into tears. In a third and final meeting, he gave her $5,000 to pay off credit-card debt; she did not report the sexual assault at the time because a friend told her no one would believe her, according to the suit.
The allegation was included in new court documents that are part of a lawsuit in New York Supreme Court in which former model Guzel Ganieva is suing Black for defamation, after he denied her claims that he raped her at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2014. Following a legal back-and-forth this summer over the 2014 rape claim and a subsequent NDA, in August, Ganieva submitted a new filing alleging that Black sexually trafficked her in October 2008, flying her from New York to Palm Beach “without her consent, to satisfy the sex needs of Epstein.” The additional filing with the Jane Doe allegation from 2002 was submitted after Black’s attorneys filed a response earlier in September denying the 2008 incident, which included an alleged audio recording of Ganieva saying that she had never met Epstein. As for the new allegation, a spokesperson for Black called it “complete fiction.”
Black, an alumnus of the notorious junk-bond bank Drexel Burnham Lambert, had avoided a reckoning for his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein until this year, when an internal probe at Apollo found that he gave $158 million to the alleged sex trafficker for pretty simple tax-planning and real-estate advice. As Black prepared his departure from Apollo and from his position as board chairman at the Museum of Modern Art — he owns Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream — his latest legal troubles began in a tweet from Ganieva in March, when she came forward to claim she was “sexually harassed and abused by him for years.”
