Leon Black speaks onstage at a MoMA tribute to Martin Scorsese on Nov. 19, 2018 in New York City.
Attorneys for billionaire Leon Black, who resigned from his hedge fund years ago amid scrutiny of his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, said during a court hearing on Tuesday that a signed agreement backed up by years of payments shield him from one of two lawsuits accusing him of rape.
In 2021, Black quit his position as CEO of Apollo Global Management months before his scheduled resignation shortly after Russian model Guzel Ganieva labeled him a “predator” on Twitter. Ganieva followed up those tweets with a lawsuit filed in New York County Supreme Court.
For more than five years before those tweets, however, Ganieva accepted monthly, six-figure payments, Black says. The parties dispute the events that preceded those transfers.
Ganieva’s lawsuit alleges that she was a single mother in her early 20s who recently immigrated to the U.S. from Russia when she first encountered Black in 2008. She claims that Black started performing “sadistic sexual acts on her without her consent and despite her saying no” that year. Black, who is married, insists that they had a consensual relationship that lasted for six years until 2014.
In 2011, Ganieva said that she relied upon Black to help finance her undergraduate studies in order to seek a career outside modeling. Black had her sign a $480,000 “loan” with a five-percent interest rate that she couldn’t repay, according to her lawsuit.
Ganieva claims Black had her sign another one just like it two years later in 2013.
Black’s lawyer Michael Carlinsky, from the firm Quinn Emanuel, kicked off his oral argument by pointing to a different agreement: a one-page document titled “Release and Non-Disclosure,” which Carlinsky described as a “broad release”—and a lucrative one.
When she entered into the release at a lunch meeting at the Four Seasons restaurant in October 2015, Ganieva received $2 million at signing, forgiveness of the roughly $1 million loan and monthly payments of $100,000 for more than five years, leading to a total of roughly $9.5 million, Carlinsky said.
Black’s lawyer noted that Ganieva graduated from Columbia University, sought the hedge fund honcho’s help applying to Harvard University and spent a period of time as a writer for U.S. News and World Report. Ganieva is now a law school graduate.
“You have a sophisticated plaintiff who signs a release that is one page in plain English,” Carlinsky said.
Ganieva’s lawyer Jeanne M. Christensen argues that her client entered into those agreements under duress. She argued that her client required “remedial help in English” to attain her academic and professional achievements.
“They’re assuming that it’s valid and enforceable,” Christensen said, referring to the agreement.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice David Cohen asked Christensen whether she requested a copy of the agreement before filing the lawsuit. Christensen conceded that Ganieva’s legal team did not.
Carlinsky, however, claims that Ganieva didn’t object to the agreements as she continued to receive money from Black.
“If you’re going to repudiate the costs that you claimed at the time, you have to repudiate, and you have to repudiate promptly,” Carlinsky argued. “There’s not a case that we found, your honor, that goes beyond two years.”
Christensen claims that her client feared terrible blowback if she refused the hush money.
“How can she repudiate this when she is under the release that if she violates this, she believes that she will be thrown in jail?” Christensen asked.
Christensen denies that the agreement called for monthly, six-figure payments.
“All this nonsense about her being paid for 15 years is just that,” she said. “It’s not in this document.”
She conceded that there may have been an informal agreement, which could explain the 65 months of payments along the principle: “As long as you keep your mouth shut, I’m going to keep paying you money.”
“When did the payments stop?” the judge asked.
Christensen replied that they ended when her client went forward in her tweets.
At one point, Justice Cohen asked whether Ganieva would return the money from the monthly payments if he were to find she entered the agreement under duress, but Christensen would not commit to that.
“I’d have to speak to my client, your honor,” she said.
The judge remained skeptical.
“Doesn’t her failure to return that consideration doom her claim that she repudiated the agreement?” he asked.
Ganieva has claimed that Black defamed her by publicly accusing her of extortion in a statement to Bloomberg.
Black’s other lawyer E. Danya Perry from the firm Perry Guha told the judge: “Our argument is that that is demonstrably true.”
“He believed, subjectively—we think fairly—that she had extorted him,” Perry said.
Apollo claimed that an independent review by the global law firm Dechert LLP cleared Black and the company of any impropriety in connection to Epstein. Derchert’s report found that Black paid Epstein $158 million for estate planning between 2012 through 2017, well after Epstein was jailed after pleading guilty on a charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution in Florida.
A separate lawsuit, filed by Cheri Pierson in the same court, also accused Black of sexual assault inside Epstein’s New York townhouse.
Justice Cohen ended the hearing without a ruling.
Have a tip we should know? [email protected]
