Billionaire Kamala Harris fundraiser Marc Lasry accuses former hedge fund exec of trying to blackmail him for $50M: lawsuit

Hedge fund titan Marc Lasry claimed a former female executive at his firm was trying to blackmail him for $50 million by threatening to spread false allegations about the firm, according to a lawsuit filed by the billionaire.The Avenue Capital Group co-founder accused Gina Strum of threatening to make it “really, really, ugly” for Lasry and his company unless he forked over the money, according to the complaint, which was filed Friday in New York State court.Strum was a senior vice president and then a senior managing director at Lasry’s Park Avenue firm from 2009 to 2013, according to public records.Lasry — the 65-year-old former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks and a major Democratic fund-raiser for Vice President Kamala Harris — said in the lawsuit that Avenue gave Strum a severance package in 2013 after she threatened to make false accusations about the firm.The company, which Lasry co-founded with his sister Sonia Gardner, also agreed to keep Strum on as a consultant if she could not find another job “rather than face undue fallout from a public report of false accusations,” according to the complaint.

However, her contact with Lasry over the past decade “veered towards the personal, obsessive and simply inappropriate,” the lawsuit said.“Plaintiffs suffered through Ms.Strum’s conduct because they concluded that, if they did not, she would carry out her malicious threats to damage them,” the complaint said.

“In retrospect, the decision to engage with Ms.Strum and accede to her demands was misplaced, as Ms.

Strum was unable (or unwilling) to find another job and always returned to demand work and money from Avenue.”Strum — who got her undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999, according to her LinkedIn account — allegedly sent the married Lasry lurid emails and texts.In one message, she wrote” “Black and navy are your colors.I remember the first time I met you .

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You were in a black turtleneck...