The personal assistant to Wall Street multimillionaire Howard Rubin and her husband face tax fraud charges, with federal authorities alleging the pair failed to disclose the “sex dungeon” financier funded every aspect of their lives, including the mortgage on their Texas home.
Jennifer Powers and her husband Stephen were hit Tuesday with the charges in a new superseding indictment, just days after Rubin and his assistant were busted with bombshell sex trafficking charges last week.
The feds allege Powers served as Rubin’s right hand in a twisted plot to psychologically and sexually brutalize several women in his Midtown penthouse, and that she and her husband allegedly reaped roughly $9 million — with Rubin paying for rent on their Manhattan apartment, private school for their kids, their credit card bills and the down-payment and mortgage payments on their Texas home when they moved in 2020.
Howard Rubin’s Midtown apartment. (Google)
According to the indictment, Jennifer Powers reported no income from employment in 2018 through 2023, and Stephen Powers reported less than $40,000 in income from his DJ business in 2018 and 2019 — and no income from that business from 2020 to 2023. They didn’t declare any of the money Rubin gave them over the years, the feds allege.
Rubin also paid Jennifer Powers’ legal fees regarding civil litigation involving the financier’s alleged sex trafficking, court papers allege.
Jennifer Powers, who was released on a personal recognizance bond after an appearance in federal court in Texas, is set to be arraigned in Brooklyn Federal Court on Wednesday. Stephen Powers will be arraigned at a later date.
Jennifer Powers was a key participant in all aspects of Rubin’s sex abuse operation, according to court filings, and allegedly helped him furnish the soundproof, locked “dungeon” in the second bedroom of his penthouse apartment near Central Park.
On July 30, 2012, the feds allege she e-mailed Rubin about the dungeon, writing, “I’ve put chains on the four points of your cross and four points of the
Dungeon bed. On the end of each chain is a cuff. . . . I’ve done this bc it will be VERY easy to just throw someone on the cross or on the bed and just strap them into the ‘premade’ chains and cuffs.”
Rubin, now 70, and Jennifer Powers lured Playboy models and other women to the city under false pretenses to torture and leave “deformed” after bondage, discipline, dominance, submission and sadomasochism sessions, known as BDSM, according to the feds.
Rubin is accused of raping women after they had fallen unconscious or were unable to say their “safe word” because they were “gagged and thus unable to coherently speak,” court documents allege. One of the victims, who was only able to make the abuse end by biting Rubin’s finger, was beaten so badly her breast implant flipped inside her, the documents charge.
The alleged abuse mostly took place at luxury hotels in Manhattan before Rubin began leasing the 76th-floor penthouse on W. 57th St. in 2011.
Jennifer Powers set up the victims’ air travel, paying them typically in installments on PayPal to avoid scrutiny, and secured their silence with aggressively enforced nondisclosure agreements, which included a $500,000 penalty if broken, court papers charge. Those NDAs “grossly misrepresented” the violence the women would endure, according to court filings.
Rubin at one point went so far as to pursue a hitman on the dark web to silence the women who filed suit against him, the feds allege.
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