JPMorgan settles Epstein suits with US Virgin Islands
JPMorgan Chase has agreed to pay $75 million to the US Virgin Islands to settle claims that it facilitated the activities of Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in 2019, according to statements released by the parties Tuesday.
The tentative settlement comes just weeks before a scheduled trial in federal court in New York City on the US territory’s claim that the bank enabled Epstein’s sex trafficking operation of teenage girls and young women for nearly 15 years.
The bank also said in its statement that it had reached a confidential settlement with James Staley, a former top banker who had been one of the biggest advocates for keeping Epstein as a client.
JPMorgan, the nation’s largest bank, already agreed in June to pay $290 million to the nearly 200 victims of Epstein in a class-action lawsuit that mirrored many of the claims raised by the Virgin Islands.
The US Virgin Islands sued JPMorgan in December, and about a month later, lawyers for Epstein’s victims had sued the bank. The US territory said it was seeking up to $190 million in compensation from the bank, which it claimed had ignored warning signs about Epstein’s activities and chose to look the other way because he generated business for it.
The money the bank is paying to the Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a private island residence for roughly two decades, will mostly go toward funding charitable causes in the US territory in the Caribbean and paying lawyer fees. The settlement, the bank said, specifically calls for $30 million to go to local charities that support local victims of sex crimes and $25 million to help law enforcement fight sex trafficking and other crimes.
The Virgin Islands said that $10 million of the total was being aimed at providing mental health support for Epstein victims.
Epstein killed himself in a federal jail in New York in August 2019, a month after he had was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges. Epstein had been a client of JPMorgan both before and after he pleaded guilty in 2008 to a charge of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl and had to register as a sex offender in New York, Florida, and the Virgin Islands.
The bank agreed to settle with the Virgin Islands after months of embarrassing disclosures about how top executives continued to keep Epstein on as a client despite numerous warning signs that he was paying large sums of money to teenage girls and young women without any good explanation.
The Virgin Islands government said in a statement that the bank made “substantial commitments” as part of the settlement to bolstering its systems to detect and deter sex trafficking.
The bank dismissed Epstein as a client in 2013 but only after Staley, the former head of JPMorgan’s private bank, left for another job.
The bank sued Staley, also a former CEO of Barclays, shortly after the US Virgin Islands filed its lawsuit. The bank had been seeking reimbursement for some of its costs associated with the litigation. The bank said the terms of the settlement with Staley were confidential.