Jes Staley was accused of whining by the judge overseeing the litigation surrounding him and his former employer JPMorgan Chase & Co. over their ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
(Bloomberg) — Jes Staley was accused of whining by the judge overseeing the litigation surrounding him and his former employer JPMorgan Chase & Co. over their ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
US District Judge Jed Rakoff on Monday rejected Staley’s bid to separate JPMorgan’s suit against him from two other cases alleging the bank itself knowingly benefited from Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking. Staley had argued he needed more time to prepare his defense, but the judge was unconvinced.
“None of Staley’s whines remotely warrants either a severance or a change in the joint trial date,” Rakoff wrote. The trial date of “these closely related claims,” set for October 23, will not be moved, the judge said.
Rakoff did give Staley seven more weeks for discovery, including witness depositions. The judge suggested that was more than enough time for Staley’s lawyer, Brendan Sullivan, and his “400-attorney law firm” to get ready for trial.
JPMorgan sued Staley in March via a third-party complaint, saying he should be responsible for any liability facing the bank in two lawsuits, one a proposed class action filed by a Jane Doe Epstein victim and the other by the US Virgin Islands. Though both suits cited Staley’s relationship with Epstein to argue JPMorgan had knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking, neither named Staley as a defendant.
In his motion to separate the case last week, Staley called the allegations about him and Epstein “baseless.”
A lawyer for Doe had also asked the judge to separate the Staley case. Attorney Bradley Edwards had accused JPMorgan of using its suit to intimidate Doe by trying to force her to confront Staley about an alleged sexual assault and turn over medical records and communications.
Rakoff wrote that Doe must have expected in filing her lawsuit that sensitive material would be subject to discovery. “The proper way to handle this is by making such discovery subject to confidential treatment,” the judge said.
In response to Doe’s claims about its motivations for suing Staley, lawyers for JPMorgan said in a court filing that the bank recognized the emotional trauma suffered by Epstein’s victims and had agreed to every request to make matters confidential.
Staley was a key witness in the case and severing his matter would only increase the costs of litigation, the bank’s lawyers wrote in a filing on April 7.
The cases are USVI v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, 22-cv-10904-UA, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan) and Jane Doe 1 v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, 22-cv-10019, US District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan)
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