News Americas, NEW YORK, NY, Thurs. Jan. 5, 2023: The governor of the Caribbean US territory of the Virgin Islands has fired the island’s attorney general days after she slapped a lawsuit on JP Morgan Chase.
USVI Governor Albert Bryan, Jr., said he has “relieved Denise George of her duties as attorney general” over the weekend without offering further details.
Bryan’s spokesman told the DailyMail.com that the JPMorgan suit was not the reason for George’s dismissal but did not clarify the details of her firing.
George had filed a lawsuit in New York federal court, accusing JPMorgan Chase of ‘turning a blind eye’ to late convict, Jeffrey Epstein’s prolific sex crimes. In the lawsuit, she accused the bank of “knowingly providing and pulling the levers through which [Epstein’s] recruiters and victims were paid.”
George had served as the territory’s attorney general for four years and reportedly did not warn Bryan of her intent to file the lawsuit. She had been aggressive in seeking financial damages related to Epstein’s crimes.
In November, George reached a settlement of more than $105 million in a sex trafficking case against the estate of Epstein, who owned a private island in the territory where he abused underage girls.
Assistant Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs will is now serving as acting attorney general.
The lawsuit against JP Morgan sought unspecified damages for violating sex-trafficking, bank-secrecy and consumer laws. It claimed that the bank concealed “wire and cash transactions that raised suspicion of a criminal enterprise whose currency was the sexual servitude” of women and girls.
JPMorgan has so far declined to comment.
EPSTEIN
Epstein was found dead in a New York jail cell in 2019 where he was being held without bail after his arrest on sex-trafficking charges. He was facing trial in Manhattan on federal crimes, having worked out a plea deal in Florida years earlier on charges of sex offences.
His former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted of similar charges in December 2021. Maxwell, daughter of the British press baron Robert Maxwell, was found guilty of sex trafficking and related charges for luring girls as young as 14 into Epstein’s abusive orbit. During her trial, a JPMorgan banker testified that Epstein wired her $31m (£25m), and prosecutors suggested this was Maxwell’s payment for procuring young girls for Epstein and friends.
