The allegations surrounding Mary Erdoes, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s Asset and Wealth Management division, focus on what she knew—and when—about Jeffrey Epstein’s criminal conduct while the bank continued doing business with him. Epstein remained a JPMorgan client from the late 1990s until 2013, despite his 2008 sex crime conviction and repeated internal warnings about his activities. Internal compliance emails revealed that by 2006, Epstein’s accounts were already raising red flags for suspicious activity, and by 2011, Erdoes was directly alerted to legal developments confirming his sex-offender status—she reportedly responded with a short “Oh boy.” Testimony and internal records suggest that Erdoes and then–general counsel Stephen Cutler held the authority to terminate Epstein’s banking relationship but did not exercise it, even as other staff raised serious concerns. Multiple reports indicate she continued corresponding about Epstein’s status and compliance reviews, demonstrating a level of awareness inconsistent with the bank’s later public claims that knowledge of his misconduct was confined to lower levels.

Critics argue this places Erdoes near the center of JPMorgan’s failure to cut ties sooner, implying that the decision to keep Epstein as a client was not a mere oversight but a conscious choice by top management to preserve a lucrative relationship. During litigation brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands and Epstein’s survivors, JPMorgan’s internal communications were unsealed, showing that Epstein’s financial activity had been reviewed annually and still cleared for continuation under Erdoes’s division. Jes Staley, Epstein’s primary contact within the bank, later testified that Erdoes “had full authority” to drop him but chose not to. Erdoes herself has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations, stating that her involvement was limited to compliance oversight and that Epstein was eventually off-boarded once risk assessments changed. Nevertheless, the accumulated evidence—from internal memos to executive testimony—has left a troubling picture of institutional willful blindness at the highest level of the world’s largest bank.


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