Leon Black entered a closed-door room on Capitol Hill on June 26 as a voluntary witness. Less than an hour later he left as a subpoenaed one.
The billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management had agreed to sit for a transcribed interview with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the sixteenth such session in a bipartisan inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein and the government’s handling of the case against him. According to lawmakers in the room, Black answered questions until investigators turned to a subject he would not discuss: the nondisclosure agreements he has signed with women. He declined to describe their terms, took a long break, and then was handed two subpoenas. He walked out.
Representative James Comer of Kentucky, the committee’s Republican chairman, told reporters afterward that one subpoena compels Black to return for a videotaped deposition under oath on July 16, and the other orders him to produce the agreements themselves. “Answers about the terms and substance of these NDAs are critical to our investigation,” Comer said. He framed the questions he wants answered as a single line of inquiry into whether the late financier shaped the settlements. “We want to know, was Jeffrey Epstein involved in the NDAs? Was he involved in writing? Was he involved in awarding funds to the women for the NDAs?”
It was a striking turn even by the standards of an investigation that has summoned a long line of wealthy and well-connected figures. Representative Suhas Subramanyam, a Virginia Democrat on the panel, noted that the committee had conducted many of these interviews without incident. “This is the first time that someone actually walked out in the middle of it,” he said, “and it’s because we had very important questions about Leon Black’s past with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Black’s account of himself was unsparing toward Epstein and protective of his own conduct. In a prepared opening statement, he said he “was not involved with, and had no knowledge of, any of Epstein’s heinous conduct,” and described a man who concealed a second life behind a respectable one. “I knew Jekyll,” he told the committee. “I didn’t know Hyde.” He said he felt terrible for Epstein’s victims, and he bristled at the suggestions that have trailed him for years. “I don’t understand why people, including members of this committee, would accept baseless speculation about me without regard to the facts and spin such ugly and vicious narratives that are demonstrably false,” he said.
The numbers at the center of the scrutiny are not in dispute, though their meaning is. An independent review commissioned by Apollo in 2021 found that Black paid Epstein roughly $158 million between 2012 and 2017 for tax, estate planning, and philanthropic advice. The Senate Finance Committee, which is conducting its own examination of Epstein’s finances, has put the figure closer to $170 million. Black has maintained that the payments were for legitimate professional services, telling the committee that Epstein “solved a massive estate problem for me, that none of the experts and lawyers I consulted had been able to solve.” He said he had known Epstein for eighteen years, dating to the mid-1990s when the two met through Rockefeller University, before he paid him a dollar.
For the lawmakers leading the inquiry, the size of the payments is the puzzle. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, wrote to the Oversight panel this month urging members to press Black on the money. “To date, I do not believe Black has provided a credible explanation as to why he paid Epstein amounts that vastly exceeded those paid to other professional advisors involved in his tax and estate planning,” Wyden wrote. He had written to Black directly in March seeking answers about what he called significant personal and financial entanglements with Epstein, and said the response had been evasive. “He stonewalled repeatedly,” Wyden said. “We just haven’t gotten the answers that are responsive.”
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s ranking Democrat, said he supported Comer’s decision to issue the subpoenas and tied the financial questions to the human ones. “There are real accusations, and there are survivors who have accused Mr. Black of horrific things,” he told reporters, calling the sums involved an enormous amount of money and arguing that Epstein could not have operated as he did without the support of men like Black.
Black has consistently and categorically denied any wrongdoing, and his attorney came out swinging. Susan Estrich described the subpoenas as a “premeditated political decision” and “a planned political stunt,” issued, she said, after less than an hour of questioning and before the committee had asked anything about what she called his legitimate payments to Epstein. “Mr. Epstein had no involvement with any NDAs, whether they exist or not,” Estrich said. She went further on the broader allegations against her client, telling reporters that Black “never abused a woman, never was with an underage woman, he never engaged in sex traffic, he never paid Epstein for access to women, he was never blackmailed by Epstein.”
Those denials answer a record of civil litigation that Black addressed head-on in his opening statement. He has been accused of rape in three lawsuits and has rejected the allegations in each. One was dismissed by a New York state judge. Another, brought by a woman named Cheri Pierson who said she was assaulted at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, was discontinued with prejudice and without any payment; Black said he had never met her. A third remains pending, though the law firm that filed it has withdrawn. “To be clear, I categorically deny the baseless and fabricated allegations in that case and in the other two lawsuits that were filed against me and that have now been dismissed,” Black told the committee, accusing the press of amplifying sensational claims without scrutiny.
The episode is the latest chapter in a reckoning that has already cost Black his perch atop the firm he built. He stepped down as Apollo’s chief executive in 2021 after the disclosure of the payments, and relinquished his chairmanship at the Museum of Modern Art the same year. In January 2023 he paid $62.5 million to the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein owned a private island, to resolve any potential claims connected to the territory’s long investigation. Fifteen million dollars of that sum was directed to a trust supporting counseling and mental health programs. The agreement released Black from current and future claims in the territory, and, by its own terms, cannot be used as evidence of wrongdoing. His representatives have emphasized that there is no suggestion in it that he knew of or participated in Epstein’s crimes, describing the deal as the resolution of unintended consequences of payments he now regrets.
The Oversight inquiry has reached well beyond any single figure. Since the Justice Department began releasing millions of pages from the Epstein files, the committee has interviewed or sought testimony from a roster that includes Bill Gates, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, and the retail magnate Les Wexner, whose own financial relationship with Epstein was once among the most extensive. Black, who has given money to candidates in both parties over the years, is among the most prominent business leaders to appear, and the only one so far to leave a session early.
What gives the hearing its larger resonance is a question that has shadowed the entire Epstein affair: how a convicted sex offender remained, for so long, a welcome presence among the powerful. In an essay published this week, the author Anand Giridharadas argued that Epstein’s survival owed less to any single protector than to what he called a network of bystanders, a class of elites for whom maintaining one’s place in a web of valuable relationships discouraged anyone from asking hard questions or walking away. He described a culture in which proximity to wealth and access was guarded so carefully that almost no one was willing to be the person who broke the chain. The thesis is contested and impossible to prove in any individual case, but it captures the unease that animates the committee’s work, and the reason a financier’s private settlements have become a matter of public interest.
For now, the practical stakes are narrow and concrete. Comer has the documents he wants on a deadline, and a date in mid-July when Black must answer under oath or invoke his rights on the record. Whether the agreements, once produced, reveal anything about Epstein’s role is unknown; Black’s lawyer insists they will show nothing because Epstein had nothing to do with them. The chairman, casting the demand in the language of accountability, said the committee owed the public transparency and owed Epstein’s survivors something more. “We owe it to the American people to provide transparency and ensure accountability for survivors,” he said.
Three weeks from his abrupt exit, Leon Black is scheduled to walk back into a committee room. This time, the cameras will be running, and he will be sworn.
