Consider This from NPR - What Jeffrey Epstein's bank knew

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

Six years after his death in prison, sex offender Jeffrey Epstein continues to dominate the news.A House committee has released a suggestive note sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday that is signed "Donald J. Trump." The White House continues to deny now President Trump wrote or signed it.Separately, a New York Times investigation tracked Epstein's relationship to the country's leading bank, JPMorgan Chase. It concludes that the bank enabled his sex crimes, even as evidence against him piled up.Times reporter Matt Goldstein explains.For sponsor-free episodes of Consider This, sign up for Consider This+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Email us at [e-mail] episode was produced by Kathryn Fink and Connor Donevan, with audio engineering by J. Czys and Ted Mebane. It was edited by Patrick Jarenwattananon. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

For his 50th birthday in 2003, Jeffrey Epstein received a book, 238 pages of photos, mementos, and notes from family and friends. One particular entry has been scrutinized. It's a typed message within an outline drawing of a woman's silhouette. One line reads to Epstein, May every day be another wonderful secret. At the bottom, the name Donald J. Trump appears along with a signature. I don't even know what they're talking about.

Now, somebody could have written a letter and used my name, but that's happened a lot. That's President Trump back in July, shortly after the Wall Street Journal broke the story of the letter's existence. The book is now public. The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed it and released a redacted version on Monday. Trump and Epstein were known to be friendly around this time, though the White House continues to deny that the letter or signature are Trump's. Regardless, there are 237 other pages in Epstein's birthday book. book. They include well-wishes, lewd references, and sex jokes, written by some of the most powerful people on earth to a man federal prosecutors would later charge with sexually

exploiting and abusing dozens of minor girls. It raises an unsettling question. How much did Epstein's associates know about what he was doing? So that is one of the great, great, another great mystery. Vicky Ward is a journalist who reported on, on Epstein around the time of that birthday and has covered him through his life and since his death in prison six years ago. We do know that there were a lot of bold-faced names, politicians, very rich men who were on his planes, who may have visited the island, who came to dinner at his houses and he was at the same time surrounded by beautiful women, many of whom were underage Myers, almost in plain sight.

Consider this. A separate New York Times investigation has found that Jeffrey Epstein's bank grew suspicious about what he was doing, but continued to do business with him and profit from him anyway. From NPR, I'm Ari Shapiro. It's Consider This from NPR.

A team of New York Times reporters has been digging into Jeffrey Epstein for years. They followed the money, the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and the country's leading bank, J.P. Morgan Chase. And in an article out this week, they conclude that the bank enabled his crimes, even as evidence against him piled up. I spoke with Matt Goldstein, one of the reporters behind the story. How valuable were Jeffrey Epstein's account? with J.P. Morgan? You know, they're valuable in the sense. Obviously, he had a lot of money there. At the peak, he had about $300 million in his accounts. But you have to view him more than just the dollars. There were lots of transactions he was doing, obviously, to run his sex trafficking

operation for so many years. And he was also valuable in helping to bring business to the bank, because his stock and trade was connecting people. You know, it's always unclear exactly how much he did in terms of bringing new business into the bank, but clearly he was very important in making introductions to some people at the bank. You're right that he seemed to know everyone. Can you give us a couple examples? Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, it's been well known that Leslie Wexner, who was the head of the Limited Victoria's Secret, was his number one client. They had also already been a client of J.P. Morgan, but that obviously further cemented the relationship. Later on, he had connections with Sergey Brin from Google, Bill Gates, who never became a

client, but they were working on a potential deal for Bill Gates and his foundation. Leon Black, obviously, was a big important client to Epstein and was a client of the bank. There's some debate over how much he introduced Benjamin Netanyahu to the bank, and Ehud Barak was also a person that he knew. Leaders of Israel, yeah. Yeah. You say that even before investigations into Epstein became public, warning lights should have been flashing inside J.P. Morgan. Explain why. Yeah. So, you know, he really becomes essentially what they call a private bank client in 1998. And that's like a special kind of real. It's not like you or me going to bank and having a checking account or like having to call 1-800 number on our credit card if we have a problem. And by 2003, they're already seeing a lot of big cash transactions being pulled out. Huge ones as much as 175,000, 1.7 million altogether by 2004. And this was money that. that was going to largely to make payments to women and people in his social circle. And the bank had an awareness of this of where the money was going, and that should have raised more flags internally.

So what pushback was there within the bank? Well, there was pushback. Early on it starts. There are some people on the compliance and the anti-money laundering side who start to flag some of these transactions. They write emails. They're raising concerns. But at this point, he's become a favorite and important customer of this person, Jess Staley, who's a very critical and high-rising employee at the bank.

And he basically vouches for Epstein. And what you start to have is this pattern where he vouches for Epstein. He says, there's no problem here. I know this guy. These things are okay. Don't worry about them. And maybe it's a little bit of human nature, but people sort of defer also according to his rank in the bank. So basically, the concerns don't really get elevator to go anywhere.

Did Staley respond to your request for comment for this story? No, he didn't. Which I can tell you has been consistent throughout Staley or his lawyers have never responded in any way. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested in New Jersey and charged with federal sex trafficking offenses, J.P. Morgan filed a report retroactively flagging some 4,700 Epstein transactions as suspicious, totaling more than a billion dollars. What was going on there, and how should those transactions have been handled in real time? Yeah, I mean, that's sort of the crux here that sort of shows that it's easy, obviously, to go back in time.

And, you know, J.P. Morgan will tell you, well, we did the right thing. We went back and analyzed the reports and looked at them in a fresh light. But it's also clear that they could have done this back then. I mean, in fairness to J.P. Morgan, they were following some of these suspicious activities reports along the way, but not with the same kind of frequency that they should have judged by the $1.1 billion report that they filed. You want to sum up the problem here. It's sort of like an institutional fail. There are people along the way on at least four different occasions who raise the point there's a big reputational risk about us keeping him here. But no one feels they have either the power or they want to actually take that next step and say,

okay, it's time to exit him from the bank. Well, what has J.P. Morgan said in response to your reporting? You know, they've stuck largely to the same party line, which has been they're very sorry about their relationship with Epstein. They're sorry that they ever did business with him and that it went on too long, but they firmly state that they had no idea they were helping to basically funnel money for his sex trafficking. And largely, they've thrown the blame on this guy, Jess Staley. And they basically say they put too much faith in Staley, and if it wasn't for Staley, they would have exited him earlier. It's, you know, there's some truth to that, but it also becomes a convenient excuse, too. So your story gives us some glimpse into the special treatment that the ultra wealthy can receive from major banks.

What's your biggest takeaway from investigating that world? Yeah, like I said, it's this idea of the very close relationship nature of it. And it's sort of like we can all relate it to our own friends, that we can sometimes have blind spots about things that our friends do that we don't like or that we find hard to reconcile with. You have to be a little bit more dispassionate, particularly in terms of finance. And quite frankly, banks' jobs is to look for things like sex trafficking,

to look for things like money laundering. And when you see a predominance kind of these kind of huge, hefty transactions going on on a regular basis, time and time again, at some point, someone should say, you know, we've got to pull the trigger here. Even if we are not totally convinced he's doing something wrong, it just doesn't smell right. That's New York Times business reporter Matt Goldstein. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me, Ari. This episode was produced by Catherine Fink and Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Jay Sizz

and Ted Mebain. It was edited by Patrick Jaron Watanananan. executive producer is Sammy Yen again. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Ari Shapiro. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism

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