Sources Tell Me the Invisible Men from Jeffrey Epstein’s World Are Running Scared

What a controversial new lawsuit against JP Morgan might be hiding

[Palm Beach County Sheriff's Department, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons]

We enter 2023 with yet more questions about Jeffrey Epstein. More pointedly, as I’ve asked before: Where are the men who should be held to account? There is no way Epstein acted alone. There is also no way that Ghislaine Maxwell was the sole player in an enterprise involving hundreds of women and reportedly lasting 30 years. What about the men who propped Epstein up, participating and enabling his sex-trafficking scheme, and yet whose names we may not know and who have never been held accountable?

The more that people look, the more invisible the men seem to become.

And as Ghislaine Maxwell—who almost certainly knows more than she has said publicly—sits in prison in Florida, I have been receiving calls from numerous people asking: Is she safe there?

Here’s why that concern might be justified.

Over the weekend, the one person in law enforcement who has focused on Epstein’s money trail (which, as I’ve reported, is the smoking gun that could very likely lead to the men who participated in his sex trafficking operation) was dramatically and bizarrely fired.

US Virgin Islands Attorney General Denise George, who put the Virgin Islands on the map in terms of taking the U.S. legal system seriously when she civilly sued Epstein’s estate and its two executors Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, was fired out of the blue by her boss, Virgin Islands Governor Albert Bryan. Bryan confirmed the dismissal on New Year’s Eve.

Just days before her firing, George had filed a suit in the Southern District of New York against JP Morgan Chase, claiming it banked and enabled Epstein while knowing of his nefarious sexual network (something it has denied). The suit alleges that JP Morgan “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” and that it “facilitated and concealed wire and cash transactions that raised suspicion of — and were in fact part of — a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude of dozens of women and girls in and beyond the Virgin Islands.”

Unlike two related suits filed in the same court in November on behalf of anonymous Epstein survivors against JP Morgan, the Virgin Islands suit is heavily redacted—particularly on the pages naming the other high-net-worth clients it claims Epstein brought to JP Morgan as a quid pro quo for its financial services.

Virgin Islands governor Albert Bryan did not try to gloss over George’s removal, saying publicly he had “relieved” her of the job she’d held for four years. No justification given. The governor’s communications director later gave a statement saying, “I can only confirm that media reports indicating the JP Morgan lawsuit as the reason are not entirely accurate. I hope you understand.”

A local paper reported that Bryan and George had clashed for a while and that Bryan had been blindsided by the suit against JP Morgan because George had not told him about it: “People familiar with the situation said Mr. Bryan had been frustrated with Ms. George for some time and that her action against the bank was the final straw.”

Does that smell right?

Er, no. Generally, you don’t fire someone for making a procedural error. You fire them for making a substantive error.

So what is there about this suit that Bryan did not like?