26 May 2026 10 min read Karma's Most Wanted

Karma's Most Wanted #8: Leon Black (Can Someone Please Arrest This MF?)

There is a version of this story where you call it a failure, a system that broke down, let someone slip through, malfunctioned in ways that can be corrected. That version is a lie.

Leon Black, BFF of Epstein, Co-Founder of Apollo Global Management. Professional scumbag.

On Epstein, money, the hedonic treadmill, a disabled teenage girl, and the system working exactly as designed.

Leon Black co-founded Apollo Global Management and accumulated one of the largest private equity fortunes in American history. He collected art. He endowed institutions. He attended galas. His name appeared on buildings. He was, by every available metric of American success, a very important and very serious person. He had all the important letters and the important clearances. And apparently, a knack for pedophilia.

That image did a lot of work for a long time. It still does, which is part of the point. Still no charges.

The Birthday Poem

Jeffrey Epstein was not Leon Black's accountant. He was not a casual business contact or a well-connected acquaintance Black shook hands with at a conference. Epstein was a trustee of the Leon Black Family Foundation starting in 1997. In 2003, the year after Epstein had already been investigated for the abuse of a 14-year-old in Palm Beach, Black contributed a handwritten birthday poem to a book celebrating Epstein's 50th birthday.

A handwritten poem. For the man's 50th. I mean this in the most respectful way possible, but that is gay as fuck. When Black knew, or should have known, exactly what Epstein was. A grown man can write another grown man a poem, there's no crime being committed. But when two of the most vile, disgusting, predatory, monsters are writing poems to each other, it's just fucking weird, man.

This was not a professional relationship that got out of hand. This was warmth and affection. This was a $17 billion man writing verse for a pedophile's milestone birthday, and then, over the following years, wiring him at least $170 million, a figure the Senate Finance Committee documented and noted was likely even higher. Senator Ron Wyden's investigation found that this money didn't just enrich Epstein. It financed his operation. It bought the logistics of child sex trafficking. Leon Black was a major part of financing Epstein's operation.

A major U.S. bank processed these transactions and waited nearly seven years to flag them to Treasury. It was legally required to report them far sooner. Nobody at that institution has been charged with anything either. In case you were wondering how financial infrastructure becomes complicit: this is how. Bureaucracies are nothing if shields for powerful people to hide their decisions.

"Money paid by Black to Epstein was used to finance Epstein's sex trafficking operations."--Senate Finance Committee, 2025

This is known. It is out there. But where is Leon Black?

What $62 million buys

In 2023, Leon Black reached a settlement with the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands for $62 million. The thing he was buying with that money was immunity from criminal prosecution -- specifically, immunity for his financial support of Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking network on USVI soil.

He paid the government not to charge him. The government accepted. This is not a conspiracy theory or an insinuation. This is a publicly filed legal document. This is the system operating with the lights on.

He also structured over a billion dollars in assets to evade estate and gift taxes, which the Senate Finance Committee documented in detail. We include this only because it would feel strange to omit it, not because it registers as particularly notable by now. When you've already paid $62 million for immunity from prosecution in a child trafficking case, your estate tax scheming is, honestly, a personality quirk.

The Treadmill: A brief digression into psychology

The hedonic treadmill is a well-documented psychological phenomenon: humans adapt to new levels of wealth, status, and pleasure with remarkable speed, returning to a roughly stable baseline of satisfaction regardless of what they acquire. The yacht becomes ordinary, too small. The Basquiat on the wall stops registering. The penthouse is just where you live now. To feel anything, you need more, not because you're uniquely broken, but because that's how the neurology works. Once you have it, desire finds another muse. And the chase is on again.

A man who has spent five decades accumulating without consequence, and the math gets disturbing. The billions normalize. The power normalizes. The access normalizes. The impunity, the lived, daily experience of doing whatever you want and watching the world arrange itself around you normalizes faster than anything else, because impunity is the most intoxicating thing money actually buys.

At some point the ordinary violations stop producing the signal. You need the extraordinary one. You need the thing that most people consider an absolute limit, not despite the fact that it's a limit, but because of it. The treadmill doesn't produce monsters from nothing. It takes men who were already willing to look away from what their money was funding and walks them, step by normalized step, toward the thing they could have never imagined wanting at the beginning. And once you're in the club, evidence of any misdeeds were often recorded and used to manipulate or extort the same powerful people.

This is not an excuse. It is an explanation of a mechanism, one that exists specifically because nobody ever stopped the treadmill. Nobody ever made the cost real. Every settlement, every NDA, every seven-year delay at a bank, every redacted name in a federal file is a dollar added to the grant that keeps the treadmill running.

The Russian Model and the Intelligence File

In 2015, Epstein sent an email to a contact named Belyakov, a Russian, linked advisor whose name appears throughout the files alongside FSB contacts and sanctioned bank transfers. The email was about a woman named Guzel Ganieva, a Russian model Epstein described as attempting to blackmail "a group of powerful businessmen in New York." Within 72 hours, Belyakov had produced a detailed intelligence profile on her. Her earnings. Her methods. Her vulnerabilities.

Ganieva later went public in 2021 accusing Leon Black of rape, sex trafficking, sexual harassment, and blacklisting her across six years. Black said it was consensual and called her an extortionist. A court sided with Black, not because her allegations were proven false, but because the NDA she signed in 2015 under what the dissenting judge called "continuing duress" covered all her claims, including future ones. She had accepted $9 million and a $100,000 monthly stipend, and the majority said that counted as ratification of the contract.

She signed the NDA the same year Epstein's Russian contact built a dossier on her.

Black has denied everything. He has still never been charged.

The Poor Girl This scumbag has managed to weasel his way out of every accusation, hearing, and subpoena. Among the civil allegations against Black--allegations he has vigorously denied, and for which he has never been charged--is a lawsuit involving a 16-year-old autistic girl with the developmental capacity of a 12-year-old. According to the complaint, she was seriously injured, left bleeding, and denied medical care after Leon was allegedly done with her.

A man worth $17 billion. Access to every resource on earth. Every consensual avenue available to anyone with unlimited money and social capital. And the alleged choice is a poor disabled child.

That is not a departure from the hedonic treadmill. That is the destination of it. That is what you get when a person has spent decades in an ecosystem where money converts consequences into line items and impunity becomes the ambient condition of daily life. The floor doesn't disappear all at once. It erodes, transaction by transaction, settlement by settlement, redacted name by redacted name, until the man standing at the bottom genuinely cannot locate it anymore. He discovers rock bottom, and proceeds in his role as a dutiful bottom feeder.

Other women have alleged rape, sex trafficking, and NDAs signed under duress. Black has denied all of it. He has never been charged.

The Exit

In January 2021, after law firm Dechert LLP confirmed the scale of the Epstein payments, Black announced he would step down as CEO of Apollo Global Management. He cited the "distraction" to the firm.

A distraction.

I supposed public accusations of raping a disabled child would be distracting to almost anyone. He stepped down from a CEO title. He retained $17 billion. He did not face prosecution. He did not face charges. He went from being a man who ran one of the largest private equity firms in the world to being a man worth $17 billion who no longer has that specific job title. This is what accountability looks like from seventeen billion dollars of altitude.

Massie gets the floor

Thomas Massie is a Republican congressman from Kentucky. He is not a crusader. He is not a liberal activist. He is a libertarian-leaning conservative who has spent years as a thorn in his own party's side. He co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act with Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna, forced a bipartisan discharge petition to 218 signatures, watched it pass both chambers, get signed into law by Donald Trump, a president publicly feuding with Massie, and then watched the Department of Justice continue to over-redact, delay, and stonewall as if the law were a polite suggestion.

Massie and Khanna personally traveled to the DOJ's secure facility in February 2026 to review the unredacted files themselves. What they found was that at least six additional people appeared, in their assessment, likely incriminated by the evidence, and all six names remained blacked out, hidden behind prosecutorial decisions that came with no public justification and no timeline for review. Millions of documents still unreleased. Victims' own FBI 302 interview forms never disclosed. Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, reportedly told the public one thing while the files said another.

Massie put Blanche on notice: release the names or he would handle it himself. The DOJ didn't move. Massie didn't bluff.

On February 24, 2026, Massie walked to the House floor and invoked the Speech and Debate Clause--a constitutional provision written in 1787 that shields members of Congress from prosecution or lawsuit for anything said during official legislative proceedings. Our country is so fucked that he needed a 238-year-old constitutional protection designed for legislative free speech just to say a living American billionaire's name in public without fear of being sued into silence.

He named Leon Black. He named Jes Staley. He named Leslie Wexner. He called on the DOJ to investigate all three. He posted it to X. He has since lost his primary to a party-approved challenger and is leaving Congress in January 2027, and he has promised to name more names on his way out the door, because at this point he has nothing left to lose and apparently a conscience that still works.

A congressman had to invoke the Constitution of the United States just to say this man's name out loud. And still. Nothing. Happened. Still no charges.

His Republican colleagues called it a political stunt. One of them said anyone who uses Epstein's victims to "advance a political agenda" should "seriously reconsider their line of work." This is the Republican Party in 2026: the man trying to name the financiers of child trafficking is the problem. The financiers are unavailable for comment. This is not even a hot take, this is what literally happened. Our government representatives decided to protect billionaire pedophiles and to turn on the one man with a conscience. This is all on the record. For the rest of their lives, those representatives will be reminded of their decision. There are many people dedicated to making sure they never forget, and hopefully get voted out sooner than later.

As of today, no charges have been filed against any of the three men Massie named on the House floor.

The Architecture

There is a version of this story where you call it a failure, a system that broke down, let someone slip through, malfunctioned in ways that can be corrected. That version is a lie.

The harder version is this: nothing failed. A man with $17 billion used that money to insulate every decision he ever made, at every stage, in every jurisdiction. He paid a government body not to charge him. He structured his assets to vanish from taxable reach. He retained lawyers and enforced NDAs and waited out every news cycle. He stepped down from a job title and remained one of the wealthiest people in American history. A sitting congressman had to invoke a constitutional clause designed for legislative free speech just to attach Black's name to a federal investigation request, and even that produced nothing.

The hedonic treadmill is not a metaphor here. It is a description of an actual process with an actual body count. The girl allegedly left bleeding was 16 years old with the developmental capacity of a 12-year-old. She does not have $17 billion. She does not have constitutional immunity. She does not have a law firm on retainer. She has a civil complaint and whatever she has managed to hold onto since.

The hedonic treadmill keeps running because we keep funding it, with settlements, with redactions, with deference, with the quiet institutional decision, made over and over again at banks and law firms and attorney general offices, that some people's floors are optional.

Leon Black has never been charged with anything. He would like you to remember that. He would eventually like you to forget. I, personally, will ensure that everyone is reminded as often as possible

The most expensive thing Leon Black ever bought wasn't the art on his walls. It was the silence around everything underneath them, and the price, it turns out, was well within budget.

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