JPMorgan reaches settlement with Epstein’s victims
JPMORGAN on Monday (Jun 12) reached a tentative settlement with sexual abuse victims of Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier, after weeks of embarrassing disclosures about the bank’s longstanding relationship with him, said the bank and lawyers for the victims.
The proposed deal would settle a lawsuit filed last November in Manhattan federal court by an unidentified woman on behalf of victims who were sexually abused by Epstein over a roughly 15-year period when they were teenage girls and young women, the suit said. The number of victims could potentially rise to more than 100.
In the statement, the bank and the lawyers for the victims said they had reached “an agreement in principle to settle” the lawsuit on behalf of the victims and the “settlement is in the best interests of all parties, especially the survivors who were the victims of Epstein’s terrible abuse.” The statement did not disclose a settlement amount.
The settlement agreement was reached roughly two weeks after Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive and one of Wall Street’s best-known bankers, sat for a daylong deposition in which he said he had barely heard of Epstein before the financier’s July 2019 arrest on federal sex trafficking charges.
Epstein killed himself in August 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell a month after his arrest.
JPMorgan still faces a related lawsuit by the government of the US Virgin Islands. That suit remains the biggest outstanding Epstein-related case after years of civil lawsuits against Epstein’s estate and Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction in 2021 in Manhattan federal court for helping Epstein engage in sex trafficking.
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The lawsuit filed by the victims charged that JPMorgan ignored repeated warnings that Epstein had been trafficking teenage girls and young women for sex, even after he registered as a sex offender and pleaded guilty in a 2008 Florida case to soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. The complaint said the bank overlooked red flags in Epstein’s activity because it valued him as a wealthy client who had access to dozens of even wealthier people.
Court documents and deposition testimony reviewed by The New York Times revealed that bank employees had filed numerous suspicious activity reports about Epstein’s repeated large cash withdrawals. The legal documents revealed that after designating Epstein a “high risk client” in 2006, the bank kept him on as a customer despite media reports detailing allegations of his sexual abuse of teenage girls and evidence that some of the cash withdrawals were for payments to dozens of young women.
The bank had said a number of times before the agreement was reached that it did not assist Epstein in committing “his heinous crimes” and “in hindsight, any association with him was a mistake.”
In a separate lawsuit, the same lawyers for Epstein’s victims last month negotiated a tentative US$75 million settlement with Deutsche Bank, which succeeded JPMorgan as Epstein’s primary banker. Deutsche, which ended its relationship with Epstein in late 2018, paid a US$150 million fine to New York regulators in 2020 over allegations that it failed to sufficiently police its financial dealings with the disgraced financier among other compliance failures. NYTIMES
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