Follow the Money, Epstein’s Millions

On August 8, 2019  – two days before his death in a New York jail cell – Epstein placed his entire fortune of $577 million into a trust in the Virgin Islands making legal claims by the victims more difficult. Despite this attempt at shielding this wealth, the victims’ lawyers successfully sued Epstein’s two banks, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan Chase, and secured settlements of $75 million and $290 million respectively to be distributed to scores of victims internationally.

The Guardian Buries the Lede

In June 2023, The Guardian reported on the victims’ lawsuit against JP Morgan Chase, Epstein’s bank of fifteen years.  A 2019 internal report filed by the bank with the court in New York revealed that Epstein appeared to “maintain a particularly close relationship with Prince Andrew the Duke of York and Lord Peter Mandelson, a senior member of the British government.” 

The Guardian noted that Prince Andrew had apparently, based on the bank’s report, lied about ending the relationship with Epstein in December 2010. Epstein abuse survivor Virginia Giuffre is seen here with Prince Andrew who settled a lawsuit filed by Giuffre.

Rather than focus on the prince, The Guardian titled the article, “Bank report details Peter Mandelson’s apparent contact with Jeffrey Epstein” with a tagline, “JP Morgan report from 2019 found Epstein seemed to keep ‘particularly close relationship’ with Labour peer.” The evidence that the Duke of York had lied about ending his relationship with Epstein was relegated to two paragraphs near the conclusion of the piece. 

For some of the more than 130 Epstein survivors to have come forward, as further investigated by Vicky Ward on Substack, the focus they insist should now be on identifying and prosecuting Epstein’s accomplices, enablers, and perpetrators. 

After Epstein’s demise in a New York jail cell in 2019, several victims spoke out including Prince Andrew’s accuser Giuffre who was interviewed for the Netflix series on Epstein:

“The people that were involved, the people that actually participated, there are so many of them out there. None of them have been held accountable. The monsters are still out there and they are still abusing other people. Why they have not been named and shamed yet is beyond me.” 

Epstein’s Lead Personal Banker at JPMorgan an Apparent Client of Epstein’s Sex Trafficking Ring

Evidence has emerged in the course of the lawsuit against the bank that, according to a New York Intelligencer report, Epstein’s own personal banker Les Staley at JP Morgan Chase was actually a client of Epstein’s, stating:

“What Staley allegedly got from Epstein has largely been drawn from court documents already made public — girls, money, influence. Epstein sent Staley pictures of models, coordinated schedules with Prince Andrew, and at one point wired money to a girl after confirming that Staley would be visiting.”

The New York Post had reported over a year earlier that Staley and Epstein had exchanged around 1,200 emails, some of them with questionable and unexplained phrases like “snow white.”

Staley, who stopped serving Epstein and ultimately left JPMorgan to join Barclays Bank, has not been charged with any crime for either facilitating Epstein’s sex trafficking ring or for being sex trafficking client.

The Intelligencer concluded that, “the more information that’s been revealed about the bank’s relationship with Epstein, the less believable it is that he was just another client.” This reporting is yet another suggestion that former U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta spoke the truth when he said “Epstein belonged to intelligence.” Acosta had made this claim when pressed to explain his shocking “non-prosecution” agreement with Epstein. 

Intelligence ties could possibly explain how Epstein was able to broker a meeting between JPMorgan’s Staley and Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel, as reported by The Intelligencer. It might also explain why Vanity Fair’s Carter and Ward hid the claims of four sources who each said Epstein was an intelligence asset of some kind, operationally involved in doing the bidding of intelligence agencies.

Chicago criminal defense attorney Leonard Goodman in WhoWhatWhy’s weighs in on the question in this incisive opinion piece as relevant now as it was in 2019. He speculates on what might have happened had Epstein’s case made it to trial:

“A public criminal trial would have made it very hard to cover up Epstein’s relationship to intelligence agencies. These are the agencies that tell US presidents which countries to bomb, what leaders to depose, and which terrorists to assassinate by drone.”

The Epstein scandal would be far worse for government officials, because it potentially involves exploiting minors to obtain dirt on world leaders. 

Such a scandal would likely lead to major reforms and oversight of US intelligence, similar to what we saw in the wake of Watergate in the 1970s, with the Church Committee investigation of the CIA, FBI, IRS, and NSA.

And it’s the job of the press, and informed citizens, to keep talking about the case until we get truthful information about Epstein and about all his co-conspirators, including the ones allegedly working with US intelligence.”

"We need to look at ourselves, too," the Miami Herald's Julie Brown told NPR referring to the responsibility of the media, "We need to understand why this wasn't scrutinized in this way before."