MoMA Trustee Leon Black Accused of Raping Autistic Teen

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 alawsuitfiled 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 has mosaic Down syndrome and thus at the time of the alleged incident possessed the developmental age of a twelve-year-old, was introduced to Epstein and convicted 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 allegedly denied her, telling her that Maxwell would “take care of it.”RelatedHELEN FRANKENTHALER FOUNDATION SUED FOR “DESTROYING” PAINTER’S LEGACYBMA CREATES PAID INTERNSHIPS HONORING VALERIE MAYNARD 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 Committeeannouncedthat it was looking into Black’s financial ties to Epstein, who died in jail in 2019. In June of this year, the Justice Department Inspector General corroborated the ruling of the New York City medical examiner, determining Epstein’s cause of death to be suicide by hanging..