A law firm that represented multiple women who accused former Jeffrey Epstein associate Leon Black of sexual misconduct alleged in a Manhattan civil suit on Monday that the powerful financier deployed “multiple frivolous and malicious lawsuits” as retaliation for representing these accusers.

Wigdor LLP claimed Black, who co-founded and formerly chaired Apollo Global Management, tried “to use his billions to buy his own form of justice” and “to weaponize the civil justice system to silence and destroy those who seek to hold him to account for alleged sexual assault”. Black has emphatically denied all wrongdoing.

Finally. Leon Black is one of the most protected names in the entire Epstein saga, up there with a handful of others like Les Wexner that until recently seemed untouchable.

And what he is doing – suing maliciously in retaliation as a matter of weaponizing the law – is incredibly vicious, and far worse than it might seem at first glance.

It drowns the victims in filings and demands and mounting legal bills even as it requires that they sit for hours at a stretch for hostile, verbally battering depositions in front of entire teams of opposing attorneys, depositions that don’t actually go anywhere or accomplish much beyond being just another means of retaliation, of forcing the victim to sit still for their own abuse at the whim of their abuser, again.

Meanwhile their own primary lawsuits against the abuser just linger, stalled, because the billionaire has an army of attorneys to keep it tied up in various legal exercises and pre-trial motions for years before it is ever heard. It is a hell that women suing these men in an effort to be free of them find themselves entrapped in for years, handcuffed by their own lawsuits to their abusers because the law itself has been transformed into a means of abuse.

So if the feds can’t or won’t deal with Black and his SLAPP suits, I’m very glad to see the women and their attorneys pursuing justice via litigation that deals with the malicious lawsuits as a separate matter in itself.

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