Billionaire collector Leon Black, a former board chair of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and since 1997 a trustee of that institution, is being sued over allegations that he raped an autistic teenage girl at the Manhattan home of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for Southern New York on July 25, the complainant, a woman in her thirties identified only as Jane Doe, offered horrific details of an encounter she says took place at Epstein’s East Seventy-First Street town house when she was sixteen.
According to the suit, the complainant, who suffers from mosaic Down syndrome and thus at the time of the alleged incident possessed the mental acuity of a twelve-year-old, was introduced to Epstein and child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in 2001 by an abusive cheerleading coach. The plaintiff asserts that in 2002, Epstein performed a “hand off” at his Upper East Side residence, to Black, whom she expected to “massage” as she frequently did Epstein. Instead, Black “picked [her] up and threw her over his shoulder and then threw her violently down on the massage table on her back, so hard he knocked the wind out of [her].” According to the plaintiff, Black then proceeded to penetrate her using sex toys, handling her body in such an aggressive manner that she was left bleeding and feared her pelvis was broken. When she petitioned Epstein for medical attention, he denied her, telling her that Maxwell would “take care of it.”
Black’s attorney Susan Estrich called the lawsuit—which was filed within the time frame allowed by an amendment to a New York law meant to protect victims of gender-motivated violence—“frivolous” and contended that the allegations were “totally made up” and “entirely uncorroborated.”
The lawsuit arrived the same day the US Senate Finance Committee announced that it was looking into Black’s financial ties to Epstein, who killed himself in prison in 2019.