This commentary is by Olivia Gentile, a writer in Hanover, N.H., and a certified advocate for survivors of gender-based violence.
“Let me be clear,” Leon Black said last October. “There has never been an allegation by anyone that I engaged in any wrongdoing, because I did not.”
The New York Times had just reported that the Dartmouth College alumnus and former trustee had paid his friend Jeffrey Epstein at least $50 million, ostensibly for financial advice, between 2012 and 2017 — after Epstein was convicted of soliciting prostitution from a teenager but before he was arrested for running a sex trafficking empire.
Black, a billionaire investor, claimed he’d been unaware of the “sickening and repulsive conduct” that led to Epstein’s second arrest.
The denial satisfied Dartmouth. The administration dismissed calls from community members to rename the Black Family Visual Arts Center, which Black and his wife funded in 2012 with a $48 million donation. One of the most prominent buildings in Hanover, it houses the college’s departments of studio art, film and media studies, and digital humanities.
“To date, we are aware of no allegations … that Leon Black engaged in any of Epstein’s reprehensible behavior,” a college spokeswoman said in January.
Since then, the situation has dramatically changed. In a lawsuit filed in New York, two women have asserted that Black violently raped them. And both say he not only knew about but also participated in Epstein’s web of predation.
“Jane Doe” began giving Epstein massages at his Manhattan townhouse around 2000, according to the suit. One day, Epstein allegedly summoned her to perform a massage on a friend of his. Once she was alone with Black, she says, he “spun her sideways on the massage table, and pushed her in a backbend over the side of the table in an incredibly painful position,” the complaint asserts. Then he raped her, according to the complaint. “Ms. Doe was in such agony that she could barely speak or breathe.”
Black’s other accuser — and the complainant in the lawsuit — is Guzel Ganieva, an immigrant from Russia who says she endured an abusive relationship with Black from 2008 until 2014 “that on numerous occasions included forced sexual conduct against her will.” Once, she says, he raped her in her apartment while she was so ill that she could barely walk.
She also alleges that in late 2008, Black flew her “without her consent” in a private plane to meet Epstein at his Palm Beach mansion. (Though Epstein was officially in prison, he was allowed to spend weekdays on “work release.”) There, she says, the men pressured her to do their bidding. She refused, enraging Black, she says.
Black acknowledges that he had an affair with Ganieva but calls the complaint “a work of fiction.” He didn’t fly her to see Epstein, he says, and he didn’t rape either woman.
“It is clear that the only goal here is to publicly destroy Mr. Black’s personal and professional reputation and to defame him by embarking on a baseless smear campaign,” a Black spokesman said on Sept. 20, the day Ganieva amended the complaint to include Jane Doe’s claims. The original complaint was filed in June.
Some institutions have been quick to distance themselves from Black. In March, five days after Ganieva first accused Black of abuse on Twitter, his own company, Apollo Global Management, said he would no longer serve as chairman and CEO. Four days after that, under pressure from detractors, he ceded the chairmanship of the Museum of Modern Art.
Dartmouth, by contrast, has taken no action to this day. Now, instead of saying no one has accused Black of wrongdoing, the administration simply refuses all comment on him — except to repeat that there are no plans to rename the arts center.
The college’s willful blindness isn’t new. In 2019, the administration agreed to pay $14 million to settle a lawsuit with a group of female students and alumnae who claimed the school allowed three male professors to abuse women for more than a decade. “These professors leered at, groped, sexted, intoxicated, and even raped female students,” the lawsuit states. When the women reported them, “Dartmouth did nothing.”
The administration pledged to do better in the future. In conjunction with the settlement, it launched a “Campus Climate and Culture Initiative” aimed at creating an environment “free from sexual harassment and abuse of power, where every member of the Dartmouth community can thrive.”
The next year, there were 71 reports of sexual assault, dating violence, or stalking at Dartmouth, about the same number as usual.
Change won’t come until the administration shows, rather than says, that it takes these crimes seriously — regardless of who is accused. By continuing to celebrate Black while ignoring the horrifying allegations against him, Dartmouth is signaling to perpetrators that they will be protected, to survivors that they don’t matter, and to all of us that it has learned nothing.
