See post on the Gradle forum

With the upgrade to jansi 1.13 a native library now is attempted to be extracted from the bundled jar and then loaded into memory. Unfortunately, this can fail with Could not initialize class org.fusesource.jansi.internal.CLibrary if there is any issue loading that library.

By default this library attempts to extract itself to java.io.tmpdir, which can often be mounted under linux as noexec, and under those conditions it will fail with the "Could not initialize class org.fusesource.jansi.internal.CLibrary" error.