New York financier Howard Rubin was arraigned on Friday afternoon and held without bail on charges of sex trafficking.
In a 10-count indictment, the Department of Justice has accused Rubin and his personal assistant, Jennifer Powers, of transporting women to a “sex dungeon” in a New York penthouse to engage in various commercial sex acts with Rubin.
Rubin pleaded not guilty to the charges. A lawyer for Rubin did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
John Marzulli, a spokesperson for the prosecution, told Business Insider that Magistrate Judge Kuo rejected Rubin’s bail application — release on a $25 million bond — citing concerns over public safety and Rubin’s risk of flight. She ordered him detained.
The indictment lays out allegations that encounters with paid sex workers were facilitated by Powers and included acts involving bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, and sadomasochism (or “BDSM”).
The indictment alleges that during “many” of such encounters, Rubin “brutalized women’s bodies, causing them to fear for their safety and/or resulting in significant pain or injuries, which at times required women to seek medical attention.”
“For many years, Howard Rubin and Jennifer Powers allegedly spent at least one million dollars to finance the commercial sexual torture of multiple women via a national trafficking network,” FBI Assistant Director in Charge Christopher Raia said in a statement about the charges. “The defendants allegedly exploited Rubin’s status to ensnare their prospective victims and forced them to endure unthinkable physical trauma before silencing any outcries with threats of legal recourse.”
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Rubin is a retired money manager who has worked for some of Wall Street’s most prominent firms, including Salomon Brothers, Bear Stearns, and George Soros’s hedge fund.
Rubin got his start at Salomon Brothers in 1982, where he worked under Lew Ranieri and became one of Wall Street’s most successful mortgage-backed securities traders, according to a 1999 story from Mortgage Backed Securities Letter, an industry publication. It said Ranieri once called Rubin “the most innately talented young trader I have ever seen.”
After Salomon Brothers, Rubin went to Merrill Lynch, where he was the firm’s head mortgage security trader. In 1987, the bank dismissed him, tied to $250 million in losses it said it sustained as a result of unauthorized mortgage-securities trading, the Wall Street Journal reported at the time.
He later worked as Bear Stearns’ mortgage trading chief, retiring in 1999, and later for the Soros Fund Management, when it was still a hedge fund. The firm is now billionaire George Soros’s family office.
Rubin is 70 years old and lives in Fairfield, Connecticut, prosecutors said.