A mugshot of Jeffrey Epstein released by the U.S. Justice Department.
Source: U.S. Justice Department
JPMorgan Chase handled more than $1.1 million in payments from Jeffrey Epstein to “girls or women” after the giant bank terminated the sex offender as a client, a lawyer for the U.S. Virgin Islands told a judge Monday.
Many of the girls or women had Eastern European surnames, and more than $320,000 of the payments were made to “numerous individuals for whom JPMorgan had no previously identified payments,” the attorney Linda Singer wrote to New York federal Judge Jed Rakoff.
Singer in her letter accused JPMorgan of failing to disclose the payments until after the end of a period of time set aside for the exchange of evidence between the bank and the Virgin Islands as part of an ongoing federal lawsuit.
The government of the Virgin Islands accuses JPMorgan in that New York federal court lawsuit of facilitating sex trafficking by Epstein for years when he was a client. 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.
The letter says that a spreadsheet prepared by JPMorgan listing the dates and beneficiaries of more than 9,000 transactions payable to Epstein-related persons between 2005 and 2019 “had a combined value of over $2.4 billion.”
“Many of the entries reflected accounts and payments, numbering in the thousands and totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars in value, of which USVI had no prior knowledge or information from JPMorgan’s responses and productions during the fact discovery period,” Singer wrote.
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