Judge Rakoff’s Order Says Bank of America Already Paid $72.5 Million Into the Epstein Survivors Fund

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 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 de mai, puis a financé le pot avant que les avocats des survivants aient fini se disputer pour 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. Courthouse News had the line about partial justice. The written order the next day made the payment a fact on the docket, not a press-release tense.

Who the class is, and who gets cut first

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 covered final approval, the pool being described was about 90. The class definition is wider than any list of names the public will see.

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.

La plaignante principale, une femme de la Floride en cours comme Jane Doe, a dit qu'elle vivait en Russie quand elle a rencontré Epstein et qu'il l'a abusée sexuellement au moins 100 fois entre 2011 et 2019. La plainte dit que son équipe lui a demandé de tenir des comptes à la Banque d'Amérique, et que l'activité dans ces comptes était assez irrégulière qu'une banque prêtant attention aurait a déposé des rapports d'activité suspecte. Les plaignants affirment que la banque n'a pas déposé les rapports requis à temps, et qu'une partie des rapports n'est arrivée qu'après la mort d'Epstein dans une cellule fédérale en août 2019. La théorie n'a jamais été qu'une caissière avait réservé un massage. C'est qu'un système conçu pour repérer le financement du trafic a traité ce cercle de clients comme une friction rentable.

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 crime news 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.