- Key insight: FirstBank maintained more than 30 accounts for Epstein entities, providing the financial infrastructure for his sex-trafficking operation, the Jane Doe lawsuit claims.
- Supporting data: The bank ignored standard anti-money-laundering protocols and did not file legally required suspicious activity reports until two weeks after Epstein's 2019 arrest, the suit alleges.
- Expert quote: "FirstBank cared about one thing — profit — and showed absolute loyalty to Epstein, including a willingness to violate banking laws," the plaintiff's lawyers state in the complaint.
A sweeping civil lawsuit accuses FirstBank Puerto Rico and its parent company, First BanCorp, of knowingly participating in and financially benefiting from Jeffrey Epstein's decades-long international sex-trafficking operation.
The
The lawsuit paints a damning portrait of $19.1 billion-asset FirstBank, in San Juan, claiming the financial institution chose multimillion-dollar profits over the safety of hundreds of young women and girls. FirstBank did not respond Friday to a request for comment.
According to the 91-page complaint, FirstBank served as Epstein's "longest banking partner," maintaining a relationship from 1998 through 2020 — long after other major financial institutions completely cut ties with the convicted sex offender.
"As a result of FirstBank's close multi-decade relationship with Epstein, FirstBank acquired a plethora of information regarding Epstein's sex trafficking operation, information that could have put Epstein in prison years earlier if FirstBank had simply properly reported what it knew to authorities," the lawsuit states. "Instead, it chose profit to the detriment of hundreds of victims."
The Jane Doe lawsuit alleges that FirstBank allowed Epstein to continue depositing and moving funds from closed accounts at other financial institutions — including
"Although Epstein cultivated an air of mystery about his wealth and business in the public-facing press, he could not invoke that mystery against his bank," the lawsuit states. "FirstBank had both the right and the affirmative obligation to know exactly how Epstein made his money, how he spent it, what his day-to-day business was, how his entities were structured, and how it all fit together."
The lawsuit also revealed that the federal government's investigation into Epstein's operation recently uncovered "actionable information on more than $1 billion worth of transactions that flowed in and out of Epstein's accounts," at large financial institutions.
"One of the documents in the Treasury Department's Epstein file indicates that between 2003–2019, there were more than 4,725 wire transfers totaling $1.08 billion involving Jeffrey Epstein and his associates," the suit states.
The four associates alleged to have been involved with the 4,725 wire transfers — Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn, Harry Beller and Erika Kellerhals — were part of Epstein's inner circle.
Both Indyke, who served as Epstein's personal attorney and was named as a co-executor of his estate, and Kahn, Epstein's primary accountant, recently testified before Congress as part of an investigation by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Beller was an Epstein financial advisor, while Kellerhals was Epstein's tax attorney.
The complaint against FirstBank states: "These transactions included wire transfers from wealthy figures over the sales of artwork, fees paid to Epstein, and payments to several women. The investigation has revealed hundreds of millions in payments to Epstein from Wall Street financiers."
Epstein's sex-trafficking operation relied heavily on access to vast sums of cash, and the lawsuit details the steps FirstBank was supposed to take to prevent criminal activity under know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering rules.
"The whole premise of [know york customer] is that the bank gets behind the public posture and learns who the customer actually is," the suit states. "What FirstBank's KYC inquiry into Jeffrey Epstein revealed (or should have revealed) was the following: Epstein held no professional credentials of any kind that would explain the wealth flowing through his accounts. He had no advanced degree. He held no professional license — no securities license, no banking license, no fiduciary license, no investment-adviser registration, and no public-accountancy license."
Epstein made round-dollar money transfers from his personal accounts into FirstBank commercial accounts, the suit alleges. FirstBank allegedly was involved in so-called circular transfers. The suit cites one Epstein account that received over $12.3 million across 11 payments from another Epstein account, which should have been flagged by the bank, according to the lawsuit.
Citing an FBI investigation memo, the suit also says FirstBank was involved in circular transactions between Epstein and his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell. A $10.9 million wire transfer moved from a FirstBank account to Maxwell's account at JPMorganChase, and on the same day, nearly all the money was transferred from Maxwell's account to various accounts in Epstein's name "for no discernible lawful purpose," the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit lists over 30 separate commercial checking and credit accounts opened at FirstBank for Epstein, his close associates and a web of single-purpose shell entities. The shell companies named in the suit hold the titles to properties Epstein owned, including Little St. James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands; a New York City townhome; a Palm Beach, Florida, mansion; and the Zorro Ranch in New Mexico.
Red Flags
Bank compliance personnel are strictly trained to flag round-dollar transfers, recurring massive cash withdrawals and prominent negative news surrounding high-risk clients.
But instead of turning to the authorities, FirstBank elevated Epstein to a "platinum banking" client in 2016, waiving account service charges and wire fees, the suit alleges. This came years after Epstein pled guilty to state felony sex offenses in Florida in 2008 and was a permanently registered Tier I sex offender in the U.S. Virgin Islands — a territory where FirstBank maintains a substantial retail and commercial banking footprint.
As to the bank's executives, Aurelio Aleman has been president and CEO of
The lawsuit states that "many details of FirstBank's knowing assistance and facilitation of Epstein's sex trafficking remain unknown."
But it adds that FirstBank "served as a banking reference for Epstein in connection with Epstein's own efforts to charter and capitalize a private banking entity through which his trafficking finances could be further obscured."
The timeline of FirstBank's eventual disclosures points toward "deliberate" concealment, the lawsuit claims, rather than a failure of compliance. The bank did not file its first suspicious activity report, or SAR, regarding Epstein until July 2019, two weeks after his second arrest in New York, the suit states. That initial, delayed report flagged just $1.7 million in suspicious transactions from the prior year, "a fraction of the suspicious activity," the suit states. Epstein died in federal prison in August 2019.
The victim's story
The Jane Doe plaintiff met Epstein in Russia in 2011, according to the suit. He provided housing to her, arranged travel via his private aircraft to transport her between New York and his private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and promised to fund her education and career, the suit states.
"From 2011 through 2019, Epstein sexually abused Jane Doe on at least 100 occasions, including but not limited to, forcibly touching her, forcibly raping her, and forcing her to engage in sexual acts with other women for his own depraved sexual gratification," the lawsuit states. "From 2011 through 2019, Jane Doe was paid repeatedly by Jeffrey Epstein in furtherance of his sex trafficking operation."
The lawsuit goes on to allege that Epstein used "means of force, threats of force, fraud, coercion, abuse of process, and a combination of such means to cause Jane Doe to engage in commercial sex acts."
The suit also charges that Epstein and his co-conspirators "continued to coerce Jane Doe in various ways, including by holding control over her immigration status over her head, until her ultimate escape when Jeffrey Epstein died."
The suit seeks compensatory, punitive, and exemplary damages for violations of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act and New York City's Gender-Motivated Violence Protection Act.
"FirstBank cared about one thing — profit — and showed absolute loyalty to Epstein, including a willingness to violate banking laws, ignore multiple red flags of criminality, and participate directly in sex trafficking to enable Epstein to fulfill his abusive sexual appetite at the expense of countless vulnerable young women," the suit states.
