A woman has dropped a New York lawsuit accusing hedge fund billionaire Leon Black of violently raping her at Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in 2002.
Cheri Pierson sued Black in 2022 claiming that Epstein purported to hire her to give Black a message in a third-floor suite at his East 71st Street property.
Unlike many of Epstein’s other accusers, she was not underage. She was a single mother of two and had hoped to both earn cash for giving Epstein and his clients massages and to attract investment in a skincare business she hoped to open. Epstein offered to introduce her to an unnamed businessman, later alleged to be Black, who could “help.”
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What happened behind closed doors left Pierson “in excruciating pain and still in shock” before Black allegedly walked out the front door into a waiting car and “left her standing at the curb.” She was bleeding, swollen and disoriented, according to the civil complaint, and pain lingered for weeks.
Both sides agreed to drop the lawsuit “with prejudice” last week, meaning the lawsuit cannot be re-filed, with neither side owing costs to the other.
A spokesman for Black told Reuters Tuesday that the billionaire had never met Pierson.
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Black, a longtime associate of Epstein’s, has denied knowledge of the disgraced financier’s sex-trafficking ring. But he stepped down from his firm Apollo in 2021 due to blowback from his business relationship with the wealthy pedophile.
He previously settled a separate matter with the U.S. Virgin Islands government, where Epstein had a private island, for more than $62 million and has also been accused of raping a 16-year-old girl with Down syndrome at Epstein’s mansion in a federal lawsuit.
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Black has filed a counter-suit against another accuser, former Russian model Guzel Ganieva.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking girls and young women at mansions in New York and Florida, an apartment in Paris, as well as his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Black was not among a number of prominent and wealthy figures in January whose names were unsealed in hundreds of court documents connected to a 2015 lawsuit from Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre.
Many people named in the file dump were not accused of wrongdoing.
Although Epstein has been dead for years, a number of lawsuits related to his misdeeds are underway. Just last week, a group of his victims sued the FBI for waiting decades to arrest him despite multiple credible accusations against him.
