NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon strongly denied knowing Jeffrey Epstein or deliberately aiding the prolific abuser’s sex trafficking of teenage girls, according to court documents released Wednesday.
In a sit-down videotaped deposition on Friday, Dimon denied responsibility for Epstein’s depravity and said he trusted his senior executives to vet clients.
“(My) heart goes out to these women. It really does. And you can ask me 85 different ways. We were trying to do our job as best as we can. And of course we are not the law — the legal profession. We are not law enforcement,” the Wall Street titan testified under oath.
The sworn deposition was included in lawsuits brought against JPMorgan by victims of Epstein and the U.S. Virgin Islands, who have accused the bank of greasing the wheels of his global sex trafficking scheme. The suits allege that Epstein couldn’t have succeeded in trafficking minors around the world for sex on his private planes for years without access to his bank accounts.
Dimon acknowledged the bank retained Epstein as a client for seven years after his 2008 conviction on child sex offense charges, but insisted he didn’t know anything about him until his indictment and ensuing suicide.
The CEO said he knew nothing about a 2010 email in Epstein’s inbox planning a dinner between the two men and former JPMorgan executive Jes Staley.
“Shall I have Lynn prepare heavy snacks for your evening appointments with Jes Staley and Jamie Dimon? Or is this to be a nice, sit-down dinner at 9 p.m.?” Lesley Groff wrote Epstein, who replied, “Snacks.”
“I’ve never met Jeff Epstein. I never knew Jeff Epstein. I never went to Jeff Epstein’s house. I never had a meal with Jeff Epstein. I have no idea what they’re referring to here,” Dimon testified when presented with the email, adding that Epstein had been “obviously misinformed.”
The CEO said Staley largely left him in the dark about Epstein. Staley was JPMorgan’s primary liaison with the sicko and has been accused of raping one of his sex trafficking victims. Staley denies the claims.
“The right people were looking at the facts at the time. That’s their job,” Dimon said at one point in the deposition. “I’ll take back my answer. Jes Staley should have told me some things. He should have told the group some things. This may have turned out differently.”
In one exchange, when asked about JPMorgan’s most problematic clients, Dimon described Epstein as a “disaster.”
“Piece of s–t. Yes, all of that, we know,” he said.
Dimon similarly denied knowing anything about internal discussions at JPMorgan on retaining Epstein as a client after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a 14-year-old girl for sex.
“(Do) you think that the bank owes an apology to some of the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking that suffered in the period after the bank was proposed to terminate him but didn’t?” asked David Boies, a lawyer for the victims.
Dimon replied that what happened to the women was “atrocious,” but not directly the bank’s fault.
“I wouldn’t mind personally apologizing to them, not because we committed the crime — we did not — and not because we believe we’re responsible,” Dimon said.
“(But) that any potential thing, what little role that we could have eased it or helped catch it quicker or something like that, or get it to law enforcement quicker or get law enforcement to react to it quicker, which they obviously didn’t, you know,” he continued, “I would apologize to them for that, yes.”
Epstein killed himself at age 66 inside the now-shuttered Metropolitan Correctional Center a month after his arrest on child sex trafficking charges. Dozens of women have alleged he abused them, many starting when they were as young as 14. A Manhattan jury convicted his longtime right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, in December 2021 of procuring and grooming his victims for at least a decade starting in the 1990s.
Asked by Boise whether JPMorgan would take any responsibility for the torment endured by Epstein’s victims, Dimon answered in the negative.
“Not while we’re having a lawsuit, no,” he said.
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