L'ordre du juge Rakoff dit que la Banque d'Amérique a déjà payé 72,5 millions de dollars Dans le fonds Epstein Survivors

Le numéro que le public a entendu en mars était un titre. Le numéro qui compte est celui d'un commis estampillé en août. Le 28 août 2026, le juge du district des États-Unis Jed S. Rakoff a signé le jugement définitif dans l'affaire Doe c. Bank of America, affaire 1:25-cv-08520 dans le district sud de New York. Selon l'ordonnance, la banque s'est déjà acquittée de son obligation d'argent en vertu d'une stipulation datée du 27 mars : 72 500 000 $ versés dans un fonds de règlement admissible. Pas promis. Payé. Une banque qui dit encore qu'elle n'a pas facilité le trafic sexuel a écrit un chèque assez grand pour faire disparaître un procès en mai, puis a financé le pot avant que les avocats des survivants aient fini de discuter de la libération.

Rakoff had told the courtroom the day before, August 27, that he would approve the deal. He called it fair, reasonable, and adequate. He said it would give many victims « substantial » compensation and « justice, even if partial. » He also said the sentence polite coverage keeps skipping: no amount of money repairs what was done to them. He rejected three accusers who argued the release was too wide, because it forced them to give up related claims against the bank and against other potential defendants without a separate check. Reuters l'audience. Nouvelles du palais de justice avait la ligne sur la justice partielle. L'ordre écrit le lendemain a fait le paiement un fait sur le dossier, pas un press-release tendu.

Qui est la classe, et qui se fait couper en premier

Entre le 30 juin 2008 et le 6 juillet 2019, Jeffrey Epstein, ou une personne liée à lui ou à son entreprise de traite, se rend à la classe. Cette fenêtre est le signal. Le plaidoyer de la Floride 2008 d'Epstein, celui qui l'a laissé dormir dans un lit d'arrêt de travail en prison, aurait dû éclairer chaque tableau de bord de conformité dans les banques américaines. Le procès dit que la Banque d'Amérique a continué à déplacer l'argent de toute façon. Les premiers dossiers disaient que les avocats connaissaient au moins 60 femmes à la fenêtre. D'ici là Banque américaine a couvert l'approbation finale, le bassin décrit était d'environ 90. La définition de classe est plus large que n'importe quelle liste de noms que le public verra.

Thirty percent of $72.5 million is $21.75 million, and Rakoff approved that cut for class counsel led by David Boies and Bradley Edwards. He praised the lawyers for producing something he called actual justice rather than talk. The praise does not change the arithmetic. Nearly a third of the fund leaves before a survivor sees a wire. What remains, split across dozens of women, is not a life restored. It is a structured admission that the bank would rather pay than put its alert logs, relationship-manager notes, and « we didn’t know » emails in front of a jury. The mediator on the deal, Simone Lelchuk, had already run the Deutsche Bank settlement in front of the same judge. The machinery of these cases is now a repeatable product.

The lead plaintiff, a Florida woman proceeding as Jane 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 complaint says his team directed her to hold accounts at Bank of America, and that the activity in those accounts was erratic enough that a bank paying attention would have filed suspicious-activity reports. Plaintiffs say the bank did not file the required reports in time, and that some of the reporting arrived only after Epstein was dead in a federal cell in August 2019. The theory was never that a teller booked a massage. It was that a system built to spot trafficking finance treated this customer circle as profitable friction.

Leon Black’s wires and the third logo on the ledger

The transaction every complaint recites is large enough to make « we didn’t notice » sound like a joke. Leon Black, then a central figure at Apollo Global Management, moved about $170 million to Epstein through Bank of America accounts, a figure that also sits in Senate reporting on the relationship. The suit’s point is not that Black’s name appears in a PDF. It is that nine-figure transfers to a registered sex offender, alongside accounts tied to Ghislaine Maxwell and to women in the trafficking, are exactly what the Bank Secrecy Act is supposed to catch. Rakoff had already ruled in January 2026 that the bank had to face a jury on the claim that it knowingly benefited from a trafficking venture and that it obstructed enforcement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The March stipulation was how both sides avoided that jury. The August judgment is how the avoidance became final.

Put the checks in a row. JPMorgan Chase paid $290 million to Epstein accusers and a separate sum to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Deutsche Bank paid $75 million. Bank of America comes in at $72.5 million and still spends more than many court systems see in a year to keep its name off a verdict form. None of the checks includes an admission. All of them include the same implicit sentence. The discovery was worse than the settlement. Bank spokesman Bill Halldin’s line, repeated from March through the approval, was that the bank stood by its filings, did not facilitate sex-trafficking crimes, and wanted the matter behind it so plaintiffs could have « further closure. » Closure is a word institutions use when the transcript is the thing they bought.

A vendor, not a bystander

Epstein’s operation did not run on cash in a suitcase. It ran on accounts, wires, houses, and men who could move eight and nine figures without a compliance officer calling the FBI. Black sitting in that stream is the demonstration that « know your customer » dies when the customer arrives with a family office. Maxwell’s later hideout picked up its own bank story when UBS money reached the Bradford, New Hampshire, estate where she waited before her arrest. Different logo. Same lesson. The financial system around this network was not fooled by a clever disguise. It was a vendor.

L'Alliance AEGIS covered the road from Rakoff’s winter ruling to this judgment in the companion file on the case the bank first tried to kill, and the week the dollar figure became public in the $72.5 million reveal. While the bank was settling, the government that is supposed to prosecute the rest of the network was still fighting over PDFs. The report that the Justice Department had released less than one percent of the promised files is the political half of the same ledger. Survivors can be owed a claims process and still watch names stay redacted. The Manhattan docket and the Washington docket are two ways of managing one client list.

What a funded settlement is for

A settlement is not a finding that Bank of America ran a trafficking ring. It is a finding that the bank preferred $72.5 million, already sitting in a settlement fund, to a month of trial exhibits. Those exhibits would have included the dates anyone inside the building knew Epstein was not an ordinary rich-man headache. The public does not get those pages. The class gets an administrator. The bank gets a sentence about closure and a judgment that says the money moved.

Readers who want the wider money file can stay on this desk’s Nouvelles du crime et entreprises stacks, including the Copperfield residency that ended after the same document wave and the older record of Maxwell’s arrest. The pattern is consistent. Institutions pay when the alternative is a transcript. They deny when the check clears. Rakoff called the result partial. The three women who objected already knew the release was built to make it so. The order of August 28 did not argue with them. It paid them, and everyone else in the class, out of a fund the bank had already filled.