What would you do if the federal government wanted you in jail and Jamie Dimon was paying your legal bills?
Here’s what Charlie Javice did: She spent money on luxury hotel upgrades, extravagant meals and cellulite butter, a personal care product that some people use to treat their skin, as a lawyer for the bank said in a hearing on Friday.
Then, she sent the receipts to the bank.
All told, Ms. Javice has spent more than $60 million — and counting — on her defense, according to recent legal filings. The bank has called the sum an “unprecedented and shocking amount that has exceeded any semblance of reasonableness.” It appears to be tens of millions of dollars more than Elizabeth Holmes’s legal fees, for instance.
In September, Ms. Javice, 33, was sentenced to more than seven years in prison for fraud. In 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired her start-up, Frank, for $175 million. Ms. Javice had claimed her company helped millions of people fill out their federal financial aid forms.
After the acquisition, however, the bank discovered that she had lied about most of Frank’s customers. JPMorgan sued, and then prosecutors put Ms. Javice on trial. A jury convicted her this year.
Along the way, Ms. Javice won a ruling that required the bank to pay her legal fees. JPMorgan has objected to the size of the fees in the past, and after her sentencing it decided to try to cut her off. The bank is trying the same maneuver with her former chief growth and acquisition officer, Olivier Amar, who was also convicted of fraud.
JPMorgan said in a filing last month that Ms. Javice engaged five separate law firms, and that she and her lawyers have treated the original ruling forcing the bank to pay for her defense as a “blank check to bill and expense whatever they please.” The stable of lawyers that she has used have also represented Elon Musk, Harvey Weinstein and Sam Bankman-Fried.
In response to a request for comment about the cellulite butter, the hotel upgrades and the luxury meals, a spokesman for Ms. Javice said, “Charlie says she has nothing to do with that and it’s a ridiculous allegation.”
He added that Ms. Javice followed JPMorgan’s written policies both as an employee and during the legal proceedings.
“As an employee, she did purchase ice cream and other items in accordance with JPMorgan’s code of conduct,” he said. “She never sought reimbursement for anything that wasn’t expressly permitted under the guidelines she was given. Any suggestion otherwise is simply incorrect.”
This isn’t the first time that the two sides have come to blows over the size of Ms. Javice’s appetite for counsel.
In 2023, the bank said that her “army of 77 lawyers” were trying “to force JPMC to pay for anything and everything relating to Frank.” Those lawyers, it said, were rounding up their hourly billings and tallying blocks of work time that the bank could not decipher.
The bank said it had produced 1.1 million pages of documents in response to government subpoenas for its recent trial. All of this activity yielded tens of thousands of time entries from lawyers, it said, including one who charged $2,025 per hour.
All told, the bank has so far offered up about $115 million for Ms. Javice’s and Mr. Amar’s legal fees. If the bank fails to slow their spending down, the costs for the pair could approach the size of the fraud they committed.
Ron Lieber has been the Your Money columnist since 2008 and has written five books, most recently “The Price You Pay for College.”
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