For four years Denise George, a 64-year-old lawyer in the US Virgin Islands, fought to uncover the truth about the abuse of young women that took place there. She tells Rosie Kinchen the inside story of the Caribbean playground that sheltered a paedophile.
Denise George, the 64-year-old former attorney-general of the US Virgin Islands, is sitting in a hotel room on the main island of St Thomas, looking out at a view of green hills and Caribbean sea. While the photographer takes her picture, she sways to music coming from the swimming pool below. Amid this idyllic scene, it is hard to believe that this is the woman who, for the best part of the past four years, has been entrenched in a legal battle with the estate of the financier, paedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
It has been a David v Goliath tussle, during which the banks and billionaires who bankrolled Epstein were hauled into the spotlight — and the rot within the islands that George calls home was laid bare. It was a fight that ultimately cost George her job. But as the corruption and institutional failures that allowed Epstein to abuse women for so long are exposed, she has emerged as one of the few heroes in this sordid story. Now, in her first interview since she was fired on New Year’s Eve, George says she has no regrets. “I’m so glad it’s coming out. This is what it’s all about — it’s about transparency,” she says.
It has been just over four years since Epstein committed suicide in prison in Manhattan while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges, and nearly two years since his friend Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite and daughter of the media baron Robert Maxwell, was convicted for her part in the operation that saw him traffic and abuse hundreds of women, many of them teenagers, around the world.
The story could have ended there, but instead we have entered a second act — one that is playing out in courtrooms in the US Virgin Islands and in New York, where two of America’s biggest banks, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank, have been accused of enabling Epstein’s years of abuse. (On September 26, three days after this story was first published, JP Morgan Chase agreed to pay US$75 million — about NZ$126m — to the US Virgin Islands to settle the claims against it).
The latest allegations focus on two men, both titans of Wall Street, who were long-term friends and business associates of Epstein.
In May Jes Staley, a former JP Morgan investment banker — who stood down as chief executive of Barclays bank in 2021 over his links to Epstein — was named in a New York courtroom as the “powerful executive” who had allegedly sexually assaulted one victim. Recently the billionaire investor and art collector Leon Black, who once spent US$120m on a version of Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream, has been accused of rape by two women who claim that he attacked them during massages at Epstein’s townhouse in Manhattan. Both men deny the claims.
The foundation for much of this latest stage was laid here, in these little islands where life moves slowly and money talks.
Epstein’s private playground
A college dropout, Epstein became a financier on Wall Street in the late 1970s. His wealth has always been shrouded in secrecy but he bought the island of Little St James from a venture capitalist in 1998, paying a reported US$8m for the 71-acre estate. He renovated the buildings, including a main house and three guest cottages, a helipad and a dock. In 2016 he spent another US$22.5m to buy Great St James, the island next door, apparently in an effort to shield his private playground from prying eyes on the hourly ferry from St Thomas to St John.
It was on these islands that Epstein could entertain the rich and famous — and it was here that he could be at his most depraved. He would fly women and girls over from Florida to St Thomas on his plane, the “Lolita Express”. Then he would bring them on his helicopter to the island he called Little St Jeff, retreating into his private cabana by the pool and raising a flag to show he was in situ. This was his personal paradise; but for the girls who were brought here, many of them teenagers bought and trafficked from eastern Europe, it was hell. They were raped and assaulted; if they tried to escape, he took their passports away.
These stories were only just coming to light in April 2019, when Denise George was appointed attorney-general of the islands by Albert Bryan Jr, who had been elected governor the previous year. George, a former Miss Virgin Islands in the 1970s, had grown up on St Thomas, leaving to study radio, television and film at the University of Maryland and then law at Howard University in Washington. She had returned to the islands in 1988 with her husband and two children, working as a law clerk and later as a state prosecutor.
She knew who Epstein was: he had registered as a sex offender in 2010 after being convicted in Florida of soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. Beyond that, his name did not mean a lot to her. “I don’t follow the news that much,” she says. “I get enough drama in my day job.”
Within days of her appointment in 2019, George found herself in the middle of a global news storm. “Stories were swirling that Epstein had been running a trafficking ring for years and that some of it had occurred at Little St James,” George says. Reporters were asking for her to comment. “My mind was boggling. I was thinking, ‘How is it possible that a sex-trafficking operation has been going on for years — right here?’ "
Throughout the spring and early summer she made inquiries with the police to see if any complaints had been brought against Epstein that would give her grounds to raise a criminal case. But then, in July 2019, Epstein was arrested by federal agents in New York on sex-trafficking charges. Just over a month later he hanged himself in his cell. “It was a real blow,” George says. She had prosecuted sexual abuse and trafficking before, and knew how important it was for victims to gain some sense of closure.
A few days later she realised that Epstein had given her an opportunity to try to deliver that. Within a week of Epstein’s suicide the executors of his will — his lawyer, Darren Indyke, and his accountant, Richard Kahn — had filed for probate (the process of validating a will) in the US Virgin Islands. Two days before his death Epstein had changed his will and moved his entire US$600m estate — investments, properties and planes he owned around the world — into a trust registered there. “So the Virgin Islands has suddenly become the epicentre of this whole operation,” George says.
It is believed that Epstein made these changes in an effort to shield the estate from financial claims from victims who were already lining up. Epstein hadn’t just used the islands as a backdrop for his crimes, he seems to have spent years trying to win influence there. He gave Stacey Plaskett, a local politician, US$30,000 to fund her congressional election campaign; he donated to the girls’ volleyball team of a high school on the island of St Croix. According to court filings, in 2012 Epstein bought 78 Thanksgiving turkeys, one for every member of the customs office at the airport, where he would often arrive with young women.
He paid particular attention to the political class. George knew she may be kicking a wasps’ nest, but she was in a unique position. “The attorney-general is responsible for the prosecution of all local crimes — and that is not subject to approval from anyone, not even the governor,” she says. “I didn’t know what had happened back then, why this thing had gone on for so long. But I knew I was here now.”
The ‘organised crime’ approach
George was determined to find grounds for prosecution; the question “was not if, it was how”, she says. She filed a civil suit under the Criminally Influenced Corrupt Organisations law — anti-fraud legislation generally used by the government to prosecute large organised crime groups — which allowed her to freeze Epstein’s assets while she set out to prove he had conducted a pattern of criminal activity.
The task ahead was vast but she was inspired by her mother, a real estate broker and businesswoman who went to New York University in the 1950s — one of the first black women to do so. “Her favourite saying was, ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ " she says. George knew she needed outside help, “otherwise it would have been like picking a gunfight with a switchblade”. She hired a Washington legal firm, Motley Rice, to work alongside a small team on the islands.
They set out to gather evidence from Epstein’s victims, many of whom were already hiring lawyers to make claims against the estate. But it was important to meet the survivors in person. “I really wanted to reach out and speak to victims,” she says. “I wanted to hear the information first-hand.” A few months later three of the women travelled to the islands to meet George. Hearing their evidence was pivotal: “The detail was so compelling and so credible.”
One girl, who had been brought to Little St James as a minor, had been raped by Epstein and another man. “She got up and ran, trying to get to the shore, and she talked about how her feet were all cut because of the rough terrain,” George says. “It was the way she described it, the things that she was running past, that you just knew it had to be true — that is our terrain.”
It was one of many victim statements that formed part of the investigation. Many of the stories are harrowing. Another girl, who was raped on Little St James by Epstein when she was 15, tried to escape by swimming away. He and his friends took a boat out, brought her back and confiscated her passport.
Within three months of Epstein’s death, his executors had attempted to launch a victim compensation scheme through the probate court in the Virgin Islands. George reviewed the terms and found them deeply problematic. “They would be administering the scheme to help the victims to get their claims — but these are the same people who are working for Epstein,” she says. “That did not sound right at all.”
Most alarming were the confidentiality clauses and a requirement that, in exchange for money, survivors had to release Epstein’s friends and associates from further claims. “They were going to have their voices silenced all over again,” she says. So George began to argue that the scheme was unlawful.
The negotiations went on for months but she was ultimately successful: the compensation fund would be administered by Jordana Feldman, an independent lawyer. She would be advised by Marci Hamilton, a lawyer and expert on child sexual abuse. “It was hard fought but I think it might be the first [compensation scheme] of its kind for human trafficking victims,” George says.
Meanwhile, the team’s investigations carried on apace. They sent out subpoenas — court-mandated demands for information — to former employees and associates of Epstein. Snippets of information emerged. A technician who had been on the islands to fix a camera claimed he saw Prince Andrew there. “He said he saw Prince Andrew fondling a young girl who looked like she was in her teens,” George says. Prince Andrew did not respond to a request for comment.
Some who had crossed paths with Epstein were co-operative. He had spent years after his Florida conviction trying to rehabilitate his reputation and had plans to launch a charitable fund with Bill Gates as a donor. When this failed Gates’s lawyer told George’s team that Epstein appeared to try to blackmail Gates over an affair he had had with a young Russian bridge player.
However, most of the people closest to Epstein’s operation, former staff and employees, had signed non-disclosure agreements when they worked for him. At first George couldn’t figure out why they were sticking to them. “He’s dead,” she says. “I kept wondering, ‘Who do they think they’re protecting?’ But then I realised — they are protecting the living.”
Epstein’s ‘indispensable captains’
There were others who were implicated in the trafficking operation who were very much alive and who had an interest in shutting down the investigation. George claims that the executors themselves — Indyke and Kahn — held and managed at least 140 bank accounts for Epstein and his businesses. Indyke, 58, a lawyer from Long Island who appeared to have been plucked from obscurity by Epstein in the early 1990s, was particularly close to his boss. In a character statement submitted to the court during Epstein’s Florida conviction, Indyke said that when he and his wife had fertility problems Epstein had given them vital emotional and financial support, including paying for five rounds of IVF. When their twins were born, “Jeffrey honoured us by agreeing to be godfather to our children”.
Neither of the executors was responding to requests for information. “They were not co-operative but we were able to get the information we needed from other sources,” George says. After his Florida conviction, Epstein had increasingly focused on trafficking women from eastern Europe. George’s team claimed that Indyke and Kahn had helped to arrange “sham marriages” between these women and American victims — concocted lesbian relationships — for visa purposes. Indyke and Khan, George alleged, had been “indispensable captains” in Epstein’s trafficking operation.
Court filings claim that Indyke made payments from one of Epstein’s personal accounts totalling more than US$2.5m “to dozens of women with eastern European surnames, purportedly for hotel expenses, tuition and rent, and to [an] immigration lawyer in New York who was involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein’s victims to secure victims’ immigration status”. Both men have denied the claims. In January 2021 George named Indyke and Kahn as co-conspirators, claiming they had ”profited substantially” from their relationship with Epstein.
As the investigation progressed, George’s team realised they were engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with the executors. In early February 2020 the estate sent a payment of about US$12m to a bank Epstein had registered in the territory in 2014. Lawyers for the estate claimed it was an “error”. The following month George’s team alleged that US$13m that had not been declared to the court was transferred into an Epstein entity called the Butterfly Trust. A chunk of that money was moved again into trusts that stood to benefit Indyke, Kahn and their spouses. Again, George notified the court.
The executors say any claim that some assets of the Epstein estate were not reported to the probate court “is false on its face”.
As these details sent the international press into a frenzy, there was trepidation on the islands. “Some people thought it was too big,” says George, whose family have been here for generations. Her mother died in 1993, but her 92-year-old father still lives here. “It’s not like anyone came to my face and said it, but I heard it on the streets,” she says. But George was not willing to back down. “We had dozens of victims. Turning a blind eye was not an option. If I had done that, what would that have made me?”
By now the Covid pandemic had closed the courts for anything but urgent criminal cases. But the lawyers kept working. “My team was, like, ‘We’re going to do this?’ And I was, like, ‘Yeah, we’re gonna do it.’ "
The road to Leon Black
Epstein’s financial arrangements were extraordinarily complex. George likens it to a tangle of charging cables that you pull out of your bag. “There was a corporation for the helicopter, shell companies and businesses for all sorts of things — that was how he shielded himself,” she says. Wading through this mass of information it was essential to stick to a strategy. “I was clear from the start. I said, ‘We don’t go after people, we go after facts — we go after evidence. And we follow that, because it will take you to the people.” The evidence led them to Leon Black.
Black, co-founder of the private equity firm Apollo Global Management and one of America’s richest men, had lived a couple of streets away from Epstein on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. He claimed to have had a “limited relationship” with the paedophile. But that began to unravel in 2020 when The New York Times reported Black had paid Epstein at least US$50m for “estate planning, tax and philanthropic advice”, despite the fact that Epstein was neither an accountant nor a tax expert.
In January 2021 Black announced that he would stand down as chief executive of Apollo and the company commissioned an independent law firm to review the links between the two men. The report, published in March that year, revealed that Black had given Epstein US$158m — and it wasn’t company money, it was his own. The money often moved through an elaborate network of shell companies. In 2017, Black’s yacht paid Epstein’s jet US$22.5m. And a substantial amount ended up in an Epstein-owned business called Southern Trust, which was registered in the US Virgin Islands. This business would become a big part of George’s investigation.
The sham consultancy
On the eastern tip of St Thomas is a tranquil marina where the motorboats and gin palaces that cruise the Caribbean are berthed. This complex, along with the marina shopping centre beside it, American Yacht Harbor, was part-owned by Epstein and it was here, alongside a nail bar and shops selling nautical rope, that he registered Southern Trust.
Epstein had incorporated the business in 2011 as “a cutting-edge consulting service” in “biomedical and financial informatics” and it was on this basis that he was granted a raft of financial incentives by the islands’ government, including a 90 per cent reduction in income tax. But George discovered that Southern Trust was a sham; not only did it appear not to have conducted any work in informatics, but of the 13 people listed as employees, only one seemed to be working in IT. One was Epstein’s driver; one was a model. Another was Cecile de Jongh, the wife of the islands’ former governor — who also ran his private office.
George estimates that the arrangement saved Epstein about US$80m in taxes and the person who signed off the deal was Albert Bryan Jr, then head of the Economic Development Authority for the US Virgin Islands, who since January 2019 has been the islands’ elected governor — and the attorney-general’s boss.
The surprises didn’t stop there. Despite not having any clients, Southern Trust had no shortage of funds. Forensic accountants discovered that between 2013 and 2017 the company received US$158m — about 85 per cent of its total revenue — from entities linked to Leon Black. The payments were described as having been for “financial planning services”. George says there was evidence that early on in their professional relationship Epstein assisted Black in some financial planning and saved him millions in estate taxes in 2013.
However, George claims forensic accountants also found that, from 2013 to 2017, Black paid Epstein US$204m. This included the payments to Southern Trust, a US$10m donation to an Epstein charity, Gratitude America, and a US$30m loan that was only partially repaid. Black’s representatives deny these figures. It is also alleged that Black made payments to women, some of whom George’s team interviewed. Black’s representatives denied that payments were made. Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, said in a statement: “As publicly reported and as an independent board review confirmed, Mr Black engaged and paid Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services.”
“The whole thing was crazy,” George says. “I keep using the words mind-boggling, but that is what it was.” In February 2020 she amended the legal action again, this time to include Southern Trust and the money it had fraudulently claimed.
All the while George was trying to run a department, setting strategy and overseeing a multitude of other cases. “The Epstein case was big and it took its toll,” she says. “But we prosecute not-so-famous-and-rich people for sexual assaults every day and we go after them hard, so how could we act like this is something different? Just because they have money? The magnitude in this case was far greater.”
George and her team were now focusing on the banks. They sent legal demands for information to at least 10 financial institutions linked to Epstein including JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank. They asked for transaction details and communications concerning Epstein, his estate and more than 30 corporations, trusts and non-profit entities connected to him. Slowly a picture began to emerge.
“There were cash withdrawals, cash transfers, huge transfers to women. Money would go from one Epstein entity to another, to another, then to a school, say, and that’s the way substantial amounts of money were moving around,” George says.
This flow of money was crucial; Epstein’s operation would have collapsed without it. So how had the banks failed to pick it up? Two institutions in particular had questions to answer. Epstein had banked with JP Morgan between 1998 and 2013 and Deutsche Bank from 2013 up to his arrest. George homed in on the former.
The spotlight hits Jes Staley
The crucial figure in this part of the story was Staley, who had run JP Morgan’s asset management business and then the private bank before leaving to eventually become CEO at Barclays in London. Staley was also a regular visitor to Little St James and he and Epstein had had a symbiotic relationship.
In 2004 Epstein introduced Staley to the billionaire hedge fund manager Glenn Dubin, whose wife, a doctor and former Miss Sweden, Epstein had dated in the 1980s. The bank went on to buy a stake in Dubin’s fund, Highbridge Capital Management. As of 2019 Highbridge had US$3.9 billion in assets under management. Epstein was paid US$20m for his role in the deal. This pattern went on for years — Epstein would introduce Staley to the rich and famous and Staley would sign them up as clients.
George and her team discovered that numerous warnings had been raised about Epstein within JP Morgan, which she alleges were ignored. “There were recommendations that he [Epstein] be red-flagged. At one point it was recommended that the bank cease doing business with him because it [Epstein’s financial activity] was too suspicious. But they ignored that sort of thing,” she says.
Between 2004 and 2005 Epstein had taken out $800,000 in over-the-counter cash withdrawals. By 2006, executives at JP Morgan admit that the bank was aware that Epstein was being investigated in relation to sexual abuse. The cash activity continued throughout this time and after Epstein was convicted in Florida. The bank appeared to accept, without proof, Epstein’s claim that the cash was being withdrawn to pay for fuel for his aeroplanes.
Although others were involved in the decision to keep Epstein on as a client, Staley appeared to be his protector. In 2010 compliance staff suggested that Epstein’s accounts “should go”. The following year news reports linking Epstein to human trafficking prompted more warnings from compliance and enhanced monitoring was suggested. Staley replied that he had discussed it with Epstein and there was no truth to the allegations.
It is the personal exchanges between Epstein and Staley that have caused the most consternation, however. Between 2008 and 2012 they exchanged 1200 emails. In one, sent from Little St James, where Staley was staying while Epstein served his prison sentence in Florida, Staley wrote: “I owe you much. And I deeply appreciate our friendship. I have few so profound.”
Others are even more concerning. Between August 27 and 29, 2009, Staley emailed Epstein saying he would be in London in a week’s time. Epstein asked whether Staley would need anything while in London and Staley replied, “Yep.” Within days Epstein wired US$3000 from his JP Morgan account to an eastern European woman. A few months earlier, in January 2009, Epstein paid US$2000 to the same woman when Staley was visiting his home in Florida.
There was another cryptic exchange in July 2010. Staley sent an email to Epstein, saying: “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White.” Epstein replied: “[W]hat character would you like next?” Staley answered “Beauty and the Beast”, and Epstein replied: “Well one side is available.” Staley denies wrongdoing.
Reaching a settlement
By the autumn of 2022, Epstein’s executors were willing to start negotiating. “I think in the end they had no choice,” George says. But she was not going to give them an easy ride. “I tried to make that clear to people, even those on my team. This is not a regular civil case where you want to shake hands and come to an agreement. This is an enforcement action. It is the attorney-general enforcing violations of the criminal law.”
The estate would have to pay a sum that reflected the severity of the crimes. They reached a deal last November. The estate would pay US$105m as a cash settlement, which included US$80m of economic benefits “that Epstein and his co-defendants fraudulently obtained to fuel his criminal enterprise”, according to a statement from the US Virgin Islands’ government.
A spokesman for the executors says a settlement was reached “without any concession or admission of liability or fault on the part of the co-executors (either in their official or individual capacities), the estate or any other parties. The co-executors deny that they engaged in wrongdoing of any kind, and continue to resolve claims related to misconduct by Jeffrey Epstein in a manner sensitive to those who suffered harm.”
In addition to the main sum, the executors would hand over half the proceeds from the sale of Little St James, which would go to sexual assault, child abuse and trafficking victims. This was an important point for George: “I wanted meaning to come out of what happened on that island,” she says. The islands sold for US$60m in May this year.
There was another key stipulation: the executors had to share information that would help the government of the US Virgin Islands with their inquiries. “When it comes to holding people to account, the investigation continues,” George says. She doesn’t know if this happened because less than a month later she lost her job.
Back to Black
Long before they reached the settlement stage, George had started to consider her next move. The investigation had thrown up a trove of information and she wasn’t going to ignore it. “As I’ve said, we don’t go after people, we go after facts,” George says, “and there were significant facts to show that Leon Black had been giving millions and millions of dollars to Epstein.”
Not only had he paid money to Southern Trust, which George claims was funding the trafficking operation, but having conducted interviews “we had enough evidence to allege Black’s willing involvement in the Epstein enterprise”, George claims. Black strenuously denies these claims.
In November last year Cheri Pierson, a single mother living in New Jersey, accused Black of rape, alleging that she was introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell in 2002 and was asked to massage Black at Epstein’s townhouse. She claims that Black attacked her so violently that she could barely walk down the street afterwards. Black denies the claim. George’s team contacted Black’s lawyers in September 2022 and a conversation began.
The other avenue was the banks. In November, while she was negotiating with the Epstein estate, two women filed class actions against the large US banks implicated in the scandal. In the first a woman named in court papers as Jane Doe 1, an eastern European woman who says she was “bought” by Epstein when she was 14, brought a class action against Deutsche Bank, which had accepted Epstein as a client in 2013. A second class action was brought against JP Morgan by another anonymous victim who met Epstein when she was a ballet dancer in New York and claimed that the bank had facilitated decades of abuse.
George wanted to focus on JP Morgan as well. Her team approached the bank in September with their evidence but the conversations did not proceed. So on December 27 last year, the US Virgin Islands launched a second legal case claiming US$190m in damages from JP Morgan on the basis that the bank “knowingly, negligently and unlawfully provided and pulled the levers through which recruiters and victims were paid and was indispensable to the operation and concealment of the Epstein trafficking enterprise”.
The development was reported in newspapers around the world. Four days later, on New Year’s Eve, George was fired.
Sitting beside me today she is reluctant to go into details. St Thomas is a small place and some of her family are still connected to the public sector here. She will say that she was at her father’s house having a celebratory bowl of callaloo, a traditional Caribbean stew, when Governor Bryan’s security detail “came over and delivered me a letter of termination”, she says.
Two days later Bryan put out a statement confirming he had “relieved Denise George of her duties as attorney-general this weekend”, while his office briefed that the governor had been unaware of the latest lawsuit until she filed the paperwork. The announcement was met with outrage on the islands, in the local press and abroad.
(On September 26, three days after this story was first published, JP Morgan Chase agreed to pay US$75 million — about NZ$126m — to the US Virgin Islands to settle the claims against it).
Islanders feel the heat
The strongest clue as to what may have been going on behind the scenes would come out a few months later. In June JP Morgan defended itself against the US Virgin Islands’ claim by alleging that its government was itself “complicit in the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein” and publishing a trove of evidence, much of which has been redacted.
The most damaging allegations were against Cecile de Jongh, the wife of the islands’ governor between 2007 and 2015, John de Jongh. The bank claims that she helped Epstein to secure visas for his victims. On one occasion she “contacted the University of the Virgin Islands … to find out whether three young women could enrol there to obtain student visas”, according to the filing. This led the university to create a bespoke class for Epstein’s victims, providing cover for their presence on the islands. That same year Epstein donated US$20,000 to the university through one of his companies.
In 2011, de Jongh consulted with Epstein on the wording of a legal bill intended to increase the monitoring of sex offenders. “This is the suggested language; will it work for you?” de Jongh wrote. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, replied: “We should add out of country for more than 7 days, otherwise I could not go for a day trip to Tortola, at the last minute.” His lawyer also suggested changes that gave the attorney-general the power to grant a waiver exempting tier 1 sex offenders, such as Epstein, from giving 21 days’ notice before travelling. This was included in the eventual bill.
In exchange for these services, the bank claims that Epstein paid de Jongh a salary of US$200,000 and covered her children’s school fees. In addition, the bank claims that successive governors, including Bryan, the present incumbent, maintained close relationships with Epstein long after he was a convicted sex offender. Cecile de Jongh did not respond to a request for comment. Giving evidence in a deposition in July, she claimed she had no knowledge of a sex-trafficking enterprise. “I would never do anything to harm anyone, or to aid and abet anyone harming someone,” de Jongh said. Governor Bryan did not respond to a request for comment.
Though she has chosen not to discuss the revelations, this turn of events hasn’t been a total surprise to George. “I knew the case might expose things because JP Morgan has a bevy of attorneys. But that’s what it’s all about,” she says. “So let’s move on.”
In July, George was called to give evidence in the case. She testified that within weeks of her appointment in 2019, Governor Bryan had asked her to review Epstein’s request for his travel requirements to be waived, as they had been since the bill passed. She refused to grant it.
George remains licensed to practise law in the US Virgin Islands and is considering her next step. “The Epstein thing took its toll,” she says. For most of the past year she has been following developments from her home. In May Deutsche Bank settled the class suit against it for US$75m. In June JP Morgan settled for US$290m. In a statement released at the time, JP Morgan said any association it had with Epstein “was a mistake and we regret it”.
Important details are still trickling out. In her case against JP Morgan, the anonymous ballet dancer claimed that “at least one of Epstein’s friends used aggressive force in his sexual assault of her and informed Doe 1 that he had Epstein’s permission to do what he wanted to her”. She was compelled to name him in court: it was Jes Staley. JP Morgan is now suing Staley for failing in his duty to the bank. Staley has denied the claims against him and did not respond to a request for comment.
(On September 26, three days after this story was first published, JP Morgan said it had reached a confidential settlement with Staley.)
This summer a public information inquiry from The New York Times revealed that Black had settled with the US Virgin Islands in January, agreeing to pay US$62.5m to be released from any potential claims arising out of the territory’s investigation into the sex-trafficking operation. Black’s lawyer, Susan Estrich, said: “As publicly reported and as an independent board review confirmed, Mr Black engaged and paid Epstein for legitimate financial advisory services. Consistent with settlements reached by major financial institutions, Mr Black resolved the USVI’s potential claims arising out of the unintended consequences of those payments. There is no suggestion that Mr Black was aware of any misconduct engaged in by Epstein.” One of the people in the room along with USVI government lawyers was the victim’s solicitor, Brad Edwards.
Black is currently facing two more claims of rape. One is from a former mistress, Guzel Ganieva, the other from an anonymous victim who has autism and a form of Down’s syndrome, and claims Black raped her at Epstein’s mansion in 2002. Black denies all the claims and is suing the law firm bringing them for malicious prosecution. “All three claims are frivolous and Mr Black has filed motions to hold the Wigdor firm accountable for its false and baseless allegations. The only case that has been adjudicated, involving Guzel Ganieva, was dismissed by the court.” Ganieva is appealing.
As the various parties sling mud in an effort to save themselves, George is one of the few people to have emerged with their reputation intact. In August 2021, the victim compensation fund closed, having paid out US$121m to about 150 people. That October she was given an award by the children’s charity Child USA in recognition for her “leadership bringing Jeffrey Epstein to account and her forward-thinking efforts to fight sex trafficking”.
She has paid a personal price, but she believes most people in the USVI are pleased that the truth is coming out at last. “People even say I should run for governor,” she says. Whatever the outcome of the legal cases, George believes she has achieved what she wanted to by showing “that no one is above the law”. Even more importantly, perhaps, she has demonstrated that some people can’t be corrupted, whatever the cost.
Written by: Rosie Kinchen
© The Times of London