Jamie Dimon should be forced to undergo a second round of questions about JPMorgan Chase’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, according to lawyers for a woman who claims the bank is liable for the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of the late financier.
Dimon, JPMorgan’s chief executive, sat for a seven-hour deposition in May. Lawyers for the unnamed plaintiff now want to talk to him again after JPMorgan turned over 1,500 documents following his questioning.
“Despite the court’s clear warning, JPMC still failed to expeditiously produce documents from the custodial files of key witnesses, some of whom had already been deposed, for strategic reasons,” lawyers for the woman wrote in a letter on Friday to Judge Jed Rakoff, who is presiding over the case in New York’s southern district federal court.
JPMorgan said there was “no reason to reopen any of these depositions”.
The bank said: “Plaintiffs like the headlines, but no amount of time on the record will change the fact that Jamie Dimon never met the man, never worked with the man, and wishes in hindsight the man had never been a client of the firm.”
Lawyers for the woman, who is using the pseudonym Jane Doe, are also seeking another set of depositions with Mary Erdoes, who runs the group’s private banking business where Epstein was a client, and Mary Casey, another private banker at JPMorgan.
The request is the latest twist in two escalating legal battles between JPMorgan and Jane Doe as well as the US Virgin Islands, where Epstein had a home. The two plaintiffs have accused the bank of ignoring red flags relating to Epstein and benefiting from human trafficking.
The bank’s lawyers have previously described the USVI suit as “meritless”, and Jane Doe’s complaint as “directed at the wrong party”.
The cases have shone a light on the internal deliberations at JPMorgan over whether or not to keep Epstein as a client of its private bank from 1998 until 2013, when the lender ultimately severed ties. During that time, he pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting prostitution from a minor and served 13 months in a Florida prison.
He subsequently became a client of Deutsche Bank, which last month agreed to pay up to $75mn to settle a lawsuit brought by Jane Doe.
In Dimon’s deposition in May, he has identified JPMorgan’s former general counsel Stephen Cutler as the “ultimate decider” who had the authority to axe Epstein as a client. The CEO said he only learned Epstein had held accounts at the bank about four years ago, when the disgraced financier was arrested on federal sex crime charges.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 as he awaited trial in jail.
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