NEW YORK LETTER
For Wall Street, he is a legendary financier, creator of the Apollo fund, which made a fortune during the years of mad finance, at the end of the 20th century.e century. For art lovers, he is the incredible owner of one of the four versions of the Shout Edvard Munch bought in 2012 at a record price of $ 120 million.
Today, Leon Black is mostly the man who did personal business with Jeffrey Epstein, who committed suicide in his cell in Manhattan in the summer of 2019 after being accused of rape of minors.
Nothing is reprehensible in the affair: no suspicion weighs on Leon Black and no one accused him of having met the very young girls that Jeffrey Epstein made available to his friends. But, having frequented the infrequent, Mr. Black, 69, had to announce that he would leave the operational presidency of his company Apollo by July, which manages 450 billion dollars (370 billion dollars). euros) in capital, as calls are mounting to demand his resignation as chair of the supervisory board of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMa) in Manhattan.
“A terrible mistake”
A little look back at the Epstein affair. The sexual predator frequented All-New York and Harvard by maintaining in the sight and knowledge of the high society of the relations with obviously very young women. He was convicted by the Florida courts of soliciting underage prostitutes in 2008 but, the case being under seal, no one knew or wanted to know the details, and life resumed its course in the following decade.
In reality, it was possible to know; one of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre-Roberts, had recounted her martyrdom as a sex slave to Daily Mail British as early as 2011. But Americans did not wake up until the end of the decade, when the Miami herald revealed the reality of the scandal from November 2018, leading the Federal Police (FBI) to revive the case and arrest Jeffrey Epstein in July 2019.
Leon Black, he continued to frequent Mr. Epstein and in 2012 traveled with his yacht to his island in the Bahamas. “Like many people I respect, I decided to give Epstein a second chance. It was a terrible mistake, I would love to be able to go back in time and change this decision, but I cannot ”, Mr Black told the New York Times in the fall of 2020, specifying that“There has never been the slightest allegation that I have done anything reprehensible because I have not done so”.
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