Bank of America has agreed to pay $72.5 million to settle a lawsuit filed by lawyers representing hundreds of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse victims, according to a filing in federal court on Friday.
The tentative settlement, which requires approval by a judge, is the third payout by a big bank to resolve similar claims by the same team of victims’ lawyers. An agreement in principle was announced this month, but the terms were not made public until Friday.
The lawsuit, filed in October in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, claimed that Bank of America had financially benefited from its relationship with Mr. Epstein and overlooked signs that its accounts were being used to further his abuse of young women.
In a statement, a spokesman for Bank of America said, “While we stand by our prior statements made in the filings in this case, including that Bank of America did not facilitate sex-trafficking crimes, this resolution allows us to put this matter behind us and provides further closure for the plaintiffs.”
The settlement will entitle many of the victims whom Mr. Epstein abused between 2008 and 2019 to monetary compensation.
In the earlier lawsuits, JPMorgan Chase, which provided banking services to Mr. Epstein for roughly 15 years, agreed to pay $290 million, and Deutsche Bank, which managed Mr. Epstein’s accounts for about five years, agreed to pay $75 million.
The years when JPMorgan provided services to Mr. Epstein, roughly 1998 to 2013, coincided with the period when, prosecutors have said, he sexually abused dozens of teenage girls, many of them minors, as well as women in their early 20s.
Most of Bank of America’s involvement with Mr. Epstein began after JPMorgan stopped doing business with him. By that time, his main victims were young women — many of them would-be models — from Russia and Ukraine.
The lead plaintiff in the Bank of America lawsuit, an unidentified woman, came to the United States from Russia in 2011 when she was about 20. The lawsuit said Mr. Epstein had sexually abused her at least 100 times and coerced her into a “cultlike life,” in which she was totally dependent on him.
In 2013, Bank of America opened an account for the woman, then 22, at the direction of Mr. Epstein’s employees, even though she spoke little English and had no job or discernible source of income — all potential red flags for sex trafficking, the lawsuit said.
In 2008, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to a charge of soliciting prostitution from an underage teenage girl. He was sentenced to 18 months in a county jail, but was released after 13 months and had to register as a sex offender.
Concern that Mr. Epstein’s sentence was too light prompted federal authorities in New York to open a new investigation, and in 2019 they charged him with sex trafficking of underage teenage girls. A month after his arrest, Mr. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in an apparent suicide.
The complaint against Bank of America focused heavily on the activities of a Bank of America customer, Leon Black, the private equity billionaire, who funneled $170 million to Mr. Epstein from his various accounts at the bank.
Mr. Black has long argued that the payments were for traditional tax and estate services. He was not named as a defendant in the lawsuit and was not party to the settlement. A spokesman for Mr. Black declined to comment on the Bank of America settlement.
The two law firms representing the victims, Boies Schiller Flexner and Edwards Henderson, could be eligible to receive fees totaling 30 percent of the settlement amount, according to the court filing.
Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.
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