Judge Jed Rakoff Approved Bank of America’s $72.5 Million Epstein Survivors Settlement and Left the Bank’s Denial Intact

Die frauen mussten archivieren, bevor der richter entschied, dass sie gewonnen hatten. Der vertrauliche Fragebogen für den Epstein-Überlebendenfonds der Bank of America wurde am 12. Juni 2026 fällig. Die fairnessanhörung fand erst am 27 august statt. An diesem donnerstag in manhattan, bezirksrichter der vereinigten staaten Jed S. Rakoff sagte, er würde die endgültige Genehmigung einer Klassensiedlung in Höhe von 72,5 Millionen US-Dollar in Doe v. Bank of America, Fall 1:25-cv-08520, erteilen. Er nannte das Geld substantiell. Er nannte es Gerechtigkeit, wenn auch teilweise. Er sagte, keine Summe könne reparieren, was die Frauen noch tragen. Er wies drei Ankläger zurück, die argumentierten, die Veröffentlichung sei zu breit, weil sie gezwungen wurden, die damit verbundenen Forderungen gegen die Bank und andere potenzielle Angeklagte ohne zusätzliche Bezahlung aufzugeben. Ein schriftliches Urteil folgte am Ende der Woche. Die bank sagt immer noch, dass sie den sexhandel nicht erleichtert hat. Die Klasse sagt immer noch, dass die Drähte es getan haben.

Diese Sequenz ist die Geschichte, die die AEGIS Alliance erzählt, nicht die Pressemitteilungsversion, in der eine Zahl erscheint und das Argument endet. Menschen, die gehandelt wurden, wurden gebeten, sich an einen deal zu binden, während der richter immer noch nein sagen durfte. Er sagte nicht nein. Er bezifferte den Fall und schloss ihn. Etwa 30 Prozent des Fonds wurden als Gebühren für Boies Schiller Flexner und Edwards Henderson genehmigt. Simone K. Lelchuk, der den Vergleich der Deutschen Bank vor demselben Richter verwaltet hatte, ist der Fondsverwalter. Das öffentliche Gesicht des Prozesses ist die 2026 Survivors Bank Settlement Fund Standort.

This was not JPMorgan’s client file

Die Beschwerde, die im Oktober 2025 von einer Frau aus Florida als Jane Doe eingereicht wurde, ist anders aufgebaut als die früheren Bankfälle. Der Vergleich von JPMorgan in Höhe von 290 Millionen US-Dollar und der Vergleich der Deutschen Bank in Höhe von 75 Millionen US-Dollar gingen aus Epsteins eigenen Konten hervor. Der Fall der Bank of America, wie Reuters described it, focused on use of the bank by „his co-conspirators, associates and victims,“ including Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year federal sentence. Doe said she was living in Russia when she met Epstein and that he sexually abused her at least 100 times between 2011 and 2019. The class is not limited to women who banked where he banked. It is every woman sexually abused or trafficked by Epstein, or by any person connected to him or to any Epstein sex-trafficking venture, between June 30, 2008, and July 6, 2019.

That definition is why the objectors had a point even though they lost. A release that wide buys peace not only for one wire room but for claims that might have been aimed at other defendants who touched the same venture. Rakoff disagreed that the deal was overbroad, and he rejected the argument that it should not cover claims materially different from Doe’s. Class-action law often disagrees with holdouts. The holdouts were describing a design feature. Settlements of this size purchase institutional quiet and a haircut for anyone who wanted a narrower release and a trial story. Estimates of who is inside the class have moved with the telling: lawyers told the Associated Press as many as 75 women, other write-ups said nearer 60, and Amerikanischer Bankier put the pool near 90. The administrator’s claim-by-claim work will be the number that matters. It will not move the bank’s sentence. Bank of America admits no wrongdoing.

How a motion to dismiss became a check

Rakoff spent the first weeks of 2026 keeping the core claims alive. He found that alleged reckless disregard could support a theory that the bank benefited from a trafficking venture. That sentence is why a general counsel settles. A Manhattan jury looking at transfers around a convicted sex offender is not a room a bank wants. The parties disclosed an agreement in late March. The AEGIS Alliance recorded that moment in the preliminary agreement piece and the figure itself in the $72.5 million announcement. Preliminary approval came in the spring. Final approval came on August 27, with the written order the next day. No banker was charged. No executive had to say the word „enabled“ on the record.

Plaintiffs pointed at a Senate report’s description of roughly $170 million moving from Leon Black to Epstein, labeled in ways that sounded like tax and estate work, and at the bank’s alleged failure to file the suspicious-activity reports that statute requires once a registered sex offender is in the flow of funds. A lawyer for Black asked Rakoff in March to delay a deposition because the parties were close to settling. The delay was granted. The settlement arrived. That is how a deposition that would have put a billionaire under oath about payments to a trafficker becomes a line in a status report. The bank’s denial and the plaintiffs‘ wire theory were never tried. They were priced.

The price list of looking away

Three banks. Three denials. Three funds. JPMorgan paid $290 million to survivors and, in a separate deal, $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Deutsche Bank paid $75 million. Bank of America comes in at $72.5 million and sits in the same moral neighborhood. Add the estate’s own victim payments, which have run past $200 million across the compensation program and later settlements, and the public math of this network is a stack of checks without a stack of executive prosecutions. Maxwell is in federal prison. The arrest that put her there did not pull a compliance officer in with her. The bankers who touched adjacent flows are in earnings calls. That disparity is the actual holding of these cases.

The banks are not the only institutions that took the money and the silence. UBS wired nearly $8 million toward the New Hampshire estate where Maxwell hid before her arrest. The island side of the same network is in the Virgin Islands trafficking case against the estate und in der earlier victims‘ fund. The 2008 non-prosecution agreement that let Epstein plead to state charges and keep a private jet was not reopened by Rakoff’s order. Partial justice is the judge’s phrase. It is also a description of a system that prices a pipeline instead of jailing the people who kept the pipe open.

What the August order does not clear

The final approval puts an administrator between the fund and the class. It releases Bank of America from the claims the stipulation covers. It does not charge a compliance officer. It does not force a public admission. It does not answer the autopsy argument over how Epstein died in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which The AEGIS Alliance has kept in the neck-fracture file because the body and the banks travel together in public memory even when they are different cases. Suspicious-activity reports exist so that a bank cannot say it did not notice large sums moving toward a man who had already been convicted of procuring a child. If the Senate figure the plaintiffs cite is right, the notice was available. If the bank’s denial is right, the statute is decoration. Rakoff did not resolve that contradiction. He ended the lawsuit that was asking him to.

Seventy-two and a half million dollars is a rounding error in Bank of America’s quarterly print and a life-changing figure for a woman who was abused across eight years of wires. Both facts can be true. The second fact is why the objectors lost on optics even when they had a point on scope. People who were trafficked need cash now. Institutions know that. The timing of the March deal, coming as Black’s deposition came due and as the files dump kept feeding headlines, was not an accident of the calendar. The admission that less than one percent of the Epstein files had been released und die Phang injunction against the department’s stall are the names chapter. This settlement is the money chapter. They are the same book.

For the running record, see the site’s Kriminalnachrichten und Vereinigte Staaten News files. The questionnaire deadline passed in June. The check cleared the courtroom in August. It did not clear the pipeline, and The AEGIS Alliance will not write it as if it did.