Could Howard Rubin end up tainting George Soros like Jeffrey Epstein tainted so many other billionaires?
Rubin is a top money manager who was a “right-hand man” for the leftist billionaire, according to the New York Post. He worked at the Soros Fund from 2008 to 2015, having come out of retirement to take the job, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
Now, he’s the subject of a court case — accused by multiple women of engaging in sadistic sex-for-hire practices that went way beyond what they had consented to.
And while he was known to be volatile professionally, it’s not the kind of headline Rubin’s career would suggest.
George Soros' right-hand man Howard Rubin accused of BDSM crimes in NYC sex dungeon https://t.co/aX7RCvT7lc
— Daily Mail US (@DailyMail) August 3, 2021
During 30 years on Wall Street, Rubin established a solid record working at other high-end investment firms. He was immortalized in “Liar’s Poker,” the debut book by Michael Lewis of “Moneyball” and “The Big Short” fame. In it, Rubin described how “the trading floor at Salomon Brothers felt like a Las Vegas casino. You made your bets, handled risk, in the midst of a thousand distractions.”
Even then, some viewed him as an out-of-control Wall Street type.
“I saw him throw a chair on the trading floor,” a former co-worker said, according to the Post. “He said, ‘F***. I just lost $50 million!’ and threw a chair at his computer. Then he came back and threw it a second time, even harder. That sums up Howie: High strung, aggressive, does not hold back his feelings. He was a trader whose ego was tied up in being the biggest swinging d*** on Wall Street.”
Others saw a man who was perfectly average for someone in his position.
“I thought he was a nice guy,” one of his co-workers at Soros Fund Management told the Post. “He was a nebbishy Jewish guy and totally normal. I was surprised to hear about him having that apartment.”
“That apartment” refers to a hidden real-estate acquisition of Rubin’s: A “luxurious midtown Manhattan penthouse,” the Post reports, that functioned as a BDSM sex “dungeon” in which Rubin is accused of sexually assaulting and abusing numerous women, among them Playboy playmates.
In November, Rubin’s purported proclivities will be on full display as six of his seven alleged victims will have their day in court, suing the 66-year-old Rubin for $18 million, according to the Post.
The women were sex workers — but the abuse they endured, they said, wasn’t what they were hired for.
“[Rubin] is alleged to have paid his partners as much as $5,000 for each BDSM session. But, the women claim, they did not agree to the degree of abuse and degradation Rubin inflicted,” the Post reported Saturday.
“One of the plaintiffs claims that, while she was bound and vulnerable in Rubin’s lair, he told her ‘I’m going to rape you like I rape my daughter’ and then, according to the complaint, forced sex on her against her will. (Rubin has three children with his estranged wife, including at least one daughter.)”
It’s worth noting, however, there are no accusations he sexually abused his daughter — merely that he told a woman that during a forced sex act.
The women say that after they were hired, they “wound up in Rubin’s dungeon, with its red walls and white carpet. Sex toys were alphabetized and an X-shaped ‘St. Andrews cross’ — a device on which submissives are restrained, spread-eagle, at the wrists, ankles and waist — took pride of place.”
Two of the women — Playboy international playmates Mia Lytell and Amy Moore — said they thought Rubin intended to engage in “some mild fetish games and perhaps take photos, neither expected to be restrained in this manner [bound with rope and tape and gagged] or to be actually beaten.”
The lawsuit states that when one of the women “screamed or protested [during a session], Rubin would simply become more violent.” It also accuses Rubin of “beat[ing a woman’s] breasts so badly that her right implant flipped.”
The injury was so serious, court documents said, that the woman’s “plastic surgeon was not even willing to operate on her breasts.”
“In short, they are each alleging that they were brought to New York and taken advantage of,” said John Balestriere, who represents the women. “Allegations come down to [the women] saying they were physically and sexually abused.”
Rubin’s defense comes down to informed consent — indicating that, yes, he had engaged in some of the lowest forms of degeneracy imaginable, but it was done with the women’s consent.
A motion for summary judgment filed by Rubin attorney Edward McDonald states that the women “signed strict non-disclosure agreements, with penalties of at least $500,000 if broken, and acknowledgment that violent sex, with a risk of injury, is what they were consenting to and being paid for,” the Post reported.
“Each of the women, all adults, had explicit knowledge of the highly paid sexual arrangements for which they willingly traveled,” McDonald told the Post in a statement.
“Multiple women confirmed consent through text messages before and after their encounters, returned for multiple encounters, arranged for their closest friends to engage in the same sexual activity and repeatedly solicited Mr. Rubin long after their final encounters.”
Balestriere argued the women had little opportunity to review the non-disclosure agreements they signed, nor did they understand the implications therein.
“They did not have lawyers on call,” he said, adding that Rubin’s “encounters” went far beyond consensual activity and into the realm of sexual violence.
“None of these women came to New York knowing that they would be physically and sexually abused. They did not consent to what did end up happening. The key factor is that Mr. Rubin said these individuals consented to the physical and sexual violence perpetrated against them. Our six clients say they did not consent.”
“Some of our clients say they were in no position to speak or leave,” he added.
There are a whole litany of stomach-churning details in the article that are best left unsaid. At present, Rubin is no longer renting the penthouse, although some of the sexual devices have been put into storage by Rubin “so he doesn’t get accused of disposing of evidence,” a source told the Post.
Even though the scandal has been slowly unfolding for years, Rubin’s wife of 36 years — Mary Henry, another Wall Street fixture — just filed for divorce on July 7, according to the Post.
Beyond the sordid nature of the case, the first question involves how true the accusations are and what evidence can be produced. If things begin looking grim on that front, attention then turns to what everyone around Rubin knew and when they knew it.
Lytell and Moore, along with a third woman, first came forward with allegations of assault, battery and human trafficking in 2017, according to the Post.
This was two years after Rubin quit working for George Soros, but it’s a good chance his proclivities were established long before that.
And that could mean at least a hint of trouble for the infamous financier of liberal causes.
While there are plenty of Wall Street figures and sundry financiers that have come into Rubin’s orbit, most don’t pretend to be moral exemplars and sociopolitical supermen the way Soros does.
And, while the alleged sexual assaults and extreme fetish behavior Rubin engaged in wasn’t publicly known before 2017, others said the financier had a history of ethical lapses. One former executive at Merrill Lynch Mortgage Capital Markets, where Rubin worked in the 1980s, noted Rubin was fired after he made an unauthorized trade that cost the firm hundreds of millions of dollars.
Without providing details, the unnamed executive said this was a part of a pattern of behavior on Rubin’s part.
“[The dungeon] was just Howie being a lowlife — again,” he said, although he added, “I never knew about the sexual deviations.”
Nevertheless, after the news broke, “people were calling me and saying he’s a sleaze … but Howie has no morals. While at Merrill Lynch, he was morally bankrupt.”
It’ll be interesting to find out who was willing to tolerate that kind of degenerate bankruptcy, and whether Howard Rubin ends up tainting reputations the way Jeffrey Epstein did.
Story cited here.
