Epstein News Deluge: Reputational Damage Taints Largest Bank, Oldest University, Academy Award Winner – Possible Class Action Suit With 100 Victims

For many years, it seemed that the people directly involved with the Epstein Trafficking Ring – be they clients, enablers or co-conspirators – would never face any kind of consequences. It was even joked that Ghislaine Maxwell was the first person in history to be convicted of sex-trafficking young girls to no one.

But for some time, now, some measure of reckoning has been under way, and it is starting to inflict reputational damage on some rich and powerful members of the American and European society.

Last weekend I published a very well-read piece about the ‘incessant flux of new (and not-so-new) information’ that has been revealed lately: Drip, Drip, Flood: Incredible Surge of News in the Epstein Trafficking Saga – Here’s 15 Shocking Developments That You May Have Missed

It’s a mind-boggling amount of developments, but I stated at the end of the article that ‘the way things are going, it’s expected that, by the time this story hit the Frank Report website, there will be additional developments, and this piece will need an update’. And I was not kidding!

Here you have a new batch of happenings on the criminal saga of the decade. Many of the developments are taking place in court.

Let me begin by the latest development: a new round of internal JPMorgan emails was released, part of the plaintiff Jane Doe’s legal memorandum requesting the judge grant class-action status to the case. If Doe succeeds, more than 100 victims of Epstein could join the litigation.

The Daily Beast Reported:

“JPMorgan raised red flags about its banking relationship with Jeffrey Epstein as early as 2006 and held meetings with former executive Jes Staley—who is accused of sexually abusing at least one woman in Epstein’s orbit—about his friendship with the multimillionaire sex-trafficker, new court exhibits reveal.

According to internal emails published as exhibits as part of an Epstein victim’s lawsuit against JPMorgan, Staley even went as far as suggesting that bank brass meet with Ken Starr, Epstein’s high-powered lawyer who helped him dodge serious charges in Florida.”

The emails prove that bank had known Epstein was radioactive for years. The filing reads: “JPMC ignored all the allegations about Epstein’s sex trafficking and instead continued to facilitate the venture.”  It “deliberately failed to file reports in the face of red flags because the reports might result in government intervention in the sex-trafficking venture.”

A few bullet points from this legal filing:

• In July 2008, JPMorgan’s private bank risk team referred Epstein to its anti-money laundering (AML) branch ‘for excessive cash activity’ and articles about Epstein’s involvement in ‘the prostitution/underage sex trade.’
• The bank’s risk managers ‘documented his negative background’ and ‘marked him high risk’.
• Director for the bank’s Financial Intelligence Unit, Phillip DeLuca: ‘This is the guy who likes young girls, correct? Hope that they do not cave!!’
• Banking transactions from a woman in Epstein’s circle: ‘Lots of salon, lingerie shops, drug stores, video like ‘girls gone wild’ and some other suspicious shops.
• 2006 memo: Epstein’s “cash withdrawals are routinely made in amounts for $40,000 to $80,000 several times a month, which total over $750,000 year to date.”

The territory of the Virgin Islands is also suing JPMorgan, alleging the Wall Street titans enabled the Epstein’s international sex-trafficking scheme.

But, since there’s actually a good deal of blame to go around, the JPMorgan is arguing that the USVI itself is to blame, and therefore not entitled to sue.

Bloomberg Reported:

“The US Virgin Islands is asking a judge to block JPMorgan Chase & Co. from arguing that the territory has ‘unclean hands’ in suing the bank for allegedly benefiting from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes because it also failed to act against him.

The USVI said in Monday filing in Manhattan federal court that JPMorgan was seeking “to shift fault to the government for alleged failure to prevent Epstein’s and JPMorgan’s own trafficking-related activity.”

JPMorgan called the claims a ‘masterclass in deflection’, saying the USVI failed to act against Epstein despite having the same information about the allegations, granting him lucrative privileges and massive tax incentives.

USVI replied: “JPMorgan had real-time information on Epstein’s activity that the government did not and had specific legal duties to report this information to law enforcement authorities, which it intentionally decided not to do.”

We have written at length about how, besides the Virgin Islands case, JPMorgan is also defendant is a parallel lawsuit by Epstein trafficking victims.

In this case, it’s the bank that’s having to fight a demand for disqualification of its law firm from defending it. A lawyer for the plaintiff is claiming that Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr has a conflict of interest and must be disqualified.

Reuters reported:

“Law firm Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr pushed back on Monday against an effort to bar the firm from defending JPMorgan Chase & Co in a lawsuit accusing the bank of helping to facilitate late financier Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of women and girls.

WilmerHale lawyers said in a court filing that the firm’s past work for an anti-sex trafficking organization that supported an alleged Epstein victim, Courtney Wild, was “unrelated to and had nothing to do” with the case against JPMorgan, which was brought by a different Epstein accuser in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

[…] WilmerHale lawyers authored a friend-of-the-court brief in 2021 on behalf of the anti-trafficking organization ECPAT-USA urging the U.S. Supreme Court to take up an appeal by Wild, who had sued to invalidate a 2007 non-prosecution deal between Epstein and U.S. prosecutors.”

We have also talked about how JPMorgan brought a lawsuit against its former top executive (and later Barclays’ CEO) Jes Staley, “in an attempt to make him liable for any penalties the company might have to pay if it is found to have facilitated Epstein’s sex-trafficking crimes in two other high-profile lawsuits”.

Financial Times reported:

“JPMorgan Chase claimed former executive Jes Staley repeatedly thwarted its efforts to sever ties with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein while the former Barclays chief executive was employed by the US banking giant.

Staley has sought to dismiss the lawsuit. In a filing in Manhattan federal court opposing that motion, lawyers for JPMorgan alleged Staley knew of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation ‘but thwarted any efforts within JPMC to sever ties with Epstein’. Staley ‘persisted for years in protecting Epstein in the face of attempts by JPMC personnel to end the company’s relationship with Epstein on reputational grounds, made misrepresentations in the process, and continued to do so to the end of his JPMC tenure’.”

Besides all the flurry of activity in the courts, there is also an ongoing movement in the MSM to shed light on Epstein’s acquaintances – and that is bringing severe reputational damage to many.

Take filmmaker Woody Allen, for example: his relationship with the convicted pedophile is well known for some time, now, but a new trove of documents has further revealed the extent of their relationship.

Telegraph reported:

“Woody Allen frequently dined with Jeffrey Epstein and invited the disgraced financier to film screenings after his 2008 sex offence conviction.

Over the course of several years, the two men planned visits to art studios, Sotheby’s auction house and film screenings together.

Allen, 87, and Epstein were scheduled to meet nearly every month in 2014 and 2015.

[…] Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, also attended dozens of dinners at Epstein’s mansion.”

It could have been seen as ‘old news’, but in the current environment no one seems immune to crippling reputational damage (just ask Prince Andrew).

So Allen and his wife had their spokesman reach out and say:

• “Woody and Soon-Yi lived in the same neighborhood as Epstein and were frequently invited to dinner parties at his townhouse”.
• “There were always other guests at those gatherings.”
• The director never “spent time with [Epstein] without Soon-Yi also being present”.

I, for one, am not impressed by these explanations. It seems to suggest that the presence of his wife was an iron-clad guarantee that all was ‘clean’ – as if only men were involved in the Epstein ring abuses, which we know very well not to be true.

Furthermore, at this point no one accused Allen of engaging in any sexual abuse of Epstein victims – despite his history, having married his former wife Mia Farrow’s step daughter (that he knew as a child), and having been credibly accused by Mia and her son Rowan Farrow of sexually abusing his adoptive daughter Dylan Farrow.

Right now, the reputational damage on Allen comes from the fact that he lent his ‘Academy-Award-Winner’ credibility to Jeffrey Epstein and helped the ‘Jay Gatsby from hell’ continue his life of crimes. And there’s no denying that.

The documents that have been released by the Wall Street Journal have also highlighted the close relationship between a sex trafficker and the oldest University in America.

Former Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers met repeatedly with and solicited donations from Epstein. In fact, the disgraced financier donated $9.1 million to Harvard from 1997 to 2007 — until the University halted donations following his 2008 conviction.

Summers also benefitted from his relationship with Epstein in other ways. The Crimson reported:

“Summers wrote an email to Epstein in April 2014 asking for ‘small scale philanthropy advice’ for his wife, Harvard professor Elisa New, who was in the process of establishing Verse Video Education, an online poetry project.

‘My life will be better if I raise $1m for Lisa’, wrote Summers, who is currently a professor at Harvard. “Mostly it will go to make it a pbs series and for teacher training. Ideas?”

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The college dropout had remade himself as a respected habitué of Ivy League schools.

The Nation reported:

“Between 1998 and 2007, Epstein donated a total of $9,179,000 to Harvard, much of it going to the establishment of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics (which carried the regrettable acronym “PED”), run by professor Martin Nowak. Epstein was treated by Harvard as not just a generous benefactor but someone who merited inclusion in the community of ideas. Epstein was made a visiting fellow in Harvard’s Department of Psychology in 2005, despite the fact that, as an internal report later noted, he ‘lacked the academic qualifications Visiting Fellows typically possessed’.”

When Epstein was prohibited to give money to the university itself, he kept giving money to individual research programs carried out by Harvard scholars.

“Harvard is one of the biggest sharks in the ocean, with an endowment of more than $50 billion—the largest academic hoard of wealth in the world. You don’t get to be as wealthy as Harvard if you are overly scrupulous about whom you take money from.”

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That’s it for now. But of course, it is a certainty that at any minute other bombshells with rock the world of the rich, famous and powerful. The deluge is not over.

Paul Serran