Bank of America has reached an agreement to pay $72.5 million to settle a civil lawsuit brought by women who allege the bank facilitated their sexual abuse at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein, court records showed on Friday. The settlement was described to Manhattan-based U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff earlier this month as a "settlement in principle," though its terms were not publicly disclosed at that time.
The proposed resolution remains subject to Judge Rakoff's approval. The judge set a hearing for Thursday to consider whether to grant that approval.
The suit, originally filed in October by a plaintiff using the pseudonym Jane Doe, accused the second-largest U.S. bank of disregarding a set of suspicious financial transactions connected to Epstein despite what the filing described as a "plethora" of information about his criminal conduct. The complaint contended that the bank prioritized profit over the safety of victims.
Bank of America has pushed back on those allegations, saying that Doe's claims were limited to the bank having provided routine services to individuals who at the time had no known connections to Epstein. The bank characterized any implication of deeper involvement as "threadbare and meritless."
Earlier this year, in January, Judge Rakoff ruled that Bank of America must face Doe's assertions that the institution knowingly benefited from Epstein's sex trafficking and impeded enforcement of the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act. The complaint highlighted a number of transactions, including payments to Epstein from Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management.
Leon Black stepped down as Apollo's chief executive in 2021 after an outside law firm review found he had paid Epstein $158 million for tax and estate planning services. Black has denied any wrongdoing and has said he was unaware of Epstein's criminal behavior.
Doe's legal team has pursued suits against other alleged facilitators of Epstein's trafficking. In 2023, those lawyers secured settlements totaling $290 million with JPMorgan Chase and $75 million with Deutsche Bank on behalf of Epstein's accusers.
Separately, the lawyers are appealing Judge Rakoff's January dismissal of a related lawsuit they filed against Bank of New York Mellon.
Jeffrey Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. New York City's medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
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