Leon Black, the billionaire collector and administrator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), will pay $62.5 million to the US Virgin Islands as part of a settlement to exempt it from lawsuits related to sex trafficking operations run by Jeffrey Epstein. News of the deal was the first reported by The New York Times on July 21, following the newspaper’s public records request to the Virgin Islands government.
The deal was reached in January, after a three-year Virgin Islands investigation into Epstein’s activities at his properties on two private islands. The settlement document notes how Black, who had a long-standing social and business relationship with Epstein, paid his friend $158 million for tax and estate planning services after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl.
A spokesperson told the Time that Black “initiated and made payments to Jeffrey Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services, which, based on all now known, he greatly regrets. Pursuant to the regulations of other major U.S. banks, Mr. Black has resolved potential USVI claims arising from unintended consequences of those payments. There is no suggestion in the USVI regulations that Mr. Black was aware of or participated in any wrongdoing.
Black, one major benefactor of MoMA, resigned from his role as chairman of the board in 2021 amid fallout from revelations about his ties to the convicted sex offender, the same year he stepped down as chairman and chief executive of private equity firm Apollo Global Management. (Last March, a New York court upheld the dismissal of a racketeering lawsuit Black had sued his former employer, claiming he was expelled.) In 2022, he faced allegations the rape of a woman in Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse; a New York state judge dismissed the federal lawsuit in May.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while in federal custody for sex trafficking. Employee misconduct and negligence at the New York facility led to his death, the Justice Department concluded in June.
The Virgin Islands also sued JPMorgan Chase late last year, alleging the company was complicit in the crimes of its former client and benefited financially from the sex trafficking operation. Part of the settlement money, the Time reported, will go towards mental health programs and efforts to combat sex trafficking in the Virgin Islands.
