Banking giant JP Morgan Chase has announced a settlement in a class action lawsuit with a victim of Jeffrey Epstein.
The undisclosed settlement resolves one claim against JPMorgan in a proposed class action by a woman who says Epstein abused her.
The lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court in November sought to hold JPMorgan financially liable for Epstein’s decades-long abuse of teenage girls and young women.
“We all now understand that Epstein’s behaviour was monstrous, and we believe this settlement is in the best interest of all parties, especially the survivors, who suffered unimaginable abuse at the hands of this man,” JPMorgan Chase said in a written statement early Monday.
According to the lawsuits, JPMorgan provided Epstein loans and regularly allowed him to withdraw large sums of cash from 1998 through August 2013 even though it knew about his sex trafficking practices.
“Any association with him (Epstein) was a mistake and we regret it,” JPMorgan continued. “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was using our bank in any way to help commit heinous crimes.”
JPMorgan kept Epstein, who was a client of the bank from 1998 until he was dropped in 2013, aboard even after his 2006 arrest on prostitution-related charges and a related guilty plea two years later.
“The settlements signal that financial institutions have an important role to play in spotting and shutting down sex trafficking,” Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for the woman known as Jane Doe 1 who sued JPMorgan, said in a statement.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal charges accusing him of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars in cash for massages and then molesting them at his homes in Florida and New York. He was found dead in jail on August 10 of that year, at age 66. A medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
Deutsche Bank, where Epstein was a client from 2013 to 2018, last month agreed to pay $75 million to settle a similar lawsuit by women who say they were trafficked by the financier.
