JPMorgan handled payments from Jeffrey Epstein after he was a client

JPMorgan Chase handled greater than $1.1 million in payments from Jeffrey Epstein to “girls or women” after the large bank has said it fired the sex offender as a client, a lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands told a judge Monday.

Lots of the girls or women had Eastern European surnames, and greater than $320,000 of the payments were made to “quite a few individuals for whom JPMorgan had no previously identified payments,” the attorney Linda Singer wrote to Latest York federal Judge Jed Rakoff.

Singer in her letter accused JPMorgan of failing to reveal the payments until after the tip of discovery, the period during which the bank and the Virgin Islands exchanged evidence as a part of an ongoing lawsuit that accuses JPMorgan of facilitating sex trafficking by Epstein.

Singer wrote that documents recently turned over by JPMorgan contained information that had been previously sought by the Virgin Islands in the course of the discovery period.

That information was assembled internally by the bank in October 2019, greater than three months after Epstein was arrested on federal child sex trafficking charges. Epstein killed himself in jail in August 2019.

“There isn’t a legitimate reason for JPMorgan failing to discover payments to ladies or women the bank itself identified as being related to Epstein — and potential evidence of Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise — years before receiving the USVI’s discovery requests,” the attorney wrote.

The federal government of the Virgin Islands alleges JPMorgan enabled and benefited from Epstein’s trafficking of young women in the course of the years when he was a client. Epstein maintained a residence on a personal island within the American territory, where he sexually abused scores of ladies.

JPMorgan says it cut ties to Epstein in 2013. But Monday’s filing challenges the bank’s timeline.

The bank denies any wrongdoing. A spokeswoman for JPMorgan had no immediate comment on the letter.

Singer’s letter says that a spreadsheet prepared by JPMorgan listing the dates and beneficiaries of greater than 9,000 transactions payable to Epstein-related individuals between 2005 and 2019 “had a combined value of over $2.4 billion.”

“Lots of the entries reflected accounts and payments, numbering within the hundreds and totaling within the tons of of tens of millions of dollars in value, of which USVI had no prior knowledge or information from JPMorgan’s responses and productions in the course of the fact discovery period,” Singer wrote.

The letter says that JPMorgan has argued the knowledge was not disclosed earlier “since it was not in a custodial production and/or didn’t relate to individuals specifically identified by the USVI as related to Epstein.”

But Singer noted, “The USVI has repeatedly made clear that its discovery requests should not limited to individuals it specifically identified as being related to Epstein.”

“The USVI specifically identified the individuals it knew were related to Epstein to make its discovery requests clearer — not relieve JPMorgan of its duty to provide known relevant documents,” the lawyer wrote.

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