Around the time JPMorgan executives courted Jeffrey Epstein and apparently disregarded news reports about him trafficking young women and girls, according to documents filed in two lawsuits against the bank, one of his victims was in a relationship with a bank employee, The Daily Beast has learned.
Sarah Ransome, who was 22 when Epstein began abusing her in 2006, says that she dated a senior employee at the financial giant and that he encouraged her not to go to police—an accusation she included in her 2021 memoir, Silenced No More. (The book did not reveal that the man worked for JPMorgan, which is currently facing lawsuits over its alleged role in Epstein’s sex-trafficking network.)
While the JPMorgan employee did not work in the private banking division where Epstein was a client, and there is no evidence that he ever knew Epstein personally or discussed him with colleagues, looking back, Ransome says she wonders if her former beau was aware that the sex-trafficker was a client of the bank. “Anything to do with Epstein,” Ransome told The Daily Beast, “there are no coincidences whatsoever.”
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“In light of everything that’s come out recently with JPMorgan, I can’t be quiet,” Ransome added, referring to the deluge of media reports on its years-long banking relationship with Epstein. “What really got me was they were joking about Epstein trafficking.”
“I feel that JPMorgan has a lot to answer for,” she said.
Last year, an Epstein victim known as Jane Doe and the U.S. Virgin Islands filed lawsuits against JPMorgan for allegedly facilitating his sex ring. While Doe settled her class action suit for $290 million in June, the territory’s case is headed to trial this October.
Throughout the litigation, legal filings cited internal JPMorgan emails revealing how bank honchos bantered about Epstein’s predilection for young women. In 2006, executive Jes Staley wrote to colleague Mary Erdoes about a concert he’d attended: “The age differences between husband and wives would have fit in well with Jeffrey. What a joke.” She replied, “Oh, and what I meant to tell you about last night was they [sic] were a few people laughing about Jeffrey.” In 2012, another high-level staffer wrote that a mansion he recently visited had reminded him of “JE’s house except it was more tasteful, and fewer nymphettes...”
And, according to Doe’s pleadings, Staley sexually assaulted her while he palled around with Epstein, with whom he’d exchanged cryptic texts about Disney Princesses. (Staley denies any misconduct in relation to his erstwhile friend, though JPMorgan is trying to make him solely liable for the settlement in her case.)
The legal papers also highlight how Epstein—considered the “biggest revenue producer” for JPMorgan’s Private Bank—referred high-powered clients including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, billionaire Leon Black, Britain’s Prince Andrew, ex-White House Counsel Kathy Ruemmler, and Donald Trump’s former casino executive Nick Ribis.
Meanwhile, Epstein-related battles continue on other fronts, with Ransome and fellow victim Maria Farmer filing a notice of claim with the FBI announcing they plan to sue the agency for $600 million for allegedly failing to investigate Epstein in the 1990s. Had the feds done their job, the women claim, they might have stopped the abuse of hundreds of girls.
Ransome claims that she dated the JPMorgan employee from 2007 to 2008 and that he knew Epstein was abusing her while also promising to get her into the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT). “I told him that I was being raped,” Ransome said. “I told him I was being trafficked. He knew what was being done to me. But I was so confused… [He] wasn’t like, ‘Hey, let’s go to the authorities.’ He was like, ‘No, no, no, don’t go.’”
Not long after Ransome fled to London, her then-boyfriend followed her.
“He said that he loved me so much, that he couldn’t live without me, I’m special, I meant so much to him, like complete love-bombing,” Ransome recalled.
Ransome’s memoir identifies this ex-boyfriend using the pseudonym “Dan.”
“I had a funny feeling about Dan,” Ransome writes. “I still do… Once when I told him I might go to the authorities, he said, ‘Why don’t you just move on and forget this whole thing?’”
Dan and Epstein “worked in the same industry,” she adds, “and Jeffrey had once been a client of his bank. I have no proof that they were connected. I just had a question mark lodged in my gut, the sort of inkling I’ve sometimes ignored at my peril...”
According to emails reviewed by The Daily Beast, the man contacted Ransome using his JPMorgan address. In January 2007, Ransome wrote Dan an email that said she was “off to eat some celery,” which she told The Daily Beast is a reference to Epstein forcing her to starve to lose weight.
“Oh I almost forgot to tell you,” she added in the message. “I spoke to Jeffrey this morning snd [sic] everything is fine. He told me not to worry.” Ransome told us she was referring to “the terrible health side effects I was starting to feel due to the severe diet Epstein put me on.”
Ransome’s 2017 lawsuit against Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell revealed they promised they’d secure her education at FIT but only if she lost weight. “I went to Epstein multiple times complaining of kidney pain, exhaustion, extreme hunger, headaches, etc., due to the diet he put me on,” Ransome told The Daily Beast. “[Dan] was very supportive of my weight loss and knew why I had to lose the weight. He did not question this or find it odd.”
In February 2007, the man sent emails coaching her on an essay she would submit with her FIT application. That summer, he forwarded Ransome an email from his JPMorgan address that shared details from a therapist he’d arranged for her to see in London and noted that he was “proud of your resolve to be happy and have a better life.”
Later, he would send her articles about a slew of lawsuits Florida victims were filing against Epstein and how the creepy financier’s lawyers were trying to convince federal prosecutors to waive any requirement that he register as a sex offender.
“Finally,” Dan wrote in one July 2008 email, above the text of a news article about Epstein starting his jail sentence in Palm Beach.
Dan did not return messages from The Daily Beast, and a JPMorgan spokesperson declined to comment.
In her book, Ransome describes how she first met Dan in January 2007, through an older homeless man who was stationed outside a corner bodega she frequented. This man had often mentioned a neighbor who’d been kind to him, she writes, and one Sunday morning he introduced them. “We greeted. I blushed. He asked me out,” she writes.
“Dan checked all the boxes: dashing and dimpled, with cheerful eyes; successful, with a top job at a bank; seemingly protective, and a decade older than me,” Ransome wrote, later adding that he “wooed me with evenings out at Michelin-rated restaurants, frequent calls, and flowers.”
“My day job continued as Jeffrey’s captive,” she continued. “My nights were spent in Dan’s swish Upper East Side apartment.”
At the time, Ransome says she was being trafficked and abused by Epstein, who sent her to a psychiatrist to be put on a “cocktail of prescriptions” that included lithium and demanded she starve herself to lose weight. She was also waiting for Epstein to deliver on a promise to secure her enrollment at FIT and to arrange for her visa to stay in the United States.
Ransome writes that Epstein kicked her out of a Manhattan apartment building where he housed her and other victims when she refused to be raped one day and that, as a result, she moved in with Dan.
In her book, Ransome says she eventually agreed to sexually service Epstein a few times a week in return for a work visa and covering her prescriptions. But when Epstein’s scheduler Sarah Kellen couldn’t reach her, the trafficker and his driver found her walking down the street. Ransome believes Epstein had tracked her using her BlackBerry. Epstein, Ransome writes, hopped out of the car, dragged her back to his residence, and assaulted her.
“Jeffrey sent for me a few days later,” Ransome writes. “Dan, of course, protested my involvement with Jeffrey. What man wants his girlfriend being helped by another? I would leave soon, I assured him, I just needed that visa.”
When Ransome arrived at Epstein’s lair, he handed her a slip of paper with the name of a “top cosmetic surgeon, a friend of his,” with whom she hoped to have an internship. Epstein seemed to be finally following through with securing her a work visa.
After interviewing for the role in May 2007, however, Ransome was in for a shock. Epstein allegedly called her, livid: “You left your items in the surgeon’s office, you stupid bitch!” Those items, she writes, included an envelope with modeling photos and a gram of cocaine. Epstein then warned her that police were coming to arrest her.
Hours later, Ransome flew to London to escape and stayed with her mother two hours outside the city. She would later settle in the Battersea neighborhood in 2008, when Dan also relocated to the U.K. That year, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting girls in Florida.
Soon after Ransome and Dan reunited, her mother was “brutally attacked” by a tenant in her home. Ransome arranged for mom to temporarily move into a flat she shared with Dan. Still, the news reports about Epstein and struggles with Ransome’s mother had begun to take a toll.
Ransome writes that Dan had forgotten her birthday that August and made amends by getting tickets to the Mamma Mia! film for her and her mom. As Dan dropped them off, he told them he needed to pick up a present for Ransome and asked to borrow her house keys since he misplaced his. But instead of meeting them at a cocktail bar afterward as planned, Dan ghosted them.
After three hours of Ransome calling his phone, she writes, he answered and said he’d moved out and never wanted to see her again. Ransome says that she was so distraught that she attempted suicide after a locksmith helped her and her mother get back inside.
Doctors resuscitated Ransome, but she was in a coma for a month.
“My mom rang Dan and told him I’d tried to kill myself. Mum says he swaggered in holding a newspaper, took one look at me, and walked out. He did not speak or show emotion. He just left me for dead,” Ransome says in her memoir.
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Ransome’s mother reiterated the claims in her daughter’s book. “I’m still not sure how long Sarah and [Dan] had been together but it was like a year-plus,” she said. “The first thing I noticed was the lack of intimacy and affection.”
The day he visited Ransome in the hospital, the mom added, “He took one look at Sarah with complete and utter disdain.”
Dan, she claims, “never asked how she was doing. He just left.”
