JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon strongly denies knowing Jeffrey Epstein or aiding child sex trafficking scheme
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon strongly denied knowing Jeffrey Epstein or deliberately aiding the prolific abuser’s sex trafficking of teenage girls in a recent deposition — despite retaining him as a client for years after the deceased sicko’s child sex crime conviction.
In a sit-down videotaped deposition on Friday, Dimon denied responsibility for Epstein’s depravity and said he trusted his senior executives to vet clients.
“I was surprised that I didn’t even — had never even heard of the guy, pretty much, and how involved he was with so many people,” Dimon said.
“[My] heart goes out to these women. It really does. And you can ask me 85 different ways. We were trying to do our job as best as we can. And of course we are not the law — the legal profession. We are not law enforcement,” the Wall Street titan later testified under oath.
The sworn deposition was included in lawsuits brought against JPMorgan by victims of Epstein and the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein committed much of his abuse on his private island Little Saint James.
The suits accuse the banking empire of greasing the wheels of Epstein’s global sex trafficking scheme, charging that he could never have succeeded in trafficking minors around the world for sex on his private planes for years without access to JPMorgan’s deep reserves. Epstein victims recently reached a tentative $75 million settlement in a similar lawsuit against Deutsche Bank.
“Knowing that they would earn millions of dollars from facilitating Epstein’s sex abuse and trafficking, JP Morgan chose profits over following the law,” reads the November complaint brought by anonymous Epstein victims.
“The ability to obtain exorbitant amounts of money, send wires to young females, and obtain unlimited cash was critical to Epstein’s operation.”
The billionaire banker acknowledged JPMorgan retained Epstein as a client for seven years after his 2008 conviction, but insisted he didn’t know anything about him until his 2019 indictment and ensuing suicide.
Dimon denied any awareness that Epstein had promoted him to contacts as a candidate for Secretary of the Treasury or knowing about a 2010 email in Epstein’s inbox planning a dinner between the two men and former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley.
“Shall I have Lynn prepare heavy snacks for your evening appointments with Jes Staley and Jamie Dimon? Or is this to be a nice, sit-down dinner at 9 p.m.?” Lesley Groff wrote Epstein, who replied, “Snacks.”
“I’ve never met Jeff Epstein. I never knew Jeff Epstein. I never went to Jeff Epstein’s house. I never had a meal with Jeff Epstein. I have no idea what they’re referring to here,” Dimon testified when presented with the email, adding that Epstein had been “obviously misinformed.”
The CEO said Staley largely left him in the dark about Epstein. Staley was JPMorgan’s primary liaison with the perverted money manager and has been accused of raping one of his sex trafficking victims.
“The right people were looking at the facts at the time. That’s their job,” Dimon said at one point in his deposition. “I’ll take back my answer. Jes Staley should have told me some things. He should have told the group some things. This may have turned out differently.”
Staley denies the rape claims and will soon be deposed in the litigation. According to reporting in the Wall Street Journal, he claims he spoke with Dimon multiple times about maintaining Epstein as a client as early as 2006.
Dimon denied knowing anything about internal discussions at JPMorgan on retaining Epstein as a client after his 2008 conviction. He said his top executive Mary Erdoes, who has acknowledged having been aware of allegations against Epstein, and the bank’s former general counsel Stephen Cutler had the power to sever JPMorgan’s ties with Epstein.
“[Do] you think that the bank owes an apology to some of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking that suffered in the period after the bank was proposed to terminate him but didn’t?” asked David Boies, a lawyer for the victims.
Dimon replied that what happened to the women was “atrocious,” but not directly the bank’s fault.
“I wouldn’t mind personally apologizing to them, not because we committed the crime — we did not — and not because we believe we’re responsible,” Dimon said.
“[But] that any potential thing, what little role that we could have eased it or helped catch it quicker or something like that, or get it to law enforcement quicker or get law enforcement to react to it quicker, which they obviously didn’t, you know,” he continued, “I would apologize to them for that, yes.”
Epstein killed himself at age 66 inside the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center a month after his arrest on child sex trafficking charges. Dozens of women have alleged he abused them, many starting when they were as young as 14. A Manhattan jury convicted his longtime right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, in December 2021 of procuring and grooming his victims for at least a decade starting in the 1990s.
Toward the end of the deposition, Boies asked Dimon whether he believed JPMorgan doing business with Epstein as long as it did facilitated the scope of his sex trafficking operation.
“I do not know the answer to that question,” Dimon replied.
