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Leon Black, a former Apollo Global Management executive, has been hit by a lawsuit claiming he raped and harassed a young Russian model before manipulating her with money promises and fake job interviews at Goldman Sachs.
The claims, which come weeks after Black He resigned of Apollo after the scrutiny of his ties with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, contradicts Black’s account of what he has characterized as a “consensual affair” with a woman he said he later extorted.
Guzel Ganieva was about twenty years old when she said that Black chose her from a crowd at an event in New York on the occasion of International Women’s Day and invited her to talk about her future during a dinner at the exclusive restaurant La Grenouille.
She alleges that shortly after that 2008 meeting, the founder of Apollo Global Management took her to a naked studio where, on a mattress on the floor, he subjected her to “forced sadistic sexual acts”.
Black “derived the pleasure of humiliating and degrading” Ganieva and intentionally caused him physical pain, according to a civil complaint archived Tuesday in the New York State Supreme Court.
But when Ganieva indicated he was cutting off contact, he says Black she became a conciliator: offering to fund a film she could produce and using her contacts to facilitate an application at Harvard Business School.
“This frivolous lawsuit is full of lies and is nothing more than wholesale fiction,” a Black spokesman said on Tuesday, adding that Ganieva “had a fully consensual relationship with [Black] for six years ”and that his allegations of“ harassment and other inappropriate behavior ”were“ categorically false ”.
Black resigned from Apollo in March, citing “relentless public attention and media scrutiny” of his professional ties to Epstein, to whom he paid $ 158 million for tax advice and artistic transaction services. An investigation by Dechert, the international law firm, found no evidence that blacks had committed anything.
Ganieva’s lawsuit alleges that Black damaged his reputation by making false and malicious statements in response to news items detailing some of his allegations of sexual harassment.
“The truth is that I have been extorted by Ms. Ganieva for many years,” Black said in an April statement that Ganieva’s lawyers say they were “fake and defamatory.”
“I made substantial monetary payments to him, based on his threats to make our relationship public, in an attempt to save my family from public embarrassment,” the statement added.
Ganieva’s lawsuit offers a different version of events related to the money she received from Black, starting with a $ 480,000 loan she said she offered in June 2011 to help her resume college.
A photograph of a one-page “loan agreement” attached to the lawsuit appears to carry Black’s fluid signature along with Ganieva’s, and provides for him to receive $ 60,000 every three months for the next two years.
“The principal loan will be repaid in full on June 1, 2016 and will have a simple interest rate of 5% per annum,” the document says, without calculating the amount to be repaid. Ganieva says he signed another almost identical “loan agreement” in 2013.
After graduating with a degree in mathematics, Ganieva began looking for work and said that Black offered her help and organized the meeting with the top executives of Goldman Sachs. Among them was Alison Mass, who now chairs the investment banking division.
A person familiar with the 2014 meetings said the bank had not interviewed Ganieva for any specific position and that it was not uncommon to hold open conversations about possible vacancies at the request of a client. Goldman declined to comment.
In the end, no work materialized. “Given the macroeconomic environment, there are currently no open jobs at Goldman Sachs that work for you / are suitable for you,” a Goldman banker in Ganieva wrote in an email, adding that a partner “would keep the open eyes “to get job openings with clients in Moscow.
“In retrospect, Ms. Ganieva knows that none of these arranged interviews were meant to be legitimate,” her lawyers wrote in a lawsuit.
A year after the meetings at Goldman Sachs, Ganieva says she asked Black “to leave her and her son alone for good.”
At a meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, he says Black agreed to forgive his loans and ordered him to sign two documents without allowing him to keep a copy. He says he now understands that he signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Ganieva then says he started receiving regular payments from Black, but that the money stopped coming in April. Weeks earlier Ganieva posted on Twitter that Black was a “predator” who had “harassed and sexually abused” him for many years.
Through a spokesman, Black has admitted to having paid Ganieva and said he had “advised the criminal authorities” of his activities.
In Tuesday’s court hearing, Ganieva’s lawyers said Black was making a “preventive extortion claim” to hinder his lawsuit.
They wrote, “He told him many times, ‘If you don’t take the money, I’ll put you in jail.’
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