A pair of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims are suing two major banks for their “complicity” in the late financier’s crimes.
The Wall Street Journalreports two anonymous Epstein accusers filed lawsuits against Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan Chase in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York on Thursday.
The lawsuits allege that the banks “knowingly benefited and received things of value for assisting, supporting, facilitating, and otherwise providing the most critical service for the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking organization to successfully rape, sexually assault, and coercively sex traffic” young women.
The lawsuits, which have requested to be certified as class action, are seeking unspecified damages.
“The Epstein sex-trafficking venture’s purpose included enticing, obtaining, harboring, and transporting the young victims without drawing unwanted attention from law enforcement,” the court documents state. “The venture had everything a sex-trafficking organization needed — funding, infrastructure, the appearance of legitimacy, and perhaps most importantly a complicit banking institution. It was by many accounts the most powerful and wealthiest sex-trafficking venture ever created.”
JPMorgan has not addressed the lawsuits. However, a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank said in a statement, “We believe this claim lacks merit and will present our arguments in court.”
Epstein was found dead in his prison cell on Aug. 10, 2019. According to court documents, the 66-year-old was placed on suicide watch sometime that July, after he was found unconscious with a bed sheet around his neck; however, a post-suicide watch report painted Epstein as a cooperative inmate who had no intentions of killing himself.
