The US government Virgin Islands in a court Friday’s filing estimated it would seek damages of at least $190 million from JPMorgan Chase in a case accusing the big bank of facilitating the sex trafficking of its former longtime customer Jeffrey Epstein.
The Virgin Islands also said it wants an order requiring JPMorgan to take a series of steps to protect young women and girls from other predators in the future.
“These sets of recommendations aim to address the same fundamental problem: JPMorgan’s knowledge of the
and failure to report Epstein’s trafficking because it lacked economic incentive and motivation
to prioritize compliance with the law and prevention of trafficking over its own profits,” said the filing in US District Court in Manhattan.
The US territory also said it would seek additional damages specifically for Epstein’s victims beyond the nearly $300 million that JPMorgan agreed to pay victims last month to settle a lawsuit by one of its accusers. The filing did not provide an amount for additional damages from the bank, which has vehemently denied any wrongdoing.
The new filing comes in response to a request last week by Judge Jed Rakoff that the territory detail the damages it is seeking in the case as it heads to a trial scheduled for Oct. 23.
The Virgin Islands lawsuit accuses JPMorgan of profiting from Epstein’s trafficking of young women he and others abused during the 15 years he was a client of the bank, which is the largest in the United States.
The complaint alleges that JPMorgan allowed Epstein to stash millions of dollars in bank accounts, which he used to fund his trafficking of women, despite numerous red flags about him raised by bank employees in recent years.
“We are taking this enforcement action because JPMorgan Chase’s institutional failure enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking, and JPMorgan Chase must make significant changes to detect, report and stop human trafficking,” said US Virgin Islands Attorney General Ariel Smith in a statement on Friday.
“Financial penalties, as well as behavioral changes, are important to ensure that JPMorgan Chase knows the value of putting its own profits ahead of public safety,” Smith said.
He said that if the Virgin Islands wins its lawsuit, it will use the monetary damages it receives “to support efforts to strengthen, inform, and expand local law enforcement and improve the Virgin Islands’ services for to victims of human trafficking and other victims of crime.”
A JPMorgan spokesman, when asked for comment about the filing, indicated for what appeared to be the first time that the bank’s lawyers had discussed a possible settlement of the lawsuit with lawyers for the Virgin Islands, which would have avoided the A challenge.
“This document does not reflect the nature of the settlement talks,” said the spokeswoman, Patricia Wexler. “As to USVI’s theories of misrepresentation of damages, they are not well founded and are being challenged in court by JPM.”
It is common in civil litigation for cases to be resolved without a trial.
The filing says the Virgin Islands wants at least $150 million in civil penalties alone. The filing also says it wants JPMorgan to disgorge at least another $40 million in fees that Epstein generated for the bank, and that JPMorgan received from “numerous ultra-high net worth clients” identified he at the bank.
Those people, the filing said, include Google co-founder Sergey Brin, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Lex Wexner, the founder of Limited Brands, and billionaire Glenn Dubin.
A spokesperson for Gates contacted CNBC after this article was first published, and in an email, “Mr. Gates has never been a client of JP Morgan.”
In addition to monetary damages, the Virgin Islands is also seeking to compel JPMorgan to “implement new policies, including the separation of its business and compliance duties and the appointment of an independent compliance consultant, to prevent human trafficking, ” according to a press release from Smith’s office. .
JPMorgan in its own court filings has accused the Virgin Islands itself of being “complicit in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.”
The bank says Epstein gave senior officials there money, advice and favors in exchange for him looking the other way when he trafficked young women to abuse there.
Epstein lives on a private island in the territory, where accusers say he and other people sexually abused them.
Last month in the same court where the Virgin Islands sued the bank, JPMorgan agreed, without admitting wrongdoing, to pay $290 million to Epstein’s victims to settle a lawsuit by one of his accusers. -accused.
In May, Deutsche Bank agreed to pay Epstein’s victims $75 million to settle a separate lawsuit by a defendant who accused the back of consenting to his sex trafficking of her and others. Deutsche Bank took Epstein on as a customer after JPMorgan cut ties with him in 2013, years after employees at the bank first raised concerns about him.
Deutsche Bank previously agreed to pay the New York state Department of Financial Services a $150 million fine for failing to identify or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions related to Epstein, which included of “payments to Russian models and to numerous women with Eastern European surnames,” Friday’s Virgin Islands filing noted.
Epstein, who was friends with former Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, as well as Great Britain’s Prince Andrew, pleaded guilty in 2008 to a Florida state charge of soliciting sex from a minor girl. He served 13 months in prison, but spent most of that time on work release each day.
Epstein, then 66, killed himself in a federal prison in New York in August 2019, a month after he was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges.
