Did JP Morgan Chase executives laugh amongst themselves about Jeffrey Epstein’s “interest in young girls”? That’s the claim from the U.S. Virgin Islands in a new filing in the lawsuit against the largest bank in the United States.
On Monday, attorneys for the territory asked for permission to amend the lawsuit to include an additional claim under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Last month, the presiding judge in the U.S. District Court Southern District of New York had tossed out all but one of the claims against the bank made by the USVI and combined the territory’s lawsuit against the bank with one from an unnamed woman – Jane Doe – who filed suit against the bank last November.
Recently, plaintiffs in the suit were allowed to depose JPMorgan Chief Executive Jame Dimon, and four billionaires including Google co-founder Sergey Brin had their communications subpoenaed, seeking any communications the men may have had relating to Epstein and JPMorgan.
In the new claim, the USVI accuses JPMorgan of working to help the deceased sex offender evade scrutiny from law enforcement and knowingly obstructing authorities from discovering his extensive criminal activity while he was a client of the bank.
“Epstein’s behavior was so widely known at JPMorgan that senior executives joked about Epstein’s interest in young girls,” the USVI claims in Monday’s filing. As evidence, the territory cites a heavily redacted deposition from Mary Erdoes, JPMorgan’s Asset and Wealth Management head, as well as another thoroughly censored email from the executive, dating back to 2008. The USVI also brought forward internal communication from 2010 between bank employees that discussed the investigation against Epstein, and the sex abuse lawsuit against him.
The territory alleges that the money used to pay at least one recruiter and several young women in his sex trafficking scheme came from Epstein’s accounts at JPMorgan Chase. Cash withdrawals from these accounts went towards facilitating his sex trafficking operation, the lawsuit claims, while at the same time, JP Morgan was looking the other way.
“JPMorgan knowingly did not follow these [anti-money laundering] requirements because it knew that doing so would have prevented Epstein’s secret cash transactions that were necessary to his sex-trafficking operation from escaping knowledge of federal investigative and prosecuting agencies,” the new filing argues.
The new claim the territory hopes to add to the ongoing lawsuit accuses the bank of violating the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The bank has denied all wrongdoing and has itself filed suit against former executive Jes Staley, claiming that any liability assigned to the bank arising from the lawsuits against it should be wholly ascribed to Staley. The senior banking official left JPMorgan for Barclays, only to resign from his post at the British bank in 2021 after regulators probed his close association with the disgraced financier.
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019, and was subsequently found dead in his prison cell while awaiting trial. Authorities ruled it a suicide.
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