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World|Jeffrey Epstein’s Bankers
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/world/jeffrey-epstein-jpmorgan-us-open.html
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JPMorgan executives knew that Jeffrey Epstein was bad news. As far back as 2006 — long before his 2019 arrest — officials debated cutting their longtime client loose. Employees raised concerns about the danger of doing business with the admitted criminal, and officials confronted him about news reports that he had raped and trafficked young women and girls.
But Epstein generated millions of dollars for JPMorgan. The giant bank lent him large sums and processed more than $1 billion of transactions for him (including payments to women who had been lured into his sex-trafficking network). Bankers debated the risks and decided he could stay, according to an investigation my colleagues Matt Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg and I published today. In short, until JPMorgan dropped him as a client in 2013, America’s leading bank financially enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator.
Why? The answer, we found, is that bankers, like all people, respond to incentives — and the incentives at JPMorgan rewarded doing business with Epstein. Today’s newsletter explains them.
A lucrative client
Epstein kept hundreds of millions of dollars at the bank. At one point, he generated more revenue than any other investor client in JPMorgan’s private-banking division, which caters to the richest of the rich.
But Epstein was much more than just another customer. He introduced bank executives to other clients, including Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who parked more than $4 billion at JPMorgan. He helped orchestrate an important acquisition for the bank. And he was a trusted adviser to some of the bank’s top executives — even while he was incarcerated in Florida after pleading guilty to a sex crime.
Long after Epstein became a registered sex offender, at least some JPMorgan employees were convinced that serving him was in the bank’s interest. (A JPMorgan spokesman said the bank regretted doing business with Epstein but denied responsibility for his crimes.)
