Billionaire Leon Black, one of the most powerful figures on Wall Street, claims lawyers and spin doctors working on behalf of a former lover and financed by a wealthy backer are conspiring to destroy him professionally and personally.
In another turn in the legal saga involving Black and Guzel Ganieva, a former Russian model who has accused him of rape, Black filed a lawsuit on Thursday in New York under the federal racketeering laws often used to bring down Mafia dons.
The suit against Ganieva, law firm Wigdor LLP, and other unidentified defendants carries a tantalizing claim: an unnamed “funder” — someone who can take on Black and knows how his world works — is behind the curtain, working to help Ganieva, her lawyers and media specialists to smear Black.
The defendants “duped and manipulated the media and the courts, using the mails and the wires, to orchestrate an assassination of Mr. Black on every level,” Black’s lawyers said in the filing.
“This is an obvious act of retaliation,” responded Jeanne Christensen, Ganieva’s lawyer at Wigdor. “It is disheartening to learn that Quinn Emanuel, despite the firm’s marketing campaign to represent sexual assault victims, is now defending Leon Black and suing a rape survivor and the law firm representing her. We look forward to defending ourselves against these ludicrous allegations.”
Ganieva didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
The drama between Black, 70, and Ganieva has escalated in a series of back-and-forth lawsuits. Ganieva’s initial allegations of sexual assault, first revealed in Tweets in mid-March, followed reports of Black’s larger than expected payments for tax advice and financial services to disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein totaling $158 million.
Black has since stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer of Apollo Global Management Inc., the firm he co-founded, and receded from coveted roles including chairman of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
Black has accused Ganieva of extortion and denied the allegation that he sexually assaulted her, instead characterizing their relationship as a consensual affair, which started in 2008 and ended around 2014. To keep it secret, he made regular payments to her totaling more than $9 million. He also denies taking Ganieva to Florida, where she claims she was brought for the purpose of engaging in sex acts with Epstein.
Black’s legal team has referred to flight logs and quoted from text messages and audio recordings that they contend will prove his innocence.
Thursday’s suit, filed in Manhattan, details what Black’s legal team characterizes as a conspiracy against him.
“I’ve seen a lot of ugly stuff, but what I haven’t seen before is an organized campaign to use charges of sexual assault as part of an effort to cancel somebody,” said Susan Estrich, who’s representing Black and has previously defended Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News.
Filing a lawsuit that accuses opposing lawyers of racketeering is highly uncommon. In the 51-page document, Black and his legal team lay out a plot orchestrated by those referred to as John Doe 1, 2 and 3.
The first two are unnamed public relations experts who the suit alleges were needed to “draft the Tweets with the right hashtags, and to make sure that the lies were then sold to the media.”
John Doe 3 is described as “covering some or all of the costs,” including payments to the public relations experts and compensation for Ganieva, replacing the money she would still be receiving had she not broken her agreement with Black to keep their relationship private.
It “took an Enterprise as skilled in social and mainstream media as it was in law; an Enterprise well-funded enough to take on a billionaire; an Enterprise that convinced Ms. Ganieva to forgo the $100,000 Mr. Black was paying her each month to publicly smear Mr. Black’s name and squeeze even more out of him,” according to Black’s filing.
Black has a net worth of $13.2 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The bulk of his wealth is tied up in shares of Apollo, where newly appointed Chief Executive Officer Marc Rowan is soon to be the sole co-founder involved with the storied firm. The stock has jumped almost 60% this year, and Black has never sold a share in the company.
Rowan was picked by Black and Apollo’s board earlier this year to be Black’s successor. Josh Harris, who had expressed a desire to take over as CEO, was sidelined after losing a bid to oust Black. Harris is expected to depart Apollo early next year, according to Apollo. Bloomberg reported in July that he has plans to raise a fund of his own.
—With assistance from Gillian Tan.
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.
