U.S. Virgin Islands Wants JPMorgan Chase to Pay Big Over Epstein
The U.S. Virgin Islands government is seeking at least $190 million in penalties from JPMorgan Chase in connection to its banking relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
In a new legal filing on Friday, the USVI’s Attorney General said the territory also wants the financial giant to separately pay damages to victims of Epstein, who killed himself in a New York lockup in 2019 while awaiting trial for abusing minors.
The USVI and a victim of Epstein referred to as Jane Doe each sued JPMorgan late last year, arguing the bank facilitated the perverted financier’s sex ring and reaped millions from keeping him as a client. While the survivor settled her class-action suit for $290 million, the USVI’s case is headed to trial in Manhattan federal court in October.
The attorney general revealed these multimillion-dollar demands in a letter to U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff, who asked for a briefing on its proposed damages.
The missive listed other remedies the USVI is seeking from the bank, including an injunction to prohibit “JPMorgan from participating in sex trafficking ventures in the future and to protect and prevent potential future victims of traffickers.”
Among its other proposed safeguards are JPMorgan’s appointment of independent compliance consultants to “overcome the economic incentives to underreport suspicious activity” and barring the “participation of employees who have personal relationships with a private banking client in decisions to retain or exit that client.”
The territory’s latter request alludes to JPMorgan executive Jes Staley, whose lengthy bromance with Epstein was underscored throughout the litigation. Text messages and emails showed that Staley’s bond with Epstein included career advice, visits to his private island, and cryptic text messages about Disney Princesses.
Meanwhile, Doe also accused Staley of sexual assault, an allegation he denies.
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“These sets of recommendations aim to address the same core problem: JPMorgan’s knowledge of and failure to report Epstein’s trafficking because it lacked the economic incentive and motivation to place compliance with the law and prevention of trafficking ahead of its own profits,” the USVI’s letter to Rakoff says.
As The Daily Beast reported, JPMorgan employees repeatedly raised red flags to bosses over Epstein’s suspicious cash withdrawals and news reports of his abuse of underage girls.
The USVI added it will prove that Epstein—a JPMorgan client from about 1998 to 2013—brought a slew of boldfaced names to the bank, among them Google co-founder Sergey Brin. “In addition, Epstein referred many ultra-high net worth clients to the bank, including Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Leslie Wexner, Glenn Dubin, and the USVI will prove, also conservatively, that those clients generated an additional $20 million in fees,” the letter states.
(A spokesperson for Bill Gates, however, said the Microsoft billionaire was never a client of JPMorgan.)
“We are pursuing this enforcement action because JPMorgan Chase’s institutional failure enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” U.S. Virgin Islands Attorney General Ariel Smith said in a statement provided to the press, “and JPMorgan Chase must make significant changes to detect, report and stop human trafficking.”
“Financial penalties, as well as conduct changes, are important to make sure that JPMorgan Chase knows the cost of putting its own profits ahead of public safety.”
Smith said the USVI would commit any restitution in the case to expand the territory’s law enforcement and boost services for trafficking victims. “I am gratified that the victims have received some measure of compensation from the bank,” Smith added, referring to Doe’s settlement, “but more needs to be done to hold JPMorgan Chase accountable and to ensure this does not happen to another generation of women and girls.”
Last November, Epstein’s estate paid the USVI more than $105 million to settle a 2020 lawsuit that claimed the trafficker opened shell companies in the territory as fronts for his trafficking enterprise.
JPMorgan spokeswoman Patricia Wexler told The Daily Beast that the USVI’s letter “does not reflect the nature of settlement conversations.”
“As for the USVI’s misdirected damages theories,” she said in an email, “they are not well founded and are being challenged by JPM in court.”
Last month, the bank argued that it wasn’t responsible for Epstein’s scheme and that the USVI government instead was “complicit” in his sex crimes. “Epstein could have lived anywhere in the world,” JPMorgan’s lawyers stated in one June 20 legal filing. “He chose USVI. Discovery obtained in this case reveals why.”
JPMorgan’s legal team added that Epstein’s “quid pro quo relationship” with the territory’s officials resulted in the trafficker lavishing them with “money, advice, influence, and favors.” In return, the government granted Epstein $300 million in tax incentives and waived his “sex offender monitoring requirements,” the bank lawyers said.
According to JPMorgan, USVI officials went as far as “facilitating ESL classes and visas that allowed Epstein to bring victims to his island.” And when the territory was upgrading its sex offender laws, government functionaries consulted with Epstein on how to tweak them.
“For two decades, and for long after JPMC exited Epstein as a client, the entity that most directly failed to protect public safety and most actively facilitated and benefited from Epstein’s continued criminal activity was the plaintiff in this case—the USVI government itself,” the bank’s lawyers stated.
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