Former Apollo director Leon Black raped and harassed Russian model, allegations allege

Leon Black, a former CEO of Apollo Global Management, has filed a lawsuit alleging that he raped and harassed a young Russian model before he was manipulated with Goldman Sachs money orders and job interview simulations.

Claims, a few weeks from Black he resigned From Apollo, after examining his connections with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, contradicts what Black described as what he described as a “consensual relationship” that he later extorted from the woman.

When Guzel Ganieva was about 20 years old, she said that Black chose her at an event in New York that celebrated International Women’s Day, and invited her to discuss her future at a luxury dinner at La Grenouille restaurant.

He complained that after that 2008 meeting, the founder of Apollo Global Management took him to a naked studio, on a mattress on the floor, where he suffered “forced sadistic sexual acts”.

Black is “derived from the humiliation and diminution of enjoyment” Ganieva and deliberately inflicted physical harm on him, according to a civil complaint archived on Tuesday in the New York State Supreme Court.

But when Ganieva stated that he was breaking off contact, he says Black he became a conciliator to finance the film he could produce and to use his contacts to facilitate an application at Harvard Business School.

“This frivolous lawsuit is riddled with lies, and it’s just wholesale fiction,” Black’s spokesman said Tuesday, adding that Ganieva had a “fully agreed relationship. [Black] for six years ”and“ allegations of harassment and other misconduct ”were“ categorically false ”.

Black resigned from Apollo in March, citing “ongoing scrutiny of public attention and the media” for his professional ties to Epstein, for which he was paid $ 158 million for tax advice and art transaction services. The investigation by Dechert, the international law firm, found no evidence that Black had done anything wrong.

Ganieva’s lawsuit alleges that Black damaged her reputation by making false and insidious statements in response to news reports that specified some allegations of sexual harassment.

“The truth is that Ms. Ganieva has been extorting me for many years,” Black said in an April appearance, saying that Ganieva’s lawyers were “fake and harmful”.

“I made large monetary payments to him, based on threats to make our relationship public, in an attempt to free my family from public embarrassment,” the document added.

Ganieva’s lawsuit provides another version of events about the money he received from Black, starting with a $ 480,000 loan, which he offered in June 2011 to help him return to college.

It appears that a photo of the “loan agreement” on a page attached to the lawsuit bears Black’s signature next to Ganieva’s, and he plans to raise $ 60,000 every three years 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 percent per annum,” the document says, without calculating the amount to be repaid. Ganieva says he signed almost the same “loan agreement” in 2013.

After graduating with a degree in mathematics, Ganieva began looking for work, and Black said he offered to help, meeting with top executives at Goldman Sachs. He was among them Alison meza, who now heads the investment banking division.

A well-known person at the 2014 meetings said that the bank did not interview Ganieva for a specific position, and that it is not uncommon for a client to conduct open interviews about potential jobs at his request. Goldman declined to comment.

In the end, no work was done. “Considering the macro environment, there are no open jobs at Goldman Sachs right now to work on / fit,” a Goldman banker wrote to Ganieva in an email, adding that a colleague would “keep his eyes open for the job”. Opening with Moscow clients.

“Looking back, Ms. Ganieva knows that none of these organized interviews were legitimate,” her lawyer wrote in the court file.

A year after the Goldman Sachs meetings, Ganieva says he asked Black to “leave him and his baby alone for good.”

At a meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in New York City, Black said he agreed to forgive his loans and ordered him to sign two documents without permission to store a copy. He says he now understands that he signed an undisclosed agreement.

Then Ganieva says Black started receiving regular payments, but stopped making money in April. Weeks ago Ganieva posted on Twitter that Black had been a “predator” for many years of “sexual harassment and abuse”.

Through the spokesman, Black acknowledged that he had made payments to Ganieva and said he had given his action to the “penal authorities”.

In a legal document filed Tuesday, Ganieva’s lawyers said Black was “claiming preventive extortion” to make it more difficult to move forward in court.

They wrote this: “He often said, ‘If you don’t take the money, I’ll put you in jail.’