Epstein victim accuses Bank of America of assisting sex trafficking operation

MANHATTAN (CN) ­— A victim of pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein has accused Bank of America of deliberately ignoring multiple red flags of criminality in Epstein’s financial transactions in the decade after he was investigated and charged with sexually abusing underage girls.

“Rather than merely providing routine banking services to Epstein, Bank of America went far beyond what a non-complicit bank would have done and instead assisted Epstein in setting up the necessary financial structure to operate his sex-trafficking venture,” the pseudonymous Jane Doe victim wrote in the 49-page civil complaint filed Wednesday in New York federal court.

Represented by Boies Schiller founding partner David Boies, the Jane Doe plaintiff, in her six-count complaint, accuses Bank of America of “purposely and deliberately” failing to timely file required Suspicious Activity Reports, known as SARS, for Epstein’s suspicious banking activities until after his jailhouse death in 2019.

“In short, instead of behaving as an ordinary provider of routine banking services, Bank of America instead assisted Epstein in covering up his past crimes and committing new ones,” the victim says in the complaint.

Representatives for Bank of America had no immediate comment when reached on Wednesday afternoon.

Boies previously represented Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who died by suicide last April at age 41, in her now-settled civil action against Britain’s Prince Andrew and separately in her litigation against Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz.

Jane Doe, now a Florida citizen, says she met Epstein in 2011 in Russia, where she was living at the time.

She says Epstein sexually abused her on at least 100 occasions between 2011 and 2019, “including but not limited to, forcibly touching her, forcibly raping her, and forcing her to engage in sexual acts with other women for his own depraved sexual gratification.”

She says Epstein used a Bank of America account to receive payments from the payroll of a sham company for monthly rent to create documentation to be provided to immigration.

In her complaint, she says Bank of America should have known as early as 2006, when Epstein was arrested on sex trafficking charges in Florida, that Epstein was running a sex trafficking scheme, paying many victims with enormous amounts of cash as well as suspicious wire transfers, and that he was using loyal employees to do so.

“With indisputable publicly available knowledge that Epstein was a sexual offender who was using his wealth to run a sexual abuse and trafficking operation, any responsible bank providing only routine banking services would have cut ties with Epstein,” she states in the complaint.

In the wake of Epstein’s 2006 arrest and his highly publicized plea deal with prosecutors in 2007, Jane Doe said, “the essential ingredient Epstein needed to expand his sexual abuse of young women and sex trafficking venture was a financial institution that would know — but not care —  that Epstein was sexually abusing women on a daily basis and paying out millions in hush money.”

“Epstein needed an institution that would in fact assist and participate in that activity, and that would support his venture and conceal it if he was ever caught,” Jane Doe wrote in the complaint.

Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, applauded the lawsuit on Wednesday, noting that the complaint was filed one week after he sent sent letters to four of the nation’s largest banks demanding records and information related to over $1 billion in suspicious financial transactions flagged by the banks tied to sex trafficking crimes committed by Epstein, convicted recruiter Ghislaine Maxwell and their co-conspirators.

“A week before these filings, we demanded this very information, asking why banks, for years, processed $1.5 billion in Epstein-linked transactions without flagging them and filing reports required by law," Raskin wrote in a statement. “We stand with survivors in exposing the truth about the enablers and co-conspirators of this decades-long, international human trafficking ring.”

Bank of America, headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, is not the only large bank facing litigation over financial services provided to Epstein.

A year after Epstein’s death, Deutsche Bank reached a $150 million settlement with New York regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize his accounts for the kinds of activity that were markedly implicated by Epstein’s publicized past.

Three years later, Deutsche Bank also agreed to pay $75 million to settle a lawsuit claiming the German lender should have seen evidence of sex trafficking by Epstein when he was a client.

JPMorgan Chase similarly reached an agreement to pay $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands to resolve a federal suit over Epstein’s underage sex trafficking, in addition to its own $290 million settlement with victims.

The executors of Epstein’s estate, Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, reached a $290 million settlement in a class action brought by a Jane Doe victim, on the same day in June 2023 that U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff granted her class standing, meaning future awards would be granted to Doe and other victims.

Two years after Epstein’s death in a Manhattan jail cell, the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program announced it had awarded nearly had awarded over $121 million to 135 survivors, roughly one year after the program launched on June 25, 2020.

Boies Schiller Flexner also filed a nearly identical class action suit on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court against The Bank of New York Mellon, in which the Jane Doe plaintiff accused Bank of New York Mellon of processing nearly $380 million in payments to victims of Epstein’s sex trafficking.

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