Apollo Global Management shareholders have filed a class action suit against the company’s billionaire co-founders, Leon Black and Marc Rowan, over their alleged connections with late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

In legal papers filed in a New York court on Monday, March 2, and obtained by In Touch, the shareholders claim that “Epstein was heavily involved and frequently communicated with Apollo Global’s senior leadership in the 2010s” and Black and Rowan repeatedly lied about it in regulatory filings in 2021 and 2022.

The Department of Justice’s January 30 release of a tranche of documents related to Epstein exposed Rowan and Black’s communications between 2013 and 2016 with the disgraced financier – after he had already been convicted and served prison time for procuring a minor for prostitution.

The emails include details about Epstein’s interest in purchasing Rowan’s private jet and reveal that the pair conferred on various financial matters and professional introductions. They also planned multiple meetings at the convicted pedophile’s Manhattan home, which included Black and other investors.

Black stepped down as CEO and Chairman in 2021 after an independent review found that he had paid $158 million to Epstein between 2012 and 2017 for financial advice, but he “remained a control person, holding 7.0 percent of Apollo Global’s common stock as of April 25, 2025,” according to the complaint. He has denied wrongdoing and said he was unaware of Epstein’s criminal conduct.

Multiple media outlets reported about the newly unearthed communications in February, the complaint notes, and two powerful teachers’ unions sent a letter to the SEC enforcement director calling for an investigation into “Apollo’s seeming inability to be forthcoming about the extent to which Jeffrey was a personal, social and professional associate of the firm and its partners.”

The reports caused share prices to plunge by the end of February, the complaint alleges.

“As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s common shares,” the complaint reads, “Plaintiff and the other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages.”

“Neither Marc Rowan nor anyone else at Apollo (excluding Leon Black) had either a business or personal relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” Apollo president James C. Zelter insisted in a February 18 press release.

However, in a Tuesday, March 3 interview with Bloomberg, Rowan said that he dealt with Epstein in his capacity as a tax advisor for Black. “I didn’t like him for my own reasons, he wasted my time,” the chair of the Wharton School’s board of advisors said. “Even from the grave, he’s wasting my time.”

Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while behind bars awaiting his trial for sex trafficking.