Welcome back to Dry Powder. I’m Bill Cohan.

In today’s issue, part two of my conversations with fallen Apollo Global Management founder Leon Black, who went on the record with me to discuss his complicated business relationship with the deceased pedophile Jeffery Epstein. This installment takes an in-depth look at Leon’s years-long affair with Guzel Ganieva, a Russian model who chose to set fire to their heavily negotiated non-disclosure agreement, in March 2021, via a series of tweets accusing him of predatory behavior, an event that catalyzed his early departure from Apollo. What’s revealed for the first time, based on newly obtained documents, is the lengths to which Ganieva went to successfully extract tens of millions of dollars from Leon in exchange for her silence.

But first…

• Paramount exodus: The plot continues to thicken over at Paramount Global in the wake of Shari Redstone’s decision to try and cut a deal with David Ellison that would seriously favor her over the non-Redstone shareholders of Paramount. The fact that four members of the Paramount Global board of directors are resigning, or will be resigning soon, according to The Wall Street Journal, is just the latest astounding development in this ongoing saga.

  As members of the special committee of the board, convened to render a judgment on the fairness of the Ellison deal versus a $26 billion offer from Apollo, it sure looks like they are voting with their feet, in a fairly unprecedented way. And we’re not talking about lightweights here, either: Nicole Seligman is a longtime Shari friend, as well as a highly respected attorney and business executive. She must have seen or heard something she did not like one bit. The other head-scratching departure is that of Rob Klieger, an attorney for Shari who did pretty much everything she asked him to do during the many years it took her to wrestle control of Viacom and CBS away from her father, Sumner, while he was in failing health. I can’t believe Klieger would leave Shari’s side at this crucial moment.

  Something is up here, folks, and I’ll be exploring it all in much more depth on Sunday. In the meantime, here’s Leon…

Black continued: “I mean, he was with a 17-year-old prostitute, got prosecuted for it, and got put away for a year,” he said, referring to Epstein’s extraordinarily controversial plea deal in 2008. “And, you know, according to him, even that person had shown an I.D. that she wasn’t underage. My feeling is, there are serious things and there are things that are less serious. I didn’t think this was the end of the world, frankly.”

The relationship with Epstein raises a series of troubling questions about Black’s judgment and the company he kept. (He told me that he wishes his friend Skip Stein had never introduced them.) In late 2020, at Black’s request, the board of Apollo Global Management retained the law firm Dechert to conduct an independent investigation into his relationship with Epstein. And while the firm’s report, issued in January 2021, cleared Black of any criminal or prurient wrongdoing, it did reveal that he had paid Epstein the staggering sum of $158 million for his estate planning services. (It’s actually $178 million if you include the $20 million loan that Leon made to Epstein and then decided to forgive.) In tandem with the report, Black decided to conduct a managed transition and announced that he would step down as Apollo’s C.E.O. before his 70th birthday, on July 31, but that he would remain chairman of the board of directors, as the firm’s founder and its largest shareholder.

He wouldn’t make it that long. Months later, on March 17, 2021, a woman named Guzel Ganieva wrote in a series of three tweets that, “I was sexually harassed and abused by [Black] for years,” dating back to the start of their relationship in 2008. Her tweets were shocking not only because of what she alleged that Leon had done, but also because of what she sacrificed by writing them. Indeed, Black and Ganieva had engaged in an on-and-off affair for years. What’s more, she had signed a heavily negotiated non-disclosure agreement with Leon, in 2015, after which he agreed to pay her $100,000 a month for 15 years in exchange for her silence.

Ganieva had kept silent for six years—until the fateful tweets—and during that time Leon paid her a total of $9.2 million. He had also forgiven close to $1 million in two loans to her; tried to get her job at Goldman Sachs; and pledged to give her another £2 million she needed to access a visa in the United Kingdom for her and her son. He had also paid for her undergraduate degree in mathematics from Columbia University and a fancy rental apartment on the East Side.

Ganieva’s decision to eschew her NDA seemed to amplify the severity of her allegations. “I was bullied, manipulated, threatened and coerced,” she claimed in her tweets, adding that Leon had “forced” her to sign the NDA. “I am breaking my silence now,” she concluded, “because I do not want this type of predatory behavior to continue happening to other women. #MeToo #LeonBlack.” Five days later, on March 22, Leon resigned as both the C.E.O. of Apollo and as the chairman of its board of directors.

There were other lawsuits, too, between Leon and her and Wigdor, the law firm that represented her; and even a RICO lawsuit filed by Leon against Ganieva, his Apollo partner Josh Harris, and P.R. maestro Steven Rubenstein, claiming they engaged in a conspiracy to oust him as C.E.O. of Apollo. (Harris told me that while the lawsuit saddened him, it was decided by a court that “there was zero-point-zero truth to any of it.” Rubenstein declined to comment, but in a legal filing in the case, his attorneys wrote that he “never colluded with Harris to launch a coup against Black.”) Leon was also sued by two other women represented by Wigdor—Cheri Pierson and “Jane Doe,” an underage autistic teenager—who likewise claimed he had sexually assaulted and raped them, in Epstein’s New York City mansion, no less. (Leon maintains he has never met either of these women and that he would never “abuse a woman.”)

In May 2023, Ganieva’s lawsuit against Leon was dismissed. (Her appeal in New York State remains active, although Wigdor is no longer representing her. Ganieva’s attorney for her appeal, Steven Bergstein, did not respond to my repeated requests for comment and to arrange for an interview with her.) In June 2022, Leon’s RICO suit was dismissed—a decision that was upheld on appeal. (As I reported in February, Leon and Josh are engaged in an ongoing arbitration, instigated by Leon, about whether Josh violated the terms of their shareholder agreement.) More recently, this past February, Pierson’s suit against Leon was “discontinued with prejudice,” with each party paying their own costs. Leon’s two countersuits against Wigdor and Ganieva for “malicious prosecution” and “unjust enrichment” continue. The “Jane Doe” lawsuit against Leon, filed in August 2023, is also still pending. (Needless to say, Leon has no love for Wigdor, which he told me he plans to hold “accountable” for its “campaign” against him.)

Leon and Ganieva cannot agree on much, other than that they had an affair and that her lawsuit against him was dismissed. According to their subsequent dueling lawsuits, which I have pored over, they could not even agree on the origin story of their affair. She claimed he “picked her out of a crowd” in March 2008 while she was attending an International Women’s Day event. (Ganieva is a Russian national.) Leon claimed they met at “a private party thrown annually” by his old colleague Donny Engel from Drexel Burnham Lambert, the investment bank that imploded in 1990 and from the ashes of which Apollo sprung. (Engel featured in Connie Bruck’s classic book about Drexel, The Predators’ Ball, as the guy who “recruited chiefly” the gorgeous women who attended Mike Milken’s annual high-yield bond conference in Beverly Hills.) Anyway, the dueling narratives only further diverge from there.

During our conversations, Leon was incredulous—stunned, in fact—that Ganieva had violated their agreement and decided to forfeit the next nine years of payments. His comment to me about it was blunt and unrepentant. “I know dozens of men who have signed NDAs,” he said. “It happens all the time, especially among bankers and law firms and lawyers. And there’s a lot of people you know who have paid NDAs to women, who they haven’t abused or done anything to but who have come out and said, ‘We’re going to embarrass you and your family and your business unless you pay me something.’ Happens all the time. Believe me, and I’m not in the business of pissing on people because some of them are friends—and you know many of these people. But it’s a pretty common thing.”

She claimed that she endured this treatment for years because Leon would offer to help her, with educational opportunities for her son; with her application to Harvard Business School, where he was an alum; with the possibility of becoming the director of an art museum he was going to create in a townhouse he wanted to buy; or by allowing her to produce or direct a film that he would finance for her because acting was too difficult a career path. “She believed him,” Wigdor wrote in her complaint.

In 2011, Ganieva enrolled at Columbia to finish her undergraduate studies, in math, with the ambition to get a job outside of modeling. She said she hoped going back to college would make her unavailable to Leon or unattractive to him. Instead, he encouraged her enrollment at Columbia and, on June 2, 2011, made her a $460,000 loan, payable in eight installments over two years, with an annual interest rate of 5 percent. According to the complaint, she viewed Leon’s loans as a tried and true method of a rich man gaining control over her. “Black knew the magnitude of the harm that he had inflicted on Ms. Ganieva over the years,” her attorneys at Wigdor wrote in the complaint. “This money, at least in his twisted mind, was a way of excusing himself.”

After she graduated from Columbia, Ganieva claimed, Leon “reignited” his “charade” of trying to get her a job on Wall Street. On May 9, 2014, she had four interviews at Goldman Sachs. Leon had also arranged for her to interview for jobs at Goldman in London and in Moscow. But she never received a job offer. In November 2014, Peter Lyon, a Goldman banker who covered Apollo and who had interviewed Ganieva, emailed her to say there were no jobs at Goldman that fit her qualifications. (Tony Fratto, Goldman’s global head of communications, declined to comment.)

Ganieva claimed Leon raped her on July 6, 2014. That holiday weekend, she was home at the East 77th Street apartment he had rented for her. Her son was away at summer camp. “I’m all alone,” she texted Leon that day, according to the transcripts that I obtained. “Let’s get together soon. I miss you. Xoxo.” Leon, meanwhile, had been at his home in the Hamptons and then returned to New York City on the Sunday night of the holiday weekend. “This is love,” she texted on the morning of July 6. “I need you…” He replied that he was driving back from the Hamptons that night and asked her if it was okay to “come over and tuck you in at 10:30?” She said yes and later asked if he could bring a “bottle of wine” with him. “Avec plaisir,” he replied. He arrived at her apartment around 9:45 p.m. that night.

In her legal complaint against him, Ganieva claimed Leon came over, uninvited, and let himself in. She said she tried to tell him that she wasn’t feeling well. “At over 6’5” and 300+ pounds, Black had no difficulty dragging Ms. Ganieva into the bedroom and throwing her on her back on the bed,” Wigdor wrote. “She was limp and unable to move. Despite her begging him to leave, he took off her clothes and his own.” According to Ganieva, afterward, Leon “angrily” told her, “Now I have fucked you,” and left her apartment and her, naked on the bed, “unable to move.” The next morning, according to the transcripts, she texted him, “It was very nice to see you last night. I already feel better. And there no money on my bank account…I love you and thank you!!! Xoxoxoxoxo and more love.”

With her student visa set to expire and without viable job prospects, Ganieva soon returned with her son to Moscow. But she kept texting Leon, according to the text transcripts. In September 2014: “I’m in masters program studying math in Russia version of MIT. Classes are in the eve so still hoping to nail the interview [in Moscow] at GS next tuesday. I miss you very much…I wish you were here.” After the Goldman interview, she texted Leon that she thought it went well “but nothing certain tho.” In October, a month later: “I will be in Rome . . . Come.” In November: “You have no idea how much I miss you and love you.” On New Year’s Eve, a month later, while on a ski vacation: “I’m in Courchevel with my son. It’s lovely. Wish you were here.” Then, in March 2015: “Moscow is too dark, dirty and depressing.” In May 2015: “I need your love… And I need you love… Xoxo.” In early June 2015: “[m]any kisses and lots of love xoxo.” And then, a few days later: “My dear Leon. How are you? I need to meet with you. It’s both urgent and important.”

Leon is a renowned and aggressive negotiator who made his fortune at Apollo through the financial alchemy of picking up pennies and turning them into dollars. He utilized those skills in figuring out a way to keep Ganieva quiet about their affair. When he received her note about the need for an “urgent and important” meeting, the two met a couple weeks later, on June 24, 2015, at a restaurant on the Upper East Side. Afterward, Leon took contemporaneous notes of the conversation. According to Leon’s amended RICO complaint, at the restaurant, Ganieva demanded $100 million from him or else she would tell the Apollo board and the media about their relationship. (In her legal filings, Ganieva makes no mention of this meeting or seven or so of the other ones, during which they allegedly hashed out their financial deal and their confidentiality agreement.)

Fearful after the June 24 meeting, and after consulting with criminal defense counsel, Leon started wearing a wire under his shirt, like in the movies, to a series of lunches with Ganieva: first at the Four Seasons; as well as at the Modern, at MoMA; and eventually at the tony Dorchester Hotel, in London, during which they discussed her monetary demands. New York State only requires one party’s consent to legally record a private conversation. Leon had transcripts made of the conversations, parts of which were included in his legal filings. (I obtained copies of the full, verified transcripts.)

The first thing they did when they both arrived at the old Four Seasons restaurant, on Park Avenue, on August 12, 2015, was order lunch: watermelon salad and Dover sole for Ganieva; the sole and a side of sautéed spinach for Leon. They discussed her seemingly unfounded belief that someone tried to poison her; how her son had been bullied at school, at P.S. 6—because of Leon, she claimed—and that his grades were not good. She said she thought maybe it was Leon who was trying to poison her; that’s why she hadn’t told him about the poisoning before. She also apparently blamed Leon for her son choking on a piece of steak a month earlier. (Ganieva’s attorney did not respond to my request for comment about this allegation, either.)

He said all he knew was that she had a visa issue and had to leave the country again. “It’s true,” she said, according to the transcript of their recorded conversation. “You don’t know me. You don’t know that I will stand up for myself. I’m not going to just let this go. It’s true; you fucked me for six years, okay. Let’s say for the last year we didn’t see each other. It was six years and you don’t know who I am. You have no idea what I’m made of.” At one point, he responded, “Why all the threats?” She suggested Leon had exploited her for sex, in exchange for a visa, finding her a job, and paying her rent. She said she was like “a wife” to him for six years, an idea Leon rejected. (He has a wife and four children.) She then mentioned a newspaper article about a woman who she said got $80 million (it was $18 million, actually) from a “Wall Street guy” (Benjamin Wey) after allegedly sleeping with him four times.

Leon said he didn’t understand why she was threatening him and wanted to put the affair behind him. At one point, he said that his wife’s cancer had returned and that his sister’s cancer was back, too, with “a very pessimistic prognosis.” (Judy Black died in November 2015.) He reminded her he had paid her $1 million the first few years they were together and then gave her $1 million in loans and then another $1 million when she left because of visa issues. He said he was willing to give her more money—beyond what he had already given her over the years—and countered her $100 million demand with an offer of $600,000 a year for eight years, in after-tax dollars, in return for her silence. (He lamented that he would have to pay gift taxes on the money.) She complained that all he cared about was money and his business, not his own family or hers. “For me, it’s not about money,” she told him, according to the transcripts. “It’s about respect.” Leon was incredulous: “So, you’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not about money, but the only way to have your respect back is for me to pay you $100 million?”

After an exchange in which Ganieva enumerated the various ways in which she could make his life hell, and Black responded by accusing her of fleecing him over a consensual affair, she offered an ultimatum. “It’s very simple,” she said. “Yes or no. And I’m not going to wait any longer than today. If it’s no, I’m going to lawyers and I’m going public. And that’s it. I cannot wait anymore. I can’t put my life on hold. Seven years is enough.” She said she would sue Leon for $1 billion, “for all the damage you’ve done to me and my life … and in business you’re going to lose even more.” He responded, incredulously, “So this is just pure, out-and-out extortion.”

They went round and round some more without resolving anything. He also urged her not to get a lawyer involved because he or she would take part of the money that was meant for her. She asked him for an immediate $100,000 for her continued living expenses while in New York, where she was staying at the Gansevoort Hotel. He agreed to give her the money, while her demand for millions more remained unresolved.

The conversation deteriorated quickly from there, but at a meeting four days later, again at the Four Seasons, Leon upped his offer to $100,000 per month for 15 years, or a total of $18 million. He also said he would forgive the roughly $1 million he made in loans to her, and that he would go forward with the idea of another £2 million for the U.K. visa, which involved investing the money for three months in the U.K. before making a visa application. “I don’t particularly want this traced back to me,” he said to her, according to the transcripts.

The money had to be invested in British securities and, if successful, she would get essentially a five-year visa. He said that after she got her U.K. green card and started paying taxes there, she could withdraw the £2 million “and it’s yours,” he said. He also offered her the option of purchasing a passport in three different countries that would allow her to live, work, and travel in E.U. countries—St. Kitts (at a cost of $400,000 for her and her son); Cyprus; and Malta (for $800,000, plus buying a house for $50,000). He said if she chose the passport route in one of these three countries, he would give her $1 million to pay for things.

She said she hoped he wouldn’t be lying about what he was offering to give her. “No, I wouldn’t,” he replied. “I want this to go away. And I want us to be at peace with each other.” He said the only thing he wanted in return, as part of the deal, was for her to sign a one-page “release and confidentiality statement.” He laughed and then took the proposed document out for her to read and to sign, at the restaurant. It had been written by an attorney at Paul Weiss, Apollo’s longtime lead law firm. He then sprung the NDA on her. “It’s one page,” he told her. “It’s quite simple. I want you to read it, obviously.” (Brad Karp, the Paul Weiss senior partner, declined to comment about the NDA.)

But he wouldn’t let her keep it. He wanted her to sign two copies, one for him and one for his lawyers. In exchange for signing, she would get $21 million, over 15 years. She signed. (I have seen a copy of the one-page NDA, signed by Ganieva, in October 2015, in which she acknowledges that the claims she made against Leon “are not true” and were made “under extreme stress.”) For the next 65 months, Ganieva received $100,000 into her bank account from Leon, from an account known only as “E Trust.” (He is now suing her to get this money back.) And she kept quiet. Until St. Patrick’s Day, 2021, when she took to Twitter.

He seemed fine with me having the transcripts of his recorded conversations with Ganieva, presumably because they revealed in stark terms her $100 million demand and the process of their compromise. Leon, of course, remains sheepish about the details of his longtime affair being rehashed publicly, out of an understandable concern for his wife and their four grown children. But he wasn’t the least bit inclined to apologize for his behavior, either.

Leon is gone from Apollo now. He seems well-pleased that Marc Rowan has taken over as the firm’s C.E.O., at his insistence, especially given that the Apollo stock is up some 140 percent since Rowan’s ascension. He seems to be spending his time these days at Elysium, which is much more professionally run than it once was. Soon after he resigned from Apollo, he brought in his longtime friend Brad Wechsler, the former chairman of Imax Corporation, to run Elysium, which has invested in such companies as Huddle House restaurants, and Phaidon, the fancy art-book publisher. Elysium is also the perch from which Black observes his 93 million Apollo shares, which comprise the majority of his $14.2 billion net worth. Leon recently sold about $250 million worth of stock—a first-time divestiture.

The idea behind the investments he’s making at Elysium, he says, is to build “businesses of lasting value.” Through his foundation, he has provided the funding behind a series of short books, published by Yale University Press, about the lives of famous Jewish men and women. Upcoming volumes feature the likes of Ayn Rand, Anne Frank, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Bob Dylan, written by New Yorker contributor Sasha Frere-Jones. He also seems to relish, on a daily basis, spending time in and around his priceless art collection, in his East Side townhouse.

To be honest, though, Leon seems a little sad to me, mostly because instead of enjoying his “Schwarzman years,” as he put it to me, he’s been pretty much sidelined from Wall Street and from New York society. He remains on the board of the MoMA but gave up his seat as chairman amid all the controversy. During one of our many sessions, he walked me through the many charitable causes he and his foundation have supported over the years, including Rockefeller University ($75 million, plus a $50 million grant), Mike Milken’s American Dream Foundation ($25 million), the MoMA ($100 million in gifts of cash and art), and to his alma maters, Dartmouth and Harvard. He’s given $70 million, and soon to be $100 million, to the Melanoma Research Alliance, which he started 17 years ago when his wife, Debra, was first diagnosed with the disease. His foundation has given away some $600 million, he tells me, with more than another $1 billion to go.

He’s frustrated because he’s discovered that some organizations don’t want his money because of his public taint. “There are a few who wouldn’t take it in the last few years,” he told me. “Reputational risk. That’s the big bugaboo at all these institutions now. There are a number of big banks that will work with us and a number of big banks that won’t. And it all comes down to ‘reputational risk.’” He continued: “It’s noise. They don’t like noise. They don’t want to take reputational risk. And even though this is all bullshit and even though with some of them I’ve had 30- or 40-year relationships, when someone says you’ve raped a 16-year-old girl with Down’s syndrome, most people are going to run for the hills.”

But he didn’t want this to be the epitaph on his ongoing legal tribulations. He was determined to make sure that I knew that, at 72, he still has plenty of fight left in him. “You can’t go through what I’ve gone through the past few years, having your name dragged through the mud with demonstrably false and outrageous accusations, without it affecting you,” he said. “But this Kafkaesque experience has strengthened my resolve not to let this be the final word on who I am and how I’ve lived my life.”