JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said in a deposition Friday that he wasn’t involved in the long-held accounts of sex offender and former customer Jeffrey Epstein.
Dimon’s deposition was tied to two lawsuits against JPMorgan, one by the U.S. Virgin Islands and one by an Epstein victim, regarding the bank’s connection to Epstein and knowledge of Epstein’s illegal sex trafficking activity in the early 2000s.
“Our CEO reaffirmed after his deposition that, as he has previously said, that he never met with him, never emailed him, does not recall ever discussing his accounts internally, and was not involved in any decisions about his account,” a bank spokesperson told CNBC. “There are millions and millions of emails and other documents that have been produced in this case and not one comes close to even suggesting that he had any role in decisions about Epstein’s accounts.”
The spokesperson called Epstein’s behavior “monstrous,” and said in hindsight, “any association with him was a mistake and we regret it.”
The suits, however, “are misdirected as we did not help him commit his heinous crimes,” the spokesperson said.
Dimon’s deposition, which was taken in private, has been expected since March.
JPMorgan’s asset and wealth-management CEO, Mary Erdoes, said in her own deposition in April that by 2006, the bank was aware that Epstein had been accused of paying cash to bring young women and underage girls to his Virgin Islands home.
April court filings showed that bank executives grappled with whether to continue working with Epstein after the bank’s Rapid Response Team noted he was withdrawing between $40,000 and $80,000 in cash multiple times a month, totaling more than $750,000 per year, according to The Independent.
The Washington Post published more details of Erdoes’ deposition Friday.
“Oh boy,” she wrote in a 2011 email to another executive after finding out about Epstein’s sex offender status tied to a 2008 sex crime against an underage girl. This was “at least the sixth time Erdoes ... had been alerted to Epstein’s criminal or civil legal trouble for sex crimes,” but she didn’t think it was her responsibility to cut off the bank’s relationship with the financier, The Washington Post reported.
Some four dozen JPMorgan employees flagged suspicions about Epstein's transactions while he was a customer, the BBC reported, citing court documents.
In March, JPMorgan sued its former private-banking chief, Jes Staley, saying he concealed knowledge of Epstein’s conduct. Staley, who last week failed to have the complaint against him dismissed, said JPMorgan is simply trying to "deflect blame" and use him as a "public relations shield" for its own mistakes, according to the BBC.
Dimon’s deposition comes a week after Deutsche Bank agreed to settle an Epstein victim’s class-action lawsuit for $75 million. Deutsche Bank brought Epstein on as a client following the 2013 dissolution of his relationship with JPMorgan. A spokesperson for Deutsche Bank declined to comment last week. The bank, however, settled a case related to its Epstein connection, paying the New York Department of Financial Services $150 million in 2020.
“We acknowledge our error of onboarding Epstein in 2013 and the weaknesses in our processes, and have learnt from our mistakes and shortcomings,” Deutsche Bank said at the time.
