From the Wall Street Journal, January 17, 2026:
Howard Rubin rose, fell and rose again as a star trader in the 1980s. He’s now landed in charges that he trafficked and abused women. ‘I don’t care if she screams.’
NEW YORK—The penthouse atop the Metropolitan Tower on West 57th Street offers proximity to Central Park and has two bedrooms.
In the summer of 2012, prosecutors say, one of those bedrooms was soundproofed.
It was painted red and outfitted with an inventory of ropes, whips and sex toys labeled A to Z. A “St. Andrew’s cross,” an X-shaped contraption named for the martyred apostle, was equipped with four cuffs—two for the ankles, and two for the wrists.
The equipment was assembled for Wall Street legend Howard Rubin, the discreet renter of the penthouse—and for years, prosecutors allege, he lured women into what he called his sex “dungeon,” where he abused and tortured them high above the Manhattan skyline.
“I want to hurt her,” Rubin texted about a woman who would be joining him at the penthouse, according to court documents. “I don’t care if she screams.”
He then added an emoji of a laughing face.
For much of his life, and for much of his day, Rubin was a mythic figure of business, famous and infamous for rising, falling and rising again as a star trader on 1980s Wall Street. In a career that began at Salomon Brothers and ended with George Soros, he embodied the excessive wealth and excessive risk of a gunslinger era in finance, most notably when he was blamed by Merrill Lynch for an unauthorized trade that cost the firm some $250 million in 1987.
“Howie,” as he was called by colleagues, was a former card-counter who brought the risk tolerance of Las Vegas to the financial world. He maintained the trappings of a New York success story: the five-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, the Hamptons estate, the charity galas, a wife and three kids.
According to legal filings, archival materials and interviews with associates from several chapters of his life, Rubin was also a Wall Street titan who rose to the upper echelons of the finance industry despite a history of not following the rules.
Since being arrested for sex trafficking and other crimes in September, today the 70-year-old Rubin lives in a Brooklyn jail cell. He has pleaded not guilty. His attorneys, allies and even his estranged wife say he is a retiree living a quiet life, whose most important job is shuttling his granddaughter to dance classes.
In previous cases and in an unsuccessful application for bail, Rubin’s lawyers have argued that the women were aware of what the encounters involved and were willing participants.
“The alleged conduct involves private activity between adults that concluded more than six years ago,” his attorneys wrote in the application.Rubin once seemed ripped from the pages of Tom Wolfe’s “The Bonfire of the Vanities”—and was himself a character in Michael Lewis’s “Liar’s Poker”—but in the government’s telling appears to be more like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Prosecutors have outlined an operation of recruitment and sexual torture against 10 victims, with alleged sourcing methods and coercion reminiscent of the approach taken by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Rubin allegedly worked with a former romantic partner to recruit women, often approaching former Playboy playmates who thought they were agreeing to sex-for-hire and light fetish play. The evenings often ended up including NDAs, beatings and advice on treating the bruises, court records show.
After beating and raping a woman one November evening, he offered her a drink and thanked her for a “pleasurable experience,” according to a separate civil suit filed against Rubin. He then told her she had to leave the apartment. He was going to meet his wife and kids for dinner.
If convicted, Rubin could receive a sentence of life imprisonment.
‘meet/greet/beat’
Much of the government’s criminal case against Rubin appears to be derived from two civil suits filed against him in 2017 and 2018.
Rubin was found liable and ordered to pay $3.8 million to six women as part of the primary civil case in April 2022. The second case also ended with a settlement.
In filings and subsequent testimony, several women told similar stories of what happened between 2009 and 2019. They were contacted over Instagram by a representative of Rubin’s about spending an evening with him. The women would be brought to New York and could receive $2,000 for a night—or up to $5,000 if he had a particularly good time. One woman said she was assured he was a “great guy.”
The evening might begin at the Russian Tea Room, located next door to the Metropolitan Tower, a skyscraper built in 1987 that one observer likened to a “glass-and-steel Godzilla looming ravenously” over the more elegant buildings nearby.
Inside Rubin’s penthouse was a safe that held a stack of blank nondisclosure agreements.
Some of the women said they were inebriated when they signed the form, which noted that the women had agreed, for payment, to engage in sexual acts “including Sadomasochistic (SM) activity that can be hazardous and on occasion cause injury,” read a form quoted by defense attorneys who argued it left little uncertainty about what the night might entail.
Breaking the contract would require paying $500,000 to Rubin.
The women say a depraved side of Rubin emerged inside the dungeon, one that went far beyond the limits of BDSM (or bondage, discipline, sadism and masochism) role-play and aggression. It included electric shocks and severe beating....
....MUCH MORE
Ummm...the depravity emerged in the dungeon?
Wouldn't having a dungeon in itself be a bit of a clue?
However, far be it for me to judge one's real estate peccadilloes.
From another part of the Dow Jones media empire, Mansion Global, October 22, 2025:
1,500-Year-Old French Castle Comes With a Dungeon, Secret Passageways and Plenty of Lore
And possibly of interest as your peeps haggle over the price for the chateau:
Sodom, LLC: The Marquis de Sade and the Modern Office Novel
