NEW YORK — The Manhattan district attorney has been dragged into litigation that’s ramping up against JPMorgan Chase, brought by abuse victims of disgraced billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
As JPMogran presses Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg for documents, a Manhattan federal judge on Thursday gave the prosecutor’s office until the following day to outline the records in question.
The Wall Street giant is accused in the suit of being a critical enabler of the dead financier’s child sex trafficking ring.
Bragg’s office previously indicated it doesn’t want to hand over documents to JPMorgan. It met with JPMorgan lawyers and attorneys for the victims and the U.S. Virgin Islands — which is also suing JPMorgan for its Epstein ties — at a Tuesday videoconference, according to court records.
Bragg spokeswoman Emily Tuttle declined to comment on the nature of the documents JPMorgan has requested from the DA, citing their court-ordered confidentiality. JPMorgan and its lawyers did not immediately answer The New York Daily News requests for comment.
The Manhattan DA’s office never brought a case against Epstein, who died in federal lockup in 2019. Three years after his 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex, Bragg’s predecessor, Cyrus Vance Jr., argued for his sex offender status to be reduced from level three to level one.
As the case in Manhattan continues, lawyers for Epstein victims on Thursday confirmed they had reached a tentative $75 million settlement in a similar lawsuit filed in November against Deutsche Bank.
Like the JPMorgan case, the proposed class-action lawsuit against Deutsche Bank was filed under New York’s Adult Survivors Act. The woman who brought it, referred to as Jane Doe, accused the German lender “of assisting, supporting, facilitating and otherwise providing the most critical service” for Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring “to successfully rape, sexually assault, and coercively sex traffic” her and others.
“The settlement reached with Deutsche Bank is an important moment for sex trafficking victims because it establishes that those who hold the purse strings are accountable under the law,“ the victim’s lawyer Sigrid McCawley said in a statement to The Daily News. “This settlement signifies real progress for the rights of victims.”
The agreement does not require Deutsche Bank to admit wrongdoing, a person familiar with the matter told The Daily News.
A spokesman for the German lender, Dylan Riddle, declined to comment on the settlement. But he pointed to a statement it issued in 2020 after agreeing to pay $150 million to New York regulators, which said the bank regretted its “error“ of taking Epstein on as a client in 2013.
“(In) recent years, the bank has invested more than 4 billion euros (about $4.3 billion) to bolster controls, processes and training and hired more people to fight financial crime,” the spokesperson added.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the settlement.
The women’s suit against JP Morgan, Jane Doe’s suit against Deutsche Bank and the U.S. Virgin Islands‘ suit against JP Morgan all relate to how Epstein easily financed his depraved abuse for decades.
Lawyers for the U.S. territory and Epstein’s victims say he couldn’t have succeeded in trafficking minors around the world for sex on his private planes for as long as he did without access to his bank accounts.
Judge Jed Rakoff, presiding over the three suits, scheduled a May 26 hearing to preliminarily approve the Deutsche Bank settlement, according to court docs.
JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon is expected to be deposed the same day in both the women’s lawsuit and the related Virgin Islands one, a source familiar with the matter told The Daily News.
JPMorgan, which retained Epstein as a client for years after he was first convicted of soliciting a teenage girl for sex, has strenuously denied that it knowingly facilitated his abuse. In a March lawsuit, it pinned blame on Jes Staley, who ran its private banking division from 2001 to 2009 and stayed on in a senior role through 2013.
Staley, who says the allegations by his former employer are false and defamatory, has been accused in the Virgin Islands lawsuit of raping one of Epstein’s victims and having “informed (the victim) that he had Epstein’s permission to do what he wanted to her,” according to court filings. He denies the allegations.
Staley’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
The Caribbean island where Epstein hoarded much of his mysterious fortune alleges America’s biggest bank “knowingly, negligently and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise.”
An amended complaint filed last month in the case alleged Dimon was fully aware his wealthy client was a sex trafficker. Lawyers for the Virgin Islands cited an internal email sent the year Epstein was first convicted, which noted his relationship with the bank was “pending Dimon review.”
The Virgin Islands’ lawyers told Judge Rakoff on Monday they were having trouble serving a subpoena on Tesla CEO Elon Musk seeking information about his correspondence with JPMorgan and Epstein and any paperwork regarding Epstein’s trafficking and “procurement of girls or women for consensual sex.”
On Twitter, Musk denied that Epstein had advised him about “anything whatsoever.”
Epstein hanged himself at Manhattan’s now-shuttered Metropolitan Detention Complex in August 2019, a month after his arrest on sex trafficking charges.
A Manhattan jury convicted his longtime right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, in December 2021 of procuring and grooming young girls for him to abuse for at least a decade. She’s serving a 20-year prison sentence in Tallahassee, Florida.
