Leon Black seeks court sanction against attorneys representing rape claims

Leon Black, the billionaire financier, has asked a court to punish lawyers representing two women who have accused him of rape, claiming that the Wigdor firm “abused the court system to launder frivolous, unsubstantiated, and damaging accusations” designed to ruin his reputation.

The sanctions motion, filed in New York state supreme court on Friday, comes three weeks after Wigdor filed a lawsuit on behalf of Cheri Pierson, who alleged that Black raped her at a Manhattan townhouse belonging to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Lawyers for Black sought to cast doubt on the credibility of Pierson, who says she was recruited by Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime Epstein associate who is serving a 20 year prison sentence for helping to lure and groom underage girls for Epstein to abuse.

Pierson was 39-years-old at the time of the alleged attack in spring 2002, according to public records filed alongside the motion.

They detailed Pierson’s previous brushes with the law, including a 1998 arrest for suspected possession of crack cocaine, as well as civil disputes that she has litigated against friends and employers.

In handwritten court papers filed in Florida in 2016, one of Pierson’s neighbours claimed Pierson had threatened to kill her and to call in help from various authorities including Donald Trump and an entity described as “the disability council”. The court later imposed a restraining order banning Pierson from having any contact with the neighbour.

Jeanne Christensen, a Wigdor partner who is representing Pierson as well as Black’s ex-mistress Guzel Ganieva, said the sanctions motion was “nothing but a pathetic PR attempt by Leon Black to distract the public from the horrific sexual violence he has been accused of”.

Earlier this year a federal judge threw out a lawsuit in which Black accused Josh Harris, his former top lieutenant at Apollo Global Management, of conspiring with Ganieva to publicise false allegations of assault as part of an effort to unseat him as chief executive of the private equity firm he co-founded in 1990.

US district judge Paul Engelmayer said he had “narrowly” decided against imposing sanctions on Black and his legal team to punish them for naming Wigdor as a defendant in that lawsuit.

Ganieva sued Black in New York state court in June 2021, claiming he raped her during their relationship and then damaged her reputation by accusing her of extortion. Both sides agree that the billionaire paid millions of dollars over several years as part of an agreement to secure her silence.