By Luc Cohen
NEW YORK, March 16 (Reuters) – Bank of America has settled a civil lawsuit brought by women who accused the bank of facilitating their sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein, court records showed on Monday.
Lawyers for the bank and the women told Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in a March 12 telephone call that they had reached a “settlement in principle,” a court filing said. The terms of the settlement were not immediately clear.
The settlement requires Rakoff’s approval. Lawyers for both sides are scheduled to submit legal papers about the settlement by March 27, and the judge scheduled a court hearing for April 2 to consider approving the deal.
Sigrid McCawley, a lawyer for the women, said in a statement, “Today’s resolution of the case against Bank of America is one more step on the road to much deserved justice.”
A spokesman for Bank of America declined to comment.
The proposed class action, filed in October by a woman using the pseudonym Jane Doe, accused the nation’s second-largest bank of ignoring suspicious financial transactions related to Epstein despite a “plethora” of information about his crimes because it valued profit over protecting victims.
Bank of America has said Doe alleged merely that it provided routine services to people who at the time had no known links to Epstein, and that any suggestion that it was more deeply involved was “threadbare and meritless.”
Rakoff ruled in January that Bank of America must face Doe’s claims that it knowingly benefited from Epstein’s sex trafficking and obstructed enforcement of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. Among the transactions Doe flagged were payments to Epstein by Apollo Global Management’s billionaire co-founder, Leon Black.
Black stepped down as Apollo’s chief executive in 2021 after a review by an outside law firm found he had paid Epstein $158 million for tax and estate planning.
He has denied wrongdoing and said he was unaware of Epstein’s criminal conduct.
Black had been scheduled on March 26 to be questioned under oath by lawyers for Doe and Bank of America.
The deposition is not expected to go forward because of the settlement. A scheduled May 11 trial will also not take place if Rakoff approves the settlement.
Doe’s lawyers have also sued other alleged enablers of Epstein’s sex trafficking, and in 2023 reached settlements of $290 million with JPMorgan Chase and $75 million with Deutsche Bank on behalf of his accusers.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide by New York City’s medical examiner.
(Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Matthew Lewis and Chizu Nomiyama)
