The House Oversight Committee issued two subpoenas on Friday to Leon Black, the private equity billionaire, after he refused to answer questions about nondisclosure agreements he had signed with women, some of whom had been linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender.
The panel’s Republican chairman, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, said that he had been moved to issue the subpoenas after Mr. Black repeatedly declined to discuss the details of the nondisclosure agreements during his testimony at a hearing Friday morning.
“We believe that information is vital to our investigation,” Mr. Comer said.
The committee’s lawyers handed the documents to Mr. Black as he was testifying in a closed-door interview about his professional and personal relationship with Mr. Epstein. Less than an hour after receiving the subpoenas, Mr. Black abruptly left the meeting.
One subpoena ordered Mr. Black to provide to the committee any nondisclosure agreements that he was involved in, as well as any agreements that may have been tied to Mr. Epstein and his longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell. The other subpoena requires Mr. Black to return and testify under oath in front of the committee, on July 16, for a sworn deposition.
The subpoenas are an unusual escalation in the House committee’s efforts to investigate Mr. Epstein. It is first time a witness who agreed to testify voluntarily in the committee’s investigation into Mr. Epstein’s case was then subpoenaed for a deposition.
Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said that Mr. Black was defiant from the beginning. “It was clear from the moment that this interview started that Leon Black was not going to answer critical questions around our investigation,” he said.
In a statement released after the hearing, Mr. Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, said: “Mr. Black came here voluntarily to assist the committee. This was nothing more than a planned political stunt. Mr. Epstein had no involvement with any NDA’s, whether they exist or not.”
In a lengthy opening statement to the committee, Mr. Black said that he had been fooled by Mr. Epstein and that he was the victim of “demonstrably false” narratives about his relationship with the sex offender.
He accused Mr. Epstein of having “exaggerated, embellished, manipulated and outright lied,” to him, concluding that he had a sinister side like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, according to a copy of his prepared statement shared with The New York Times. “I didn’t know Hyde,” he wrote.
Mr. Black told the committee he had never sexually abused women, never had sex with any underage teens and never paid Mr. Epstein to get access to women. He also said that Mr. Epstein had never blackmailed him, and he defended the hefty fees he had paid Mr. Epstein for tax and estate advice.
“I was not involved with, and had no knowledge of, any of Epstein’s heinous conduct,” Mr. Black told member of the House Oversight Committee, which has been scrutinizing the Justice Department’s investigation into the sex offender.
Mr. Black was one of Mr. Epstein’s closest friends and main financial benefactors. He paid Mr. Epstein $170 million for what he described as traditional tax and estate planning services from 2013 to 2017, and he also lent him $30 million, according to congressional records and government documents.
The revelations about the extent of Mr. Black’s professional and personal relationship with Mr. Epstein resulted in him stepping down in early 2021 from all executive posts at Apollo Global Group, the large private equity firm he co-founded.
In his testimony, Mr. Black said he was often lied to by the sex offender, including Mr. Epstein’s claim that a portion of the fees he paid to him were tax deductible.
Mr. Black also said he was frustrated that his relationship with Mr. Epstein had become the source of “baseless speculation” and he blamed some of the committee for falling prey to it.
“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.
Mr. Black’s comments were included in an opening statement that he read at the start of his closed-door testimony on Friday morning. He arrived at the interview with about a half-dozen lawyers.
The committee had asked Mr. Black to sit for a voluntary interview to answer questions about his friendship with Mr. Epstein, which began in the mid-1990s. The committee has been investigating the Justice Department’s handling of its investigations into Mr. Epstein and the powerful people tied to him.
Mr. Black is one of several people who once associated with Mr. Epstein that the committee has called in for questioning, including former President Bill Clinton and the billionaire Bill Gates. The committee has also scheduled interviews with James Staley, a Wall Street executive who for years was Mr. Epstein’s main champion at JPMorgan Chase, where Mr. Epstein did much of his banking.
Mr. Black’s decision to step down from Apollo came after an outside law firm hired by the private equity firm’s board found that while the fees Mr. Black paid Mr. Epstein may have been excessive, they were for legitimate tax advice. The report, by the Dechert law firm, also found no evidence of wrongdoing on Mr. Black’s part.
In his opening statement, Mr. Black said the Dechert report, which found $158 million in payments to Mr. Epstein, should have ended all inquires into his dealings with Mr. Epstein.
“The Dechert report also determined that I had no awareness of, or involvement in, any of Epstein’s criminal activities,” he said. “The rank speculation about me was proven to be just that: rank speculation.”
But the release of millions of pages of Epstein-related emails and documents by the Justice Department this year showed other aspects of Mr. Epstein’s relationship with Mr. Black. For example, Mr. Epstein advised Mr. Black on how to address issues that had arisen with several women with whom Mr. Black had sexual affairs.
Mr. Black, who is married, paid about $20 million to a dozen women, according to the recently released files and notes taken by congressional investigators and shared with The Times. A few of the women had affairs with Mr. Black, according to those records.
Among them was a Russian woman named Guzel Ganieva, whose name came up when Mr. Black was in front of the committee on Friday, according to two people familiar with the meeting but were not authorized to speak publicly about a closed-door hearing. In 2015, Ms. Ganieva was threatening to go public with allegations of sexual abuse unless he paid her $100 million, according to the Justice Department’s documents and interviews with people familiar with her claims. Mr. Epstein drafted a menacing email that appeared to be meant for Mr. Black to send to Ms. Ganieva, who was in her 30s at the time, which threatened to contact the Russia security service about her.
There is no indication that Mr. Black ever read the message or had any role in drafting it, or that it was sent to Ms. Ganieva.
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