Bank of America and BNY are facing class-action lawsuits, filed Wednesday by an alleged victim of disgraced financier and late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The anonymous plaintiff, Jane Doe, seeks unspecified damages and alleges Epstein’s trafficking operation wouldn’t have existed without banks providing special treatment to him and co-conspirators.
The lawsuits accuse both banks of failing to file suspicious activity reports about Epstein-related transactions “before it was too late.”
Bank of America filed SARs in 2020 covering $170 million in transactions between Epstein and former Apollo Global Management CEO Leon Black. Black paid Epstein for estate planning and tax services, according to a legal review by Apollo’s board.
BNY filed SARs – after Epstein’s 2019 death in prison – covering $378 million in transactions.
In both lawsuits, Doe said she met Epstein in 2011, while she was living in Russia. She said she became financially dependent on Epstein, whom she accuses of raping her, forcibly touching her, and forcing her to engage in sex acts with other women at least 100 times between 2011 and 2019.
Doe said she opened an account at Bank of America in May 2013 at the direction of Epstein’s then-accountant, Richard Kahn, whom she said transferred about $14,000 into the account. Kahn regularly sent Doe money for rent through the account, she said. Money in the account was also used to “defraud immigration officials,” according to the lawsuit.
In 2015, Kahn's assistant told Doe, according to the suit, that Epstein was adding her to the payroll for a "sham company" and that she would receive funds through her Bank of America account. Doe said she did not know the purpose of those payments.
Epstein and Kahn continued to use accounts set up for Doe at the bank until 2019, according to the suit.
In the BNY suit, meanwhile, Doe said the bank gave a line of credit to MC2, a modeling agency she accuses Epstein and associate Jean-Luc Brunel of using to traffic victims. Brunel, a French modeling talent scout, was arrested in December 2020 and was found dead in jail in 2022, prosecutors in Paris said.
Spokespeople for Bank of America and BNY declined to comment.
Doe’s complaint against Bank of America does not cite Epstein as a direct client but focuses on the use of BofA accounts by “his co-conspirators, associates and victims,” including Epstein’s longtime girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell. In the suit, Doe asserted Bank of America knew the accounts were being used for criminal activity.
“Bank of America had a plethora of information regarding Epstein’s sex trafficking operation but chose profit over protecting the victims,” lawyer David Boies wrote in the suit.
Boies’ firm, Boies Schiller Flexner, is among the legal teams that secured a $290 million settlement from JPMorgan Chase in 2023, on behalf of Epstein victims, and $75 million from Deutsche Bank, in separate cases.
“The other banks responsible for allowing Epstein’s trafficking should have contacted us during the previous litigation to do the right thing for these victims,” said Brad Edwards, founding partner at Edwards Henderson, another law firm representing Doe. “It is sad that only through lawsuits and Congress are we able to bring justice to this obvious problem.”
At least two congressional committees are investigating banks’ Epstein ties. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-MD, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, last week urged the CEOs of Bank of America, BNY, JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank to offer more information on their companies’ connections to Epstein.
Meanwhile, Sen. Ron Wyden, D-OR, wrote in July to the commissioner of the IRS, asking for payment and transfer records to be subpoenaed – with particular focus on the connection to Black.
Wyden, ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, then asked Treasury secretary Scott Bessent last month to submit Epstein-related records, including SAR filings, to lawmakers. Wyden has said his investigators have documented – from SARs – more than 4,700 transfers of funds in and out of Epstein’s accounts.
“As Congress works toward unraveling how Jeffrey Epstein was able to orchestrate his criminal sex trafficking enterprise for decades without detection, we are taking another important step forward toward justice for survivors," Sigrid McCawley, a managing partner at Boies Schiller Flexner who is also representing Doe, said in a statement Wednesday.
