JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon must undergo up to two days of questioning by lawyers handling lawsuits over whether the bank can be held liable in financier Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of teenage girls and women, a federal judge said Tuesday.
During a telephone conference with lawyers, Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan ordered Dimon to set aside two days for deposition testimony, though he didn’t specify when. He said one day of testimony might be sufficient and lawyers would have to get his approval to continue to a second day.
The New York bank, the nation's largest, has been sued by the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands and two women, both identified as Jane Doe, who say they were abused by Epstein.
The lawsuits contend JPMorgan should have seen evidence of Epstein’s sex trafficking and avoided profiting from it.
The bank, besides denying the allegations, has sued one of its former executives, saying the man hid Epstein's decades of sex abuse and trafficking to keep Epstein as a client.
Darin Oduyoye, a JPMorgan spokesperson, said lawyers for the lawsuits against JPMorgan “know our CEO has no relevant knowledge, but persists with this media stunt designed for headlines and clicks.”
He said a review of more than two decades of emails and other documents made it clear that Dimon had no involvement with Epstein or his accounts.
“He does not recall ever meeting, speaking or communicating with him,” Oduyoye said.
Epstein was 66 when he killed himself in a federal jail cell in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. Federal prosecutors had accused him of paying underage girls hundreds of dollars for massages at his homes in Florida and New York, where he then molested them.
Lawyers for JPMorgan did not immediately return messages seeking comment.
Final ticket sales pushed the jackpot beyond its earlier estimate of $810 million to $842.4 million at the time of the drawing, making it the fifth-largest Powerball jackpot and 10th-largest U.S. lottery jackpot ever won.
A New Jersey mayor says buses of migrants bound for New York City have been stopping at the train station in his town and others in an apparent effort to evade an executive order by New York's mayor trying to regulate how and when migrants can be dropped off in the city.
The world population grew by 75 million people over the past year and on New Year's Day, it was estimated to stand at more than 8 billion people, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
UW-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow. Wisconsin-La Crosse fired Gow on Wednesday, Dec. 27, 2023, after learning Gow and his wife have been producing and appearing in pornographic videos. Gow maintains the firing violated his free speech rights.
The U.S. military is now putting independent lawyers in charge of its investigations of sexual assault and other major crimes, what Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III has called the "most important reform" to the military justice system in recent history.
A decades-old law bans Medicare from paying for weight loss drugs. Now, drugmakers and a wide-ranging bipartisan coalition of lawmakers are gearing up to push for that to change next year.
Barring a court order, in March Texas police will start being able to arrest people they suspect have entered the U.S. illegally, but increases in border crossings since a 2021 law authorizing some arrests shows the limits of that approach in the face of desperation that causes people to risk everything and travel thousands of miles to the U.S.
