JPMorgan to pay $75 million on claims that it enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operations

NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase &Co. has agreed to shell out $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands in a lawsuit alleging America’s biggest bank was a fundamental enabler of Jeffrey Epstein’s years-long sex trafficking of teenage girls, representatives for the financial institution said Tuesday.

The bank will shell out $20 million to charities in the U.S. territory where the deceased financier committed much of his abuse on his two private islands, $10 million toward mental health services for Epstein victims, $25 million to local law enforcement, and $20 million towards legal fees. It also reached a tentative settlement in related litigation with former Barclays Bank chief executive and Epstein pal Jes Staley.

The settlements add to the $290 million that JPMorgan agreed to pay a class of Epstein victims in a separate lawsuit in June, which also accused it of providing critical banking services to the prolific abuser from 1998 to 2013 when he was targeting children for sex trafficking despite glaring red flags. Deutsche Bank, where Epstein took his money after parting with JPMorgan, also reached a $75 million settlement with his victims in June.

The settlements appear to bring to a close a years-long pursuit of justice for Epstein’s depraved abuse against young girls after his suicide at age 66 inside Manhattan’s now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center, where he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. More than 100 women have accused him of sexually abusing them, many of them when they were minors, but the only person who has been held criminally accountable is Ghislaine Maxwell. His former lover and associate was found guilty in late 2021 of grooming his victims for at least a decade starting in 1994.

The cases against JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank sought to shed light on how the deep-pocketed Brooklyn native got away with his abuse for as long as he did — with unreserved access to hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the Virgin Islands case, which sought $190 million and was headed to trial on Oct. 23, Justice Department investigators found JPMorgan “pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid” in “a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the Virgin Islands.”