Leon Black is "fearful" of discovery, lawyers for an alleged victim say
They also charge his lawyers with trying to expose her name to the public through court filings initially made in December last year
Lawyers for a woman who alleges that she was sexually assaulted and raped by the billionaire former Apollo chair Leon Black say that Black is “fearful of what fact discovery will yield about him,” and that he’s using his fortune to throw up barriers against litigating the case.
The woman, who’s pseudonymous in the case, claims that Black raped her at the late billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s home on 9 East 71st Street in Manhattan in 2002. She says that Black, who Epstein called he “special friend,” used “physical force” to carry out the attack, which came after she gave him a massage on Epstein’s orders.
Black denies all the charges, and his lawyers have dug into her background and tried to undermine the woman’s credibility. They challenge claims that she has autism and a condition called Mosaic Down syndrome.
Mosaic Down is similar to the traditional Down syndrome that most people know about, but people with it “may have fewer characteristics of the syndrome than those with other types of Down syndrome,” according to Stanford Medicine Children's Health.
Black’s lawyers say that private investigators talked with the woman’s family, who told them that she never had the condition growing up and only started talking about having it in her twenties. Their essential argument is that she made up the diagnosis, part of a history they say undermines her credibility.
I’ve reported on details of the case here, and Kate Briquelet at the Daily Beast has a good rundown too.
In a December 8th, 2023 filing, Black’s lawyers reiterated some of the arguments they’ve developed in the past, pointing in particular to social media records they say cut the legs out from under her case. The document was refiled on October 4th this year with substantial redactions after the woman’s lawyers argued that Black was using the filings to try to reveal his accuser’s identity to the public and the media.
They cite tweets which they say undermine the woman’s “origin story” and show that she’s publicly identified herself as an Epstein survivor in the last 16 months.
“Based on my review of Ms. Doe’s Twitter posts, Twitter Spaces conversations, and correspondence on social media, in the last 16 months, Ms. Doe has repeatedly publicly identified herself as an Epstein survivor, explained that she was trafficked by Epstein for two years as a child, used the hashtags “#Epstein” and “#JeffreyEpstein,” and connected with various Twitter users with larger followings who relayed her tweets detailing her alleged abuse to their followings,” Black’s lawyers explained.
They say the woman deleted her Twitter account before filing the lawsuit, but that some of her tweets and interactions with people were preserved by the Wayback Machine.
Black’s lawyers also claim the woman spoke on a Twitter Space that had 6,300 viewers, and messaged people who she talked about the case with. His lawyers say they obtained some of those messages from people on the other side of the conversations who asked them for anonymity. One of them they’re calling “Elizabeth” in the filing. Those people didn’t tell the lawyers why they wanted anonymity, but the lawyers say that they “suspect…fear of retaliation.”
The lawyer’s also claim that Black’s accuser talked on Twitter about being on Epstein’s flight logs and said she was close to two pilots, who she called Mr. Larry and Mr. Gary.
Black’s lawyers say that the woman (whose name I don’t know) doesn’t appear on flight logs for any of Epstein’s planes or helicopters.
It’s worth nothing here that no full copies of Epstein’s flight manifests—that is, the official records of who was on a plane—have ever been made public. One of Jeffrey Epstein’s pilots, David Rodgers, testified in the criminal case against Ghislaine Maxwell that he turned those manifests over to Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers. He reconstructed passenger lists from a personal log he kept. Rodgers was Epstein’s chief pilot from 1991 to 2002. His co-captain during that time was Larry Visoski. In 2002 they switched roles, and continued in them until Epstein died in 2019.Working around the clock
The woman’s lawyers say that Black’s private investigators are “working around the clock to dig up everything they can about Ms. Doe,” and that he thinks that “his wealth offers him a different justice system.”
They say that filing extensive information about the woman’s social media account is a “roadmap” to her true identity and that he’s just trying to throw up barriers to prevent her from litigating her claims—and prevent discovery from revealing
“Defendant does not cite, and cannot cite, a single case permitting him to attach pages of social media posts allegedly made by Plaintiff regarding her personal life that serve a sole purpose: to allow the public and specifically the media to swiftly identify Ms. Doe,” her lawyers wrote in a filing from December 21st. That document was also refiled on October 4th.
“Black did this with the purpose of threatening and intimidating her to the point where he believes she will cease litigating her claims,” the woman’s lawyers argued.
They also deny that the woman has ever talked publicly about the events in the current litigation, and argue that “what Ms. Doe said or did not say in years past on social media about her own medical procedures, her understanding of her ancestry or her opinions on political events in other countries, has absolutely nothing to do with the legal grounds,” for whether discovery goes forward.
If anybody knows the woman’s name, I’m interested in checking out her Twitter history. I’ll respect the court’s order on pseudonymity, and only use the details to inform my reporting on this case. I’m also interested in checking out Black’s argument that people “fear retaliation” for sharing DMs with his legal team. If you did, I’ll respect your anonymity too, and want to hear about the circumstances and reasons you did it.