IMPORTANT NEW BOOKS:

Our Fragile Freedoms
by Eric Foner
W.W. Norton and Company, 2025

[Publication date: September 2, 2025]

From one of the most acclaimed and influential historians of the United States, an insightful guide to our history and why it matters.

Eric Foner has done more to shape the public and professional understanding of American history than any other scholar. The preeminent historian of the Civil War era, Foner’s keynote has been American freedom and the recurring battles over its meanings and boundaries. His award-winning works show that freedom has been a birthright for some and a struggle for others, that rights gained can also be lost, and that they must always be tended with knowledge and vigilance. The present political moment makes the importance of these themes abundantly clear.

This collection of Foner’s recent reviews and commentaries demonstrates the range of his interests and expertise, running from slavery and antislavery, through the disunion and remaking of the United States in the nineteenth century, Jim Crow and the civil rights movement, and into our current politics. Each piece shows a master at work, melding historical knowledge and balanced judgment with crystalline prose. Foner takes up towering figures from Washington to Lincoln, Douglass, and Rosa Parks, pivotal events such as the Fugitive Slave Act and the Tulsa Race Massacre, and the fragility of constitutional guarantees to civil liberties, due process, and birthright citizenship, whether in times of war or peace. He also explores recent controversies over how to commemorate, and how to teach, our history.

REVIEWS:

"Eric Foner’s essays, old and new, feel utterly fresh. With a rare combination of authority and generosity, he writes from deep conviction yet with a spirit of openness toward ideas and arguments with which he sharply disagrees. By illuminating the past in light of the present, he confirms his standing as the leading American historian of his generation."

― Andrew Delbanco, author of The War Before the War

 

"Our greatest historian, Eric Foner offers engaging, insightful, and sobering reflections on our contested history and imperiled republic. I would feel more confident about keeping our freedoms if every citizen could read Foner's calm and lucid reflections on our past, present, and future."

― Alan Taylor, author of American Civil Wars

 

Our Fragile Freedoms is a necessary read for our troubled times, but also a delightful read for anyone who savors the pleasure of seeing history come alive in the work of a contemporary master of the historical profession."

― Henry Louis Gates, Jr., author of The Black Box

 

"Eric Foner's new collection is as fierce, brilliant, and insightful as all of his work. Unsentimental and clear-eyed, these essays are a reminder that even in bleak times, thinking about history can give us hope for the future."

― Kim Phillips-Fein, author of Fear City

 

"At a moment when the classroom is under threat from politicians insisting on 'pro-American' lesson plans, Foner’s lifetime of scholarship is the most powerful evidence as to why we need to keep engaging our past through honest and clear-eyed analysis. A tour-de-force showcasing the career of one of the most influential historians of our times."
― Julian E. Zelizer, author of In Defense of Partisanship
 

"With characteristic rigor, empathy, and wisdom, Foner demonstrates why history is not merely a study of the past but a vital tool for navigating our present struggles for justice and equality. This book is a stirring call to action and a profound affirmation of our shared humanity."
― Elizabeth Hinton, author of America on Fire
 

"It is hard to imagine a subject more pressing today than the history of the country's 'fragile freedoms'―or to imagine a historian better equipped than Eric Foner to tell us what we need to know."

― Beverly Gage, author of G-Man

 

"A remarkable survey of American history and history writing, and a powerful set of reflections on the importance of historical study and thinking, Our Fragile Freedoms couldn't be more timely and essential. As much as any book it helps us recognize the centrality of history in our efforts to understand the present. And it demonstrates why Eric Foner is one of this country's greatest historians."

― Steven Hahn, author of Illiberal America

 

"Eric Foner is the foremost chronicler of our nation’s past. In this timely book, he reminds us that democracy and freedom have always been contested. An urgent call to continue our freedom struggles, this book is required reading for our times."

― Lisa McGirr, author of The War on Alcohol

 

"Eric Foner is that rare historian who makes history speak to important contemporary issues while maintaining the highest standards of historical scholarship. These essays―as readable as they are insightful―are a fitting capstone to Foner’s illustrious career."
― James Oakes, author of The Crooked Path to Abolition
 

"Whether this book is your introduction to Eric Foner or a reminder of the depth and breadth of his contributions to the study of U.S. history, you can find no better guide to American democracy."

― Kathleen DuVal, author of Native Nations

 
"Our Fragile Freedoms shows why Eric Foner is the ‘go to’ author for readers seeking incisive commentary steeped in deep historical knowledge about current and past controversies."

― Randall Kennedy, author of Say It Loud!

 

"No other historian has shaped our current understanding of the United States as much as Eric Foner. A must-read not only for scholars but also every American citizen."
― Manisha Sinha, author of The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

 
Eric Foner's indelible works include the landmark history, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution; a bestselling study of Lincoln and slavery, The Fiery Trial, winner of the Pulitzer, Bancroft, and Lincoln Prizes; and an influential history of the Reconstruction amendments, The Second Founding. The DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, Foner continues to write frequently for The Nation and other publications.

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries:
The Story Of the League of Revolutionary Workers
by Jerome Scott and Walda Katz-Fishman
The University of Georgia Press, 2025

 

[Publication date:   September 1, 2025]

 

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries offers a fresh perspective on class, race, and revolution in the United States. Drawing on more than forty hours of interviews with former members of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Scott and Katz-Fishman share the rich story of the League, including the women and students. That story includes the history of the automotive industry in Detroit, the 1967 Detroit Rebellion, and the wildcat strike that sparked the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM). The authors describe the rise of the League from 1968 to 1971. They explore the centrality of struggle and political education as the League split and a section of League comrades moved into revolutionary organizations and social movement spaces, many of which remain active today. League comrades share their analysis of the current moment and staying the course of revolutionary struggle.

REVIEWS:

 
At long last! Here is the story of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, one of the most important working-class movements in U.S. history, as told by the very people who made it and lived it. Reflection on the experience of the League and the lessons we must draw from it and from the revolutionary political organizations that developed out of it could not be more vital at this barbarous time. Every social justice activist and proletarian intellectual must read it and discuss how to apply the lessons of our revolutionary parents, grandparents, and ancestors to the contemporary working-class struggle for an end to capitalist exploitation and to the racism, sexism, and other oppressions that capitalism generates. -- William I. Robinson ― Distinguished Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara and author of Epochal Crisis: The Exhaustion of Global Capitalism

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries is an essential contribution to the understanding of a transformative period in post-World War II United States capitalism. It reveals, in deeply personal narratives, the formation of a workers’ movement in the automotive industry that challenges both race and class oppression in the factories and within the UAW. It’s a history that few are aware of, but all can learn from. It’s history that matters. Today. -- Gene Bruskin ― activist, veteran labor organizer, and playwright

Motown and the Making of Working-Class Revolutionaries is an exceptionally powerful analysis of the 1969 formation and history of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. These workers in the Detroit automobile industry developed into working class revolutionaries who studied and struggled for social transformation at the point of production and beyond. They took on the exploitative automobile industry and embedded themselves in the worldwide class struggle against white supremacy and imperialist capitalism. Their voices are clear and incredibly potent with critical lessons for today. -- Rose M. Brewer ― Distinguished Teaching Professor, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, 2024-2025 

 
Book Description 

 
An inside look at how the experiences of Black workers created lifelong revolutionaries

ABOUT THE AUTHORS: 

 
JEROME SCOTT is a former autoworker, labor organizer in Detroit auto plants, and member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. The founding director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, he is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others.

WALDA KATZ-FISHMAN is a scholar activist and professor of sociology at Howard University. A founding member and former board chair of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide, she is a contributing author or editor of popular education toolkits and books, including The United States Social Forum: Perspectives of a Movement and The Roots of Terror, among others.

Jack Whitten: The Messenger
by Jack Whitten and 15 contributors
Edited by Michelle Kuo

The Museum of Modern Art

 

[Publication date:  April 22, 2025] 

 

The first full retrospective of Whitten's dazzling and trenchant abstraction from the 1960s–2010s, which transformed the relationship between art, race and society

Jack Whitten offered the world a new way to see. Over nearly six decades, he dared to invent new forms of abstraction, constantly transforming both perception and our understanding of art in society. This gorgeously illustrated volume, with pathbreaking new perspectives and revelatory technical analyses of his innovative materials and processes, explores Whitten's wide-ranging and game-changing practice.

Raised in the segregated Jim Crow South in the 1940s, Whitten undertook an extraordinary journey in becoming an artist, convinced that by changing form, he could help change the world. Despite pressure from peers to create figurative art, he was a key proponent of creating abstract art that responded to social turmoil; to his own identity as a Black artist; and to sea changes in technology. He created new ways of painting through a series of artistic inventions and strategies. He defied traditional boundaries between abstraction and representation, pictures and things, culture and technology, individual identity and global history.

Published to accompany the first comprehensive retrospective of Whitten's art, this sumptuous catalog presents the full range of his career across painting, sculpture and works on paper, produced in New York and Greece, with texts by leading art historians and artists, and new technical analyses by conservators. Previously unpublished writings by the artist and an expansive chronology of Whitten's life, featuring newly discovered photographs and archival materials, bring into focus an artist who was as committed to human perception as to human rights, becoming one of the most important artists of our time.

 

REVIEWS:

 

The late Jack Whitten refused categorization in favor of forging his own way through the 1960s New York art scene. The painter used distinctive techniques, making marks with materials such as Afro combs, saws, and squeegees. These and more examples of his enduring legacy will be on view in his first full retrospective, plus several pieces on public display for the first time. -- Natalie Haddad ― Hyperallergic

The show’s more than 175 works will span nearly six decades of [Jack Whitten's] practice, which explored the Civil Rights Movement, science, and technology via an impressive range of disciplines including painting, sculpture, collage, photography, printmaking, and music. A tenor saxophonist, he brought an improvisational approach to his work. -- Julie Belcove ― Robb Report

[Jack Whitten's] work influenced generations of artists ― from Andy Warhol to Glenn Ligon ― but looked like nothing else before or since. -- M.H. Miller ― T Magazine

Whitten spoke, with wishful optimism, of wanting to be an artist-citizen of the world, a world in which ‘there is no race, no color, no gender, no territorial hangups, no religion, no politics. There is only life.’ Life is what this great show of his fantastically inventive art is filled with. -- Holland Cotter ― The New York Times

For Whitten, one of the great painters of the past half century, everything was light―people, places, paintings, all of it. He was less interested in depicting light than in embodying it in paint, no small task. -- Alex Greenberger ― ArtNews

Persistently original, restlessly evolving, and uncharmed by fashion. -- Ariella Budick ― The Financial Times

What makes Whitten remarkable is more than just his embrace of ambiguity or his technical experimentation. It’s his ability to use abstraction to create palimpsests of poetic meaning, inspired by jazz and hyper-attuned to the implications of modern communication. -- Sebastian Smee ― The Washington Post

[A] breathtaking, deeply researched glimpse of a career that unfolded in one long eureka. -- Julian Lucas ― The New York Times

Endlessly inventive, [Jack Whitten] mastered complex techniques to animate his visceral imagery. -- R.C. Baker ― Village Voice

Jack Whitten’s paintings are like voids you fall into before finding you don’t want to leave. -- Camille Okhio ― Elle Decor

A remarkable aspect of Kim's oeuvre is how ASL, written English, musical notation, and gestural mark-making are fused into a coherent, unified language -- John Vincler ― Cultured

The pieces on view in ‘The Messenger’ – Whitten’s retrospective at MoMA – exceed painting: they reach past the medium, live beyond its edges. -- Zoe Hopkins ― Frieze

The American artist moved from the segregated South to the New York art world and beyond as he forged unique processes of painting and sculpting, the textured, totemic results of which are now on view in a staggering retrospective. -- James Panero ― The Wall Street Journal

To walk through the MoMA show and marvel at Whitten’s polymath abilities, his deep political and social engagement, and his restless imagination is to be reminded all over again of the loss to ourselves and our culture that we did not know and appreciate a talent like Whitten’s better when he was alive. -- Marion Maneker ― Puck

From a work of swirling sorbet oranges to a sewn black surface with a hole punched through it, these paintings invite you to get up close. -- Lisa Yin Zhang ― Hyperallergic

What appears to be brilliantly restless innovation is revealed to be rigorous interrogation of what painting, and only painting, can do. The opportunity to see this for ourselves, to test it against our own perceptions, makes the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective not only one of its best shows in a decade but, if properly attended to, one of its most consequential. -- Jarrett Earnest ― The New York Review of Books

The catalogue itself is a monumentally impressive piece of scholarship and taste, a stunning group effort that brings together too many luminaries to name, led by MoMA curator and publisher Michelle Kuo. This book, this show, is the kind of world I want. -- David O'Neill ― Bookforum

[No] matter the year or subject, Whitten’s work remains a fruitful site of play, improvisation, experimentation, grounding, reverence, and convergence, an outlet for all the expressive vulnerability, emotion, and meaning his body could hold. -- Lee Ann Norman ― The Brooklyn Rail

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Jack Whitten (1939–2018) was born in Bessemer, Alabama, and began his studies in medicine at the Tuskegee Institute. After moving to New York in 1960 to attend the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, he became a leading artist in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, and of a generation of Black artists committed to abstraction. Whitten lived in New York until his death.

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: Bari Weiss is a virulent White supremacist, a raging intellectual fraud, a brazen media opportunist, and an openly rank Trump regime acolyte--all the things Corporate America, and the national cultural/political/economic elite in general absolutely loves and supports about her bottomless greed and braindead bigotry

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/10/business/media/cbs-news-bari-weiss-free-press.html

Bari Weiss Closes In on Major Role at CBS News

The talks with Ms. Weiss, a founder of The Free Press, are the strongest sign yet that the new owner of CBS News intends to make major changes.

Listen to this article · 5:34 minutes

Learn more 

Bari Weiss co-founded The Free Press in 2021. Ms. Weiss’s potential role at CBS would be part of a broader deal. Credit: Noam Galai/Getty Images
 

by Lauren Hirsch and Benjamin Mullin
September 10, 2025
New York Times

Bari Weiss has spent the past few years leading The Free Press, a scrappy online media start-up that was founded as a rebuke to traditional news organizations. Now, she is closing in on a leadership role at CBS News, the country’s quintessential traditional TV news organization.

The new owner of CBS News is weighing giving Ms. Weiss the job of editor in chief or co-president of the network, as part of a broader deal to buy The Free Press, according to two people with knowledge of the deal.

The people cautioned that the terms of a deal were not final. But even the consideration of Ms. Weiss for such a prominent role at CBS News is the strongest sign yet that the network’s new owner, David Ellison, intends to make major changes at the news organization. On Monday, the company announced that Kenneth R. Weinstein, a longtime proponent of conservative policies, would take a job focused on reviewing complaints about the network’s coverage.

Mr. Ellison, whose company Skydance merged with Paramount last month in an $8 billion deal, has been in talks to acquire The Free Press for over two months. Any deal is expected to put the price tag for The Free Press at over $100 million, its valuation in 2024, the two people said.

The total price, which is still being negotiated, depends in part on how long Ms. Weiss stays at Paramount. Some expect the value to exceed $150 million, paid with some cash and the remainder in stock.

 

David Ellison’s company Skydance merged with Paramount last month in an $8 billion deal. Credit: Sam Comen for The New York Times

A deal could be reached within a few weeks, said the two people, who would speak only under the condition of anonymity because the talks remain private. Puck, which publishes newsletters on finance, politics and media, earlier reported the broad outlines of the pricing.

Trump Administration: Live Updates




Updated

Sept. 10, 2025:

Republicans block Schumer’s effort to force a vote on the Epstein files.


A Republican senator asked the Social Security agency about a whistle-blower’s claims.


The Education Department is ending grant funding worth $350 million for minority-serving Colleges.

Ms. Weiss started The Free Press in 2021 with her wife, Nellie Bowles, and her sister, Suzy Weiss, after resigning from The New York Times, where she worked as an editor for the opinion section and occasionally wrote essays. Ms. Bowles also previously worked at The Times.

They positioned the new company, which started as a newsletter, as an unflinching alternative to traditional media organizations. The Free Press has garnered attention for its reporting and commentary, some that is critical of news organizations and individual journalists, including an article by the former NPR senior editor Uri Berliner that accused the radio network of having a liberal bias. In her columns for The Free Press, Ms. Weiss has opposed diversity and inclusion programs, reported and commented on what she called Israel’s “war of defense” in Gaza and disclosed voting for Joseph R. Biden Jr. for president in 2020.

In many ways, The Free Press and CBS News are very different organizations.

CBS News, the home of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, epitomizes traditional media, while The Free Press is a digital publisher. And CBS News is a sprawling corporate division with thousands of employees scattered around the globe, while The Free Press is much smaller. The Free Press has more than 50 employees and offices on both coasts. The site now has roughly 1.5 million free and paid subscribers. It also publishes podcasts and videos, and operates an events business. (Paramount has discussed supporting Ms. Weiss with leaders who have expertise in television, one of the people said.)

Image



CBS News announced recently it would now air only interviews that are conducted live, or are prerecorded with no edits. Credit: Vincent Alban/The New York Times

So far, Mr. Ellison has mostly spoken in broad terms publicly about his plans for CBS News, saying he wants the division to be “fact-based and truth-based” during a press briefing in August. “We believe in basically being in the trust business,” Mr. Ellison said. “We believe in being in the truth business.” When the company this week announced the hiring of Mr. Weinstein, whom President Trump nominated as ambassador to Japan in his first term, it said he would “serve as an independent, internal advocate for journalistic integrity and transparency.”

Mr. Ellison is taking control over Paramount at a time of intense government scrutiny of the media industry. Mr. Trump and regulators have criticized news organizations for what they say is a liberal bias, and have begun investigations into media companies over D.E.I. and sponsorship practices.

In July, as Skydance waited for regulators to sign off on its deal to merge with Paramount, the company agreed to pay Mr. Trump $16 million to settle a suit he had filed over the editing of a segment of “60 Minutes,” the crown jewel of the network’s news division.

The settlement was widely considered an extraordinary concession to a sitting president by a major media organization. He had accused the show of purposely editing an interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris to benefit her campaign. Many lawyers had dismissed Mr. Trump’s lawsuit as baseless and believed that CBS would have ultimately prevailed in court. Shari Redstone, the company’s controlling shareholder, said that it was in the company’s best interest to settle.

The scrutiny over CBS has persisted. Last Wednesday, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, posted on X that “it is time for a change” at the network after Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, accused “Face the Nation,” the network’s longtime Sunday politics show, of deceptively editing an interview with her. Two days later, the company said that the show would now air only interviews that are conducted live, or are prerecorded with no cuts or edits.

Lauren Hirsch is a Times reporter who covers deals and dealmakers in Wall Street and Washington.

Benjamin Mullin reports for The Times on the major companies behind news and entertainment. Contact him securely on Signal at +1 530-961-3223 or at benjamin.mullin@nytimes.com.

A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 11, 2025, Section B, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: CBS Weighs Major Role For Weiss. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe


See more on: U.S. Politics, Donald Trump, CBS News, Paramount, Skydance Productions LLC

https://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2025/sep/10/bari-weiss-cbs

 
Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?

‘She doesn’t just speak to the 1%. She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen’…Fred Luntz. Illustration: Guardian Design/Getty Images

After leaving the New York Times, she turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, Weiss is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites

by David Klion
September 10, 2025
The Guardian (UK)

Last month, federal regulators approved the long-anticipated merger of Skydance Media and Paramount Global, positioning David Ellison – the founder of Skydance and the son of megabillionaire Larry Ellison – as one of the most powerful figures in US media. Paramount Skydance Corporation, as it is now officially known, is one of a small handful of American media conglomerates, with Paramount Pictures, cable networks such as Comedy Central and MTV, and CBS all under its umbrella. CBS, in turn, runs one of the major US news operations, with nightly news viewership in the millions and 60 Minutes still being the most watched news program on network television.

The implications of the merger are far-reaching and were already being felt ahead of its final approval. In July, Paramount agreed to pay Donald Trump $16m to settle a lawsuit over a 60 Minutes segment the president disapproved of, and a few weeks later, CBS controversially cancelled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, which many observers speculated was at least partly about jettisoning an outspoken critic of Trump in anticipation of the deal.

Read more

But one of the most buzzed-about aspects is Paramount’s possible acquisition of the Free Press, the digital media company founded by Bari Weiss as a Substack newsletter in 2021, and Weiss’s potential new role steering CBS’s editorial slant. In July, the Financial Times reported that Weiss was seeking at least $200m for her website – more than double its valuation a year earlier and more than the site’s admittedly impressive 155,000 paid subscribers (roughly a 10th of total subscribers) would seem to justify. That same week, the media newsletter Puck published an anonymously sourced report that Weiss would possibly be advising David Rhodes, a former CBS and Fox News executive and the current chair of Sky News, in the event that Rhodes resumes running CBS. And just last week, Puck reported that the deal was all but finalized, with the Free Press to be acquired for somewhere in the $100m to $200m range (less than Weiss sought but nothing to sneeze at) and with Weiss tasked with “guiding the editorial direction of the [CBS news] division”.

If all this comes to pass, it will cement Weiss as a key figure in shaping the national news environment, just five years after her much publicized resignation from the New York Times over what she characterized as a censorious and hostile workplace. This came in the wake of the resignation of the editorial page editor, James Bennet, after a staff uproar over the publication of Senator Tom Cotton’s opinion piece calling for military intervention against Black Lives Matter protesters.

Weiss, 41, is no stranger to publicity; since 2019, she has been the subject of mostly fawning profiles in Vanity Fair, Semafor, Los Angeles Magazine, the Times of London, the New Statesman, the Financial Times, and her former employers, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The product of an idyllic and fiercely Zionist upbringing in Pittsburgh’s Jewish community, she first gained notice for her campaign against pro-Palestinian faculty during her undergrad years at Columbia University. A stint at the Bret Stephens-run neoconservative Wall Street Journal editorial page followed, before she and Stephens both departed for the New York Times, where her tenure as an opinion editor and writer was stormy well before her resignation. She and her wife, fellow voluntary Times exile Nellie Bowles, decamped to Los Angeles, where she wasted little time launching new projects: she co-founded the “heterodox” University of Austin and launched a Substack, originally dubbed Common Sense and then rebranded as the Free Press, which quickly acquired venture capital backers, a sizable subscriber base, and an editorial staff numbering in the dozens and including many media industry veterans. Her triumphant return to New York City last year marked her as a power broker in her own right. More than any other figure in her age cohort, Weiss wrote the playbook on canceling anti-Zionists and “woke” progressives, even as she decried “cancel culture” and claimed to champion free speech – and with the Free Press, she has developed a whole newsroom around that mission. The Guardian put detailed claims in this piece to Bari Weiss and the Free Press and did not receive an official response.

 

 

Bari Weiss, left, then a sophomore at Columbia University, speaks at a press conference organized by Columbians for Academic Freedom as a crowd listens outside the gates to the New York City campus in March 2005. Photograph: Tina Fineberg/AP

When New York Magazine convened 57 of “the most powerful people in media” to discuss the industry’s future last year, Weiss was on the list. A month later, after Trump’s victory, the Free Press co-hosted an inauguration party with Elon Musk’s X and Uber, attended by the former British prime minister Liz Truss, Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and Dr Mehmet Oz. For each of her haters, and there are many, Weiss counts Jeff Bezos, Jerry Seinfeld (whose daughter is on staff at the Free Press), and Sheryl Sandberg among her fans, and Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and Howard Schultz among her financial backers. “She doesn’t just speak to the 1%,” the conservative pollster Frank Luntz told the New York Times last year. “She speaks to the one-hundredth of 1%. And they’ll listen.”

In just a few years, Weiss has gone from a punchline in media circles to one of the most influential names in the industry, one with a genuine popular following beyond insiders and donors. Her stunning comeback is a tribute to her hustle, her oft-acknowledged personal charisma, and above all her unapologetic support for Israel and attacks on progressive social justice dogmas, often disparaged as “wokeness” – both of which align her with some of the most powerful people alive even as they alienate her from many of her generational peers in journalism.

But while Weiss is widely understood as a provocateur, what is less well understood is how she has used the Free Press to empower rightwing factions within established elite institutions, and how her efforts have been turbocharged by Trump’s return to the White House. If Weiss does join CBS, it will only formalize the role she has already carved out as the Trump administration’s de facto ally in its effort to silence progressive and pro-Palestinian voices. Weiss will be an ideological commissar situated within the highest levels of the media business, wielding her considerable platform to help the White House enforce compliance in spaces that fostered resistance during Trump’s first term: the media, academia and civil society.

To get a sense of the kind of opportunities Weiss might have to influence decisions and coverage at CBS, it is worth flashing back a year to the fall of 2024. On 30 September, Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared on CBS’s morning news show, where he was interviewed by anchor Tony Dokoupil over Coates’s new book, The Message, which includes a scathing firsthand account of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Dokoupil questioned Coates aggressively (some would say condescendingly) over what he called a one-sided depiction of Israel, and the interview was litigated on social media for days, pitting supporters of Israel and Palestine against each other on predictable lines.

A week later, the Free Press joined the fray with an exclusive from inside CBS News, where the Coates interview was at least as divisive as it was to the wider public. On the first anniversary of the 7 October Hamas attacks, someone high up at CBS leaked recordings of an editorial meeting to the Free Press, revealing that, as the site’s editors put it, “the network’s top brass all but apologized for the interview to staff, saying that it did not meet the company’s ‘editorial standards.’” Though the article acknowledged that CBS’s chief legal correspondent, Jan Crawford, defended Dokoupil’s tough questions, it portrayed the meeting overall as an example of the woke conformity endemic to institutions such as CBS.

“The sad truth is that Coates is not speaking truth to power,” the Free Press editorialized, in a sweeping indictment both of CBS and of elite liberalism writ large. “He is echoing the new consensus of the powerful. One can find more sophisticated versions of The Message in the course catalogs of Ivy League universities, the editorial pages of leading newspapers, and in the reports of well-funded NGOs. It is journalists like Tony Dokoupil who are an endangered species in legacy news organizations, which are wilting to the pressures of this new elite consensus.”

A month later, Trump won the presidential election. Since then, what the Free Press editors termed “this new elite consensus” has been under siege from the federal government, which has openly sought to purge anything it considers “wokeness” from universities, newspapers and NGOs, and in particular has sought to criminalize pro-Palestinian activism and criticism of Israel. Weiss, who has presented herself as a leading defender of free speech, has in effect leveraged her publication to help the government suppress it.If you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help

The Free Press’s involvement in the administration’s war on Columbia University, Weiss’s alma mater (and, full disclosure, mine; I socialized with Weiss as an undergraduate, though we have not spoken in years) has been a case in point. Trump’s joint task force to combat antisemitism chose the Free Press to break the news on 7 March that the administration was withholding $400m in federal grants to Columbia over the university’s alleged failure to combat antisemitism in the wake of the 7 October attacks – essentially the opening volley in Trump’s assault on elite higher education. Two weeks later, on 21 March, Columbia conceded to Trump’s blackmail, agreeing to place its Middle East studies department – which Weiss has been crusading against since she was an undergraduate two decades ago – under academic receivership. Just four days after that, the Free Press published a leaked transcript of a private Zoom call in which the university’s then president, Katrina Armstrong, told about 75 faculty members that she did not intend to comply with all of Trump’s demands, despite her public surrender. Three days later, Armstrong resigned – and according to the New York Times, a key reason why was that Trump’s antisemitism task force expressed concern over the transcript leaked to the Free Press.

Weiss’s publication, in short, was the preferred vehicle for conveying information from Columbia insiders who wanted to purge all criticism of Israel from the university to Trump administration officials who were using unprecedented financial pressure to help them do exactly that. Just as with CBS a year ago, Weiss and the Free Press were there to help reactionaries at elite institutions advance their internal turf wars – and unlike a year ago, those reactionaries can now count on the full weight of Trump’s authoritarian administration to back them up.

The same playbook can also be seen in the Free Press’s efforts to discredit National Public Radio, which from 1971 until this summer served as America’s major publicly supported broadcaster. Last April, the Free Press published an error-laden article by a disgruntled NPR business editor, Uri Berliner, who accused his employer of pervasive liberal bias and of betraying America’s trust. Berliner was predictably hired by the Free Press two months later, and within a year, he was being invited by House Republicans to testify against his former employer. In July of this year, Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill voted to defund NPR, and the Free Press published Berliner’s victory lap. The pattern is clear: if you work at a liberal institution and you want the Trump-controlled federal government to step in and discipline it, Bari Weiss is there to help.

These are the real stakes of Weiss potentially joining CBS. If Paramount’s acquisition of the Free Press goes through, Weiss will probably be in a position to recruit a network of snitches and rightwing thought police, both from within existing CBS staff and from her own publication, ensconced throughout one of the four largest US media conglomerates. CBS staffers are reportedly “apoplectic” at the news of her impending role, with some raising concerns about a “hall monitor” approach to coverage and others threatening to resign – resignations Ellison and Weiss might welcome, as it would give them an opportunity to start fresh. Weiss could be responsible for shaping coverage and enforcing her own orthodoxy, especially with regard to Israel and its critics – an issue around which Weiss has consistently provided cover for Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal government. This would represent a shift for CBS; Paramount’s outgoing chair, Shari Redstone, is an avowed supporter of Israel who has reportedly been outraged by 60 Minutes’s coverage since the 7 October attacks, and has openly expressed hope that the Trump administration could force CBS to clamp down on “anti-Israel bias”, which Weiss is ideally suited to facilitate.

Bari Weiss hosts Senator Ted Cruz at a Free Press event presented with Uber and X on 18 January in Washington DC. Photograph: Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Uber, X and The Free Press

Last month, the Free Press sparked widespread outrage by publishing an article by staffers Olivia Reingold and Tanya Lukyanova, who reported that the starving Palestinian children whose images appeared in multiple mainstream outlets were all suffering from pre-existing conditions such as cystic fibrosis or rickets – a clear attempt to bolster a narrative the publication has been pushing for months that widely reported famine conditions in Gaza are a hoax. Reingold and Lukyanova’s article drew condemnation from many quarters, including from the president of Refugees International, who pointed out that it is precisely children with such conditions who are most vulnerable in a famine. But the Free Press brushed off its critics and claimed credit for pushing CNN and the Washington Post to caveat their coverage in light of their reporting. “Journalistic outlets love to boast about ‘impact,’ and this story has had more than its share,” wrote the editors. As if to prove their point, Netanyahu himself posted a video of Reingold defending her work, with the caption: “Facts matter.” (The Guardian stands by the stories it published that included the image and says the photo did not act to deceive.)Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition

One of the critics the Free Press singled out was Ben Rhodes, a former top adviser to Barack Obama, who, the Free Press noted, was once nicknamed “Hamas”, an epithet used by his Obama administration colleague Rahm Emanuel (who sat for a friendly interview with Weiss in July) for his willingness to criticize Israel. In an appearance on Pod Save the World – which is part of Crooked Media, the independent progressive podcasting network run by former Obama staffers – Rhodes called Reingold and Lukyanova’s reporting “sociopathic” and “grotesque”. “There’s something wrong with you, deeply, deeply fucked up,” he added. These would be harsh words coming from anyone, but Ben Rhodes is the brother of David Rhodes, who has been floated as CBS’s next executive and who reportedly would be working closely with Weiss. In Ben Rhodes’s 2018 memoir, The World As It Is, he acknowledged political differences with his brother while also saying they have always been close. That he would speak publicly with such undisguised contempt about Weiss’s media company in that context suggests serious alarm at the possible direction of CBS News.

Alarm is a justifiable reaction. Weiss has often been underestimated, but the success of the Free Press to date vindicates her seemingly limitless ambition. That is in spite of internal turmoil: in May, the media newsletter Breaker reported that the Free Press had seen a number of notable departures amid its rapid expansion and that staff had been skeptical of Weiss’s “chaotic” management style.

But in the context of Trump’s federally funded culture war, it is unclear any of that will matter. In order to avoid the president’s disfavor and present themselves as worthy of access, legacy media companies are desperate to tap into the audience and the relationships that Weiss has so effectively courted.

Although the Free Press did not respond on the record to the Guardian’s questions, a source within the Free Press defended the range of views the organization publishes and emphasized that it was not a partisan shop.

When Trump first ran for office, Weiss positioned herself as a “Never Trumper”, following the lead of her mentor Stephens and other prominent neoconservatives, and in 2017 she described the first Trump administration as “shambolic”. But this February, as Trump kicked off his second term, Weiss told Fox News’s Howard Kurtz that her stance on Trump had softened. “I’m the first to admit that I was a sufferer of what conservatives at the time would have called TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome,” Weiss said, claiming she cried at her desk the first time Trump won. Now, she explained, she had come to appreciate Trump for two main reasons: first, she saw the left’s “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction to him” as “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian in its impulses”, and second, she approved of some of his actual policies, noting particularly his Israel-aligned moves in the Middle East.

 
The anti-woke warriors used to defend free speech. Now they make McCarthyism look progressive

Arwa Mahdawi


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The Free Press claims to be independent and non-partisan, and ahead of the 2024 election it canvassed its own staff and determined that it was equally divided between supporters of Trump, Kamala Harris and neither. But during Trump’s second term, the site has been noticeably sympathetic to the administration. As the UnPopulist has carefully documented, Weiss has made a choice in the Trump restoration era – rather than position the Free Press as a heterodox champion of “classical liberalism”, as it was initially presented during the Biden years, she has aligned herself with the White House’s priorities. The hiring of Batya Ungar-Sargon, a formerly left-leaning journalist turned fervent Maga pundit, this April was a clear signal of Weiss’s repositioning. This choice has alienated many of her former champions – for instance, Glenn Greenwald, who achieved a public rapprochement with Weiss in the early days of the Free Press (both Weiss and Greenwald have thrived and handsomely profited on Substack), has since excoriated her for consistently attacking the free speech rights of Israel critics. But it has also set her up well to ascend to even greater influence.

Weiss is not afraid to burn bridges, scandalize critics or be branded a hypocrite in pursuit of power. In that sense, she has something in common with the president who has done so much to enable her rise. But Trump could never operate in the kinds of spaces where Weiss has been able to flourish. With her education, experience and extensively cultivated networks, she is uniquely well-suited to champion the prerogatives of those in academia, media, publishing and similar sectors who feel threatened by progressive social movements. Liberal institutions produced Bari Weiss, and now at least one could be hers to remake.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

David Klion is a columnist for the Nation, a contributing editor at Jewish Currents, and currently working on a book about the legacy of neoconservatism

FASCIST AMERICA 2025: As Always White Supremacy, Capitalist Plunder, and Predatory Misogyny Remain the Foundational Pillars Of Fascism Throughout the World And Especially in the United States

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/supreme-court-racial-profiling-la-raids

Society

The Supreme Court Just Gave the OK to Racial Profiling

The court’s ruling allowing ICE to resume its indiscriminate roundups of LA’s Latino residents can only be described as one thing.

by Elie Mystal
September 8, 2025
The Nation



An art installation that displays black-and-white images of people detained or deported as a result of ICE raids in Southern California.

(Ted Soqui / SIPA USA via AP Images)

On Monday morning, the Supreme Court allowed ICE to resume racially profiling all Latinos in Los Angeles under the suspicion that they might be “illegal” immigrants. The order is technically temporary, allowing racial profiling to happen only until the court reviews the full record, but the Republican justices made it incredibly clear that, whenever the court gets around to voting on the merits of the case, they will still be in favor of racial profiling. The vote was, predictably, 6-3, along party lines, with alleged attempted rapist Brett Kavanaugh as the only justice in the Republican majority who bothered to explain his racist excuse for reasoning.

The case is called Noem v. Perdomo and it has been on the Supreme Court’s shadow docket for months. The issue emerged at the height of Trump’s attack on LA, when multiple citizens reported that ICE was rounding up anybody who was Latino, or looked Latino, for questioning. Racial profiling is unconstitutional (or was, until this morning) and people sued, including the named plaintiff in this case, Pedro Vasquez Perdomo. District Court Judge Maame E. Frimpong (a Biden appointee) issued an emergency injunction prohibiting the raids in July, but the Trump administration appealed that injunction to the Supreme Court.

In a rare example of honesty from this administration, it admitted that it was racially profiling Latinos, and promised to do so again if the Supreme Court lifted the injunction. The government admitted it was only looking at four factors before pulling people off the street:

• Their apparent race or ethnicity
• Whether they spoke Spanish or spoke English with an accent
• The type of location where they were found
• The type of job they appeared to do

I shouldn’t have to explain how this is racist, but since white Republicans might read this, I guess I do. If you are a white guy, anywhere in LA, you are presumptively “legal” and ICE will not bother you. If you are a Vietnamese woman working at a nail parlor, you are also presumptively OK. If you are a Chinese guy running a dry cleaner, you’re good. Name the race and the racially stereotypical job, and, according to the US government, you are not on their list. At least for now. Obviously, once the government greenlights racial profiling against one group of people, it’s pretty easy for the white people running the joint to support racial profiling against another.

But, for now, the government’s racism is focused on Latinos. If you’re Latino of any description, or if you merely look like you could be Latino, and you speak with a Spanish accent, and you appear to be at a Home Depot or car wash or just waiting for the freaking bus, ICE claims it has “reasonable suspicion” to pull you off the street and demand that you prove your citizenship. It is a literal double standard. Being Latino or looking Latino presumptively makes you “suspicious” to ICE.
 

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And the Supreme Court decided that such racism can continue.

Kavanaugh starts where all the racists do these days, by saying that there are a lot of “illegal” immigrants in the country. He then goes on to estimate that there are 2 million undocumented people living in Los Angeles alone, adding “there is an extremely high number and percentage of illegal immigrants in the Los Angeles area.” But if I could stop Kavanaugh right there, I’d point out that even if he thinks that there are 2 million “illegal” immigrants in Los Angeles, he has not established that they are all Latino. And even if he racistly thinks that there are 2 million illegal Latino immigrants in LA, that’s still only a minority percentage of the 5 million Latinos living in LA. Los Angeles is around 50 percent Latino. Kavanaugh’s treatment of all of them as suspect is the very definition of racism.

And, of course, I don’t have figures on how many people look like they might be Latino. They never gave me the color chart white men use to determine who is “OK.”

Unfortunately, Kavanaugh doesn’t stop at these racist premises. He keeps going with classic bigoted reasoning. Kavanaugh claims that it is just “common sense” to stop Latinos who look like they might be engaged in low-wage jobs and question their immigration status. Again, this is only “common sense” to racist people.

He then goes on to give the whitest possible read on the situation, by characterizing the stops as no big deal. He says: “Moreover, as for stops of those individuals who are legally in the country, the questioning in those circumstances is typically brief, and those individuals may promptly go free after making clear to the immigration officers that they are U.S. citizens or otherwise legally in the United States.” Yes, Brett, it’s just a friendly conversation with your local masked jackboot. Just a totally polite and harmless conversation where, as long as you answer the questions correctly, you do not end up on a plane to a concentration camp in Uganda. What could possibly go wrong?

Kavanaugh knows he’s lying here. You can tell by his word choices. He says stops are “typically brief,” which means he knows full well that sometimes they are not. He says that people can go free “after making it clear” to the gestapo that they are US citizens, but glosses over what “making it clear” actually means. Does anybody reasonably think Brett Kavanaugh is carrying around proof of citizenship in his wallet? Of course he isn’t carrying his birth certificate around with him. He doesn’t have to. He’s white. He thinks his proof of citizenship is plastered all over his face. Kavanaugh is functionally saying that it’s unreasonable to ask him, a white guy, to prove his citizenship, but it’s totally reasonable to ask any Latino to prove theirs.

In the very next paragraph, Kavanaugh shows that he fully understands what’s going on, but just doesn’t care. He says, “Finally, although the dissent emphasizes the force allegedly used by immigration officers, that is not the issue in this case.” I mean, the pure banality of his evil would be actually laughable if it weren’t so serious. Sure, Kavanaugh says, this “brief” stop followed by “prompt” release can sometimes lead to straight-up brutality against the 5 million people in Los Angeles who might look Latino or speak with a Spanish accent, but such brutality is not his concern in this case, so he can ignore it.

The dissent Kavanaugh referred to was written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor and joined by the other two liberals on the court. She did all she could to rip the racist Republican majority and Kavanaugh a new one. She writes: “The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.” She explains that the Constitution “prohibits exactly what the Government is attempting to do here: seize individuals based solely on a set of facts that ‘describes a very large category of presumably innocent’ people.”

This decision, from the Republicans and Kavanaugh, is explicitly racist. It explicitly authorizes government harassment of all Latinos based on their phenotype. The government literally admits that its intention is to conduct law enforcement through racial profiling, and Kavanaugh fixes his mouth to call this illegal, unconstitutional, racist law enforcement policy “common sense.”

At some point, the pro-Trump parts of the large and legal voting population of Latino Americans has to reject this abject racism. Republicans could not politically survive this bigotry if overwhelming numbers of Latinos turned out to vote against them. White people will not help, and Black people cannot help, as there are too few of us to flip places like Texas or Florida on our own.

This administration and this court can be stopped. But it’s going to take all of us rising together against the white supremacists like Brett Kavanaugh. Otherwise, it’s just going to be ICE raids all the way down, in a country that turns speaking with an accent into a presumptive crime.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elie Mystal


Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v. U.S.” here.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/magazine/jeffrey-epstein-jp-morgan.html
 

How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein

A Times investigation found that America’s leading bank spent years supporting — and profiting from — the notorious sex offender, ignoring red flags, suspicious activity and concerned executives.

Photo illustration by Tyler Comrie and Hannah Whitaker for The New York Times

by David EnrichMatthew Goldstein and Jessica Silver-Greenberg
September 8, 2025
New York Times

[The reporters, who started investigating Epstein more than six years ago, reviewed more than 13,000 of pages of legal and financial records for this article.]

One day in October 2011, Jeffrey Epstein walked into the cavernous lobby of 270 Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The skyscraper was home to JPMorgan Chase, arguably the world’s most prestigious bank. The sex offender — who barely a year earlier was under house arrest after serving 13 months in a Florida jail — was ushered onto an elevator and whisked to a top floor where Jamie Dimon, the bank’s chief executive, and the rest of the senior leadership had their offices.
Listen to this article, read by Malcolm Hillgartner

Epstein had long been a treasured customer at JPMorgan. His accounts were brimming with more than $200 million. He generated millions of dollars in revenue for the bank, landing him atop an internal list of major money makers. He helped JPMorgan orchestrate an important acquisition. He introduced executives to men who would become lucrative clients, like the Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and to global leaders, like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. He helped executives troubleshoot crises and strategize about global opportunities.

But a growing group of employees worried that JPMorgan’s association with a man who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime — and was under federal investigation for human trafficking — could harm the bank’s reputation. Just as troubling, anti-money-laundering specialists within the bank noticed Epstein’s pattern of withdrawing tens of thousands of dollars in cash virtually every month. These were red flags for illicit activity.

That was why Epstein was at the bank’s headquarters. JPMorgan’s top executive in charge of ensuring compliance with laws and regulations had already pushed to fire him as a client. Now Stephen Cutler, a former federal securities regulator and the bank’s general counsel, had added his voice to the chorus.

Epstein’s chief defender at the bank was Jes Staley, a top contender to one day succeed Dimon as chief executive. Staley persuaded Cutler to sit down with Epstein and “hear him out.” It was a high-stakes meeting for Epstein; his close ties to JPMorgan had been invaluable in his quest for money, influence and legitimacy. The bank lent him money. Staley dished confidential information to him. At Epstein’s behest, JPMorgan set up accounts — into which he routinely transferred huge sums — for young women who turned out to be victims of his sex-trafficking operations. It wired his funds overseas. It even paid him millions of dollars.

 

PHOTO: Jes Staley, once the leading contender to succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive of JPMorgan, repeatedly went to bat for Jeffrey Epstein at the bank. Credit:  James Manning/PA Images, via Getty Images

Epstein’s crimes have been exhaustively documented, and elements of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein have become public via legal proceedings in the United States and Britain. But the full story of how America’s leading lender enabled the century’s most notorious sexual predator has not been told. This account has been pieced together from thousands of pages of internal bank records, sealed deposition transcripts and other court documents and financial data, as well as interviews with people with direct knowledge of the Epstein relationship. Among the findings: Bank officials for more than a decade were anxious about Epstein’s prolific wire transfers and cash withdrawals — JPMorgan ultimately processed more than $1 billion in such transactions for him — and warned senior management about his suspicious activities. But on at least four occasions over five years, the bank’s leaders overrode those objections and continued to serve Epstein.

Joseph Evangelisti, a spokesman for JPMorgan, said in a statement that the bank’s relationship with Epstein “was a mistake and in hindsight we regret it, but we did not help him commit his heinous crimes.” He added, “We would never have continued to do business with him if we believed he was engaged in an ongoing sex trafficking operation.” The bank has pinned blame for the scandal on Staley, a trusted confidant to Dimon. “We now know that trust was misplaced,” Evangelisti said.

Tales of greed trumping ethics and morals are older than Wall Street itself, and the story of how and why JPMorgan spent years serving Epstein is a case study in that dynamic. But it is instructive in other ways as well. More than six years after his death in a Manhattan jail cell, where he was awaiting prosecution on federal sex-trafficking charges, mysteries continue to swirl around how Epstein amassed and deployed money and influence on a grand scale. Over time, those mysteries curdled into conspiracy theories — most of them unsubstantiated — that placed Epstein at the center of a vast global pedophilia ring or as a foreign intelligence operative compiling dirt on the rich and powerful. The Trump administration’s refusal to release files gathered by federal investigators as they built a case against Epstein — aside from unsuccessfully seeking to unseal an F.B.I. agent’s grand-jury testimony — has only added to the frenzied speculation.

In Epstein’s lengthy alliance with JPMorgan, we found a more mundane, if no less damning, explanation for Epstein’s remarkable success. He was, in the words of one friend, the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, “a collector of people.” He used those relationships to cultivate new connections and establish his legitimacy. He traded favors and gossip and advice. He created an aura of indispensability and of being so plugged-in that he bordered on omniscience — traits that made him a vital asset for a worldwide cast of government and business leaders. That, in turn, gave Epstein access to more money and connections that he could use to power his criminal activities.

But in 2011, this edifice of power and influence was at risk of crumbling. His conviction and incarceration led some of his powerful friends to back away and threatened to leave him an outcast from the financial world. His relationship with JPMorgan was therefore more important than ever. The fact that he remained a client in good standing conferred on him respectability and helped him foster new ties to corporate elites. He was determined not to blow it. Sitting in Cutler’s office that autumn afternoon, Epstein assured the general counsel that he had “turned over a new leaf.” And he rattled off names of prominent figures who, he told Cutler, could vouch for his character. “Go talk to Bill Gates about me,” Epstein said at one point.

Afterward, Cutler sat alone, trying to figure out what to do. He kept brooding for weeks. Epstein struck him as a smooth operator; it wasn’t hard to imagine him charming powerful people. Yet Cutler didn’t see how he would be able to explain to his female colleagues that JPMorgan was keeping Epstein as a client, he would later say. After a second conversation with Epstein, he informed Staley that he still thought the bank should cut ties.

But the recommendation came with crucial caveats. Cutler considered his primary job to be protecting JPMorgan from legal risks, and from his perspective, the Epstein relationship was a threat to the bank’s reputation. He did not see evidence that Epstein was using his accounts for criminal purposes. As a result, he would not insist that the bank expel him as a client. Nor would he escalate the matter to Dimon, the chief executive.

And so Epstein was allowed to stay.

Jamie Dimon has said he did not “recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019, even though his subordinates were fighting over whether to keep him as a client. Credit:  Tom Williams/Associated Press

The story of JPMorgan’s relationship with Epstein begins in the late 1990s in the canyons of Manhattan’s financial district. Epstein was in his 40s, a college dropout who briefly worked on Wall Street after a time as a high school math teacher, and he had a gift for making it seem as if he belonged. He had gone on to advise and manage money for some big-name clients. In 1985, he opened a bank account at a company that is now part of JPMorgan, but it wasn’t until more than a decade later, as his wealth and renown grew, that he began getting noticed at the bank.

A JPMorgan client suggested to Sandy Warner, the bank’s chief executive at the time and a titan of American finance, that he meet this up-and-comer. Warner invited Epstein to a meeting in his 20th-floor office in the bank’s neoclassical headquarters at 60 Wall Street. (JPMorgan would move to Midtown a couple of years later.) The pair talked about markets and policy, Warner recalled in an interview. Epstein presented himself as a heavyweight, claiming to manage money for the Rockefellers.

That meeting was followed by a well-attended gathering at Epstein’s Manhattan home. Warner today insists that he was immediately creeped out by Epstein. Even so, he phoned one of his lieutenants to encourage him to meet Epstein, “who drops 50 names in an hourlong conversation.” That lieutenant was Jes Staley.

Staley had joined JPMorgan in 1979 after graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine with an economics degree. He worked for the bank in Brazil, where he met his future wife, and then relocated to New York. His star rose rapidly inside the storied investment bank. In 1999, Warner promoted him to run JPMorgan’s private-banking division, which catered to ultrawealthy clients. Not long after, at Warner’s urging, Staley visited Epstein at his office in an old mansion across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Midtown Manhattan. It was the beginning of a long, fateful friendship. (Staley, as well as some other current and former senior bank executives, did not respond to our questions or declined to comment for this article.)

Epstein was on his way to becoming one of JPMorgan’s most important clients. A 2003 internal report pegged his net worth at about $300 million. The report, which hasn’t previously been disclosed, noted that Epstein’s occupation was advising wealthy individuals like Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire operator of brands like Victoria’s Secret and the Limited, though bank documents at the time did not list any other clients. That year, JPMorgan attributed more than $8 million in fees to Epstein, making him the biggest revenue generator among investor clients in the private-banking division.

But the report overlooked something that, had it been taken seriously, might have dimmed the bank’s enthusiasm. In 2003, Epstein withdrew more than $175,000 in cash from his JPMorgan accounts — a huge haul, even for someone with millions at the bank. Outside investigators later found that Epstein paid almost that exact amount to women that year. JPMorgan recognized that those withdrawals needed to be reported to federal regulators that monitor large cash transactions. But the bank failed to treat those withdrawals as an early-warning system for itself. Indeed, JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering specialists subsequently acknowledged that such withdrawals should have alerted the bank to the possibility that Epstein was committing crimes.

JPMorgan did financial work for Epstein’s company that handled the affairs of his private island Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank later paid settlements to victims who were sexually abused there.Credit...Emily Michot/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty

JPMorgan, however, was all in. Soon it opened accounts not just for Epstein but also for his companies, including one that handled the affairs of his private island, Little Saint James, off the coast of St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The bank also provided financial backing for Epstein to help Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling scout who had been the subject of media reports about drugging and raping women, start a modeling agency called MC2. JPMorgan would ultimately open at least 134 accounts for Epstein, his companies and his associates.

Wittingly or not, the bank was supporting important cogs in Epstein’s sex-trafficking machinery. On the island, Epstein would compel teenage girls and young women to give him nude massages and have sex with him. Some of Epstein’s underage victims said MC2 lured them to the United States with the prospect of paid modeling work. (In 2022, Brunel died by suicide in a French jail cell after being charged with raping teenage girls.)

The millions of dollars in fees that Epstein was paying the bank was only part of his allure. Arguably more important, he was identifying potential new clients and business opportunities. In 2003, for example, he introduced Staley to Brin, the co-founder of Google and one of the world’s richest men. Brin hired JPMorgan to help manage his immense fortune — he would eventually park more than $4 billion in assets at the bank — a decision that Staley credited to Epstein. Staley later said in a deposition that a parade of other Epstein referrals — including to Gates, Elon Musk and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, an Emirati billionaire — followed, though not all became clients.

Just as JPMorgan landed Brin, Epstein made an even more consequential contribution to the bank’s growth. Hedge funds were all the rage among America’s rich, and Staley thought that if he could offer clients access to these investment vehicles, it would help distinguish JPMorgan from rivals. As it happened, Epstein had a useful point of contact: Glenn Dubin, who co-founded a $7 billion hedge fund called Highbridge Capital Management, and his wife, Eva Andersson-Dubin, a former Miss Sweden whom Epstein once dated. Epstein was the godfather to the Dubins’ daughter, and photographs and paintings of the girl were ubiquitous in Epstein’s colossal Upper East Side townhouse. (Epstein would later name Andersson-Dubin as a beneficiary of his estate. Her lawyer said she learned she was a beneficiary only after his death and rejected the bequest.)

In 2004, with Epstein acting as middleman, JPMorgan agreed to pay $1.3 billion for a controlling stake in Highbridge. The acquisition would turn into a landmark for the bank — and for Staley, who described it as “probably the most important transaction in my professional career.” Staley, who by then was running JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management business, was soon reporting to Dimon, the bank’s No. 2 executive and C.E.O.-in-waiting.

Epstein, for his part in arranging the Highbridge deal, pocketed a $15 million fee from the hedge fund that JPMorgan now controlled. The payout reflected a crucial reality: Epstein was the rarest of customers, one whose moneymaking potential extended far beyond his own accounts. It was imperative to keep this superclient happy.

A few months later, in early 2005, Staley emailed an underling in the private bank about bringing on another new client. Her name was Ghislaine Maxwell. She was Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and remained entwined in his life. (She would later be convicted of playing a central role in his sex-trafficking operations and is serving a 20-year sentence.) “Ghislaine is a good friend of one of our very big clients in the US,” Staley wrote. “Can we please try to help her.” Epstein later transferred millions of dollars into Maxwell’s JPMorgan account, including $7.4 million to buy a green Sikorsky helicopter to fly people to Little Saint James.

Image

Epstein’s waterfront home in Palm Beach, Fla., was the site of the sex crime he was charged with in 2008. Even after he was a registered sex offender, JPMorgan did not end its relationship with him. Credit: Pedro Portal/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images

By then, Epstein’s abuse of young women and girls was attracting the notice of law enforcement. In March 2005, the parents of a 14-year-old girl filed a complaint with the police in Palm Beach, Fla., alleging that Epstein had molested her. The police opened an investigation, and soon other teenage girls shared similar stories of abuse. (Women have subsequently accused Epstein of raping them as teenagers as far back as 1985.)

Even before the investigation became public, warning lights should have been flashing inside JPMorgan. Epstein’s huge cash withdrawals continued — a total of more than $1.7 million in 2004 and 2005, according to records we reviewed — much of which was used to procure girls and young women. Some of the withdrawals took place at the bank branch in JPMorgan’s Park Avenue headquarters, where Epstein’s accountant regularly arrived to cash huge checks written from Epstein’s various accounts.

At Epstein’s request, the private bank also agreed to open accounts for two young women without actually speaking to either of them. Instead, one of Epstein’s minions provided bare-bones information, and JPMorgan couldn’t confirm one woman’s Social Security number. A banker was supposed to meet with the woman to verify her details but never did, according to a report prepared for the U.S. Virgin Islands, which later sued JPMorgan. (Evangelisti, the bank spokesman, said the accounts “were properly verified and documented.”)

Decades of scandals — in which banks facilitated drug smuggling, human trafficking, money laundering, terrorism and even genocide — gave rise to requirements that lenders vet their customers, closely monitor their activities and flag suspicious transactions to the government. Among its many lapses with Epstein, JPMorgan often failed to alert federal watchdogs to transactions that the bank later acknowledged were suspicious. And by opening accounts for young women without meeting them, the bank was missing a well-known hallmark of human traffickers: that they control victims’ interactions with the outside world.

Not until Epstein was arrested and indicted in July 2006 on charges of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl did JPMorgan start paying more attention. In a deposition in 2023, Staley said that he phoned Dimon to tell him an important client had just been indicted and that the two executives later met in person to discuss the situation. (Dimon has denied this under oath.) “So painful to read,” Mary Erdoes, who had succeeded Staley at the helm of the private bank, emailed her boss, attaching an article about the indictment. Staley responded that he had just met with Epstein the previous night. “I’ve never seen him so shaken,” he typed on his BlackBerry, saying that Epstein “adamantly denies” being involved with girls.


Mary Erdoes, a top JPMorgan executive, signed off on a new loan to Epstein months after his indictment in Florida on a charge of soliciting prostitution from a teenage girl. Credit:  Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

In private, Staley and Erdoes seemed to make light of their client’s predilections. That August, Staley attended a Hamptons fund-raiser and was struck by the crowd’s composition. “The ages between husband and wives would have fit in well with Jeffrey,” he told Erdoes in an email. She replied that Epstein’s name had come up at an event the night before. An acquaintance noted how another prominent New York businessman liked to surround himself with beautiful assistants. “Lots of comparisons to JE,” Erdoes wrote, adding that people were “laughing about Jeffrey.”

JPMorgan pulled together a team to decide what to do about their indicted but lucrative client. Around this time, the Justice Department charged another bank customer, the actor Wesley Snipes, with tax fraud. JPMorgan quickly kicked Snipes out of the bank, according to sealed court records we reviewed. (Snipes was later convicted on tax-related misdemeanors but acquitted of more serious fraud charges.)

But the Florida sex-crime charge against Epstein — even when coupled with news that the Justice Department had opened its own investigation into his activities — didn’t lead to a similar result. The team assigned to the Epstein matter noted his suspicious pattern of large cash withdrawals but, after discussing things with Staley and Erdoes, opted to keep him as a client. The one condition: JPMorgan “will not proactively solicit new investment business from him,” an internal memo said. But that did not preclude continuing to lend him money. The following year, Erdoes signed off on a new loan to Epstein. “I am relieved to hear,” a banker wrote after learning that Erdoes had approved the new credit line despite concerns raised by others within the bank. 

 

[Much of the paper trail was in email exchanges. Below are excerpts.]

From: Mary Erdoes
To: Jes Staley

Subject: Re: epstein press

so painful to read

From: Jes Staley
To: Mary Erdoes
Subject: Re: epstein press

I went and saw him last night. I’ve never seen him so shaken. He also adamantly denies the ages.

How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein - The New York Times

In 2008, the situation again seemed to grow untenable. A parade of victims had sued Epstein for sexually abusing them, and the ugly details in the court filings caught the attention of JPMorgan executives. Then, in June, Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor and was sentenced to 18 months in the Palm Beach County jail. It was a sweetheart deal — among other things, he avoided prosecution on more serious allegations — but even so, he was now a felon and a sex offender. The bank’s general counsel was supposed to sign off on doing business with felons.

The rank and file in the private-banking division pushed to expel Epstein. “No one wants him,” a banker noted in an email. The decision was made to tell Staley that “we are uncomfortable with Epstein” and that they shouldn’t bother going to Cutler, who had become general counsel the previous year after being the top enforcement officer at the Securities and Exchange Commission. They should just boot him out of the bank.

Staley later testified under oath that he alerted Dimon to Epstein’s guilty plea and that Dimon told him to talk to Cutler. Staley made no secret about his desire to retain his star customer, and when he and Cutler met, “the decision was made to keep Mr. Epstein as a PB client,” according to an internal write-up. Around that time, as two executives in the private bank emailed about whether Epstein’s accounts would be closed, one of them said the decision was “pending Dimon review.” Another internal email noted that Cutler was reviewing Epstein-related documents “for Jamie.” Yet in his own sworn deposition, Dimon said he did not “recall knowing anything about Jeffrey Epstein” until 2019.

Regardless of who made the decision, Epstein remained a client — “no change to relationship approach” was the final verdict — and even during his jail sentence, JPMorgan continued wiring money from his accounts to banks in Russia and Eastern Europe, where young women were being drawn into his sex-trafficking network, according to sealed court records.

All the while, Staley was regularly backchanneling with his buddy. “I hope you’re hanging in there,” Staley wrote at one point. “Just think of the island and my boat anchored in front.” (Staley had a 90-foot yacht, Bequia, named after the Caribbean island on which he and his wife honeymooned.)

Staley sailed his 90-foot yacht, Bequia, to stay on Epstein’s private island in 2011, telling Epstein it was “paradise.” Credit: Bing Guan/Bloomberg, via Getty Images

When Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme collapsed in late 2008, Erdoes asked Staley to call Epstein “to get the scoop” about how wealthy clients in the Palm Beach area were faring. Around the same time, a rumor was circulating that Dimon might become the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration — in which case Staley would be a prime contender to succeed him as chief executive. Staley emailed Epstein about Dimon’s status. Epstein responded, “We can help push Obama.”

Epstein was a master manipulator who sometimes exaggerated or lied about his access and power. It is not clear whether he had sway with officials in Barack Obama’s inner circle at the time, though he and a top Obama economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, were friendly. In any case, there is no question that Staley and at least some of his colleagues trusted Epstein.

Staley at times shared confidential information. As the world descended into a deep financial crisis in 2008, Staley divulged to Epstein that the bank was trying to buy one company and sell another. The next month, he revealed that JPMorgan’s private bank had been inundated by $44 billion in new assets in the past two weeks. He disclosed that JPMorgan was working on a deal for the Pritzker family, and he detailed the bank’s talks with the Federal Reserve about how to stabilize the financial system. Over and over, Staley passed what he later acknowledged was potentially market-moving information to a criminal.

Epstein cultivated relationships with other JPMorgan bankers and executives, and it is possible that Staley was not the only one leaking to the sex offender. In the fall of 2009 — barely two months after Epstein was released from jail and began a period of home arrest — he learned that Staley was in line for a big promotion, this time to run JPMorgan’s investment-banking division. He seemed to know more about Staley’s future than Staley did. “I am told you are on track,” Epstein wrote more than three weeks before Staley was formally tapped for the job.

The public announcement made clear that Staley was now the front-runner to one day inherit Dimon’s throne. “Jes has impeccable character and integrity,” Dimon told Fortune magazine. (When Bin Sulayem emailed Epstein about Staley’s promotion, Epstein implied that he himself had masterminded it.) Staley immediately began turning to Epstein for advice. How much should he earn in the new gig? How should he handle the job transition? What should his priorities be? To that last question, Epstein urged Staley to embrace China, perhaps by moving some banking operations there. He arranged for Staley to get “a quick tutorial” about China from an Oxford-educated expert.

What did Epstein get out of this? Clearly he wanted to endear himself to bank executives. But there was more to it. In his New York townhouse, Epstein kept framed stock certificates of iconic American companies like General Motors, AT&T and JPMorgan. A felon and sex offender under house arrest, he was at risk of becoming a pariah. Yet he was also proving indispensable to top executives at one of the world’s premier banks. The intimate relationship imbued him with prestige in the eyes of those he hoped to impress.

Staley would later be asked under oath why Epstein introduced him to the China expert. “Epstein relied on his network for his legitimacy,” Staley answered. “And I, as running the largest investment bank in the world, was part of that network for him.”


While Epstein was serving his sentence in Florida, Staley visited his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. “I owe you much,” Staley wrote to Epstein from the ranch’s hot tub. Credit: Drone Base/Reuters

One of the enduring mysteries about Epstein is why so many rich and powerful men risked their reputations by continuing to spend time with him after he was registered as a sex offender. Did they value his advice? Consider him a friend? Like tapping into his network? Or was it about sex with the young women who always seemed to be around him?

At least with Staley, the answer might have been all of the above. While Epstein was under house arrest in November 2009, Staley visited his sprawling Zorro Ranch in New Mexico, where girls and young women later accused Epstein of raping and trafficking them. (Epstein also discussed using the desert compound as a venue for inseminating women in order to seed the human race with his DNA.) Staley emailed Epstein while sipping white wine in the hot tub. “Next time, we’re here together,” he wrote. “I owe you much.” Other messages were littered with apparent sexual references. “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,” Staley emailed in 2010. Epstein responded by asking which character he would like next. “Beauty and the Beast,” Staley answered.

One day around then, while visiting Epstein’s New York townhouse for a meeting, Staley had a conversation with a woman in her 20s. She had been with Epstein since around 2003, making her one of the longest-serving women in the retinue that surrounded Epstein. The woman would later allege in a class-action lawsuit, which was eventually settled, that Epstein sexually abused her for more than a dozen years and that he forced her and other victims to engage in commercial sex with “certain select friends.”

According to Staley, the woman suggested that he come by her apartment in an Upper East Side building owned by Epstein’s brother. On the appointed day, Staley arrived, and after chatting in the living room, they went to her bedroom and had sex. Afterward, Staley took a shower. He was out of the building in less than an hour and walked back to work. (Staley, who is married, has publicly acknowledged having sex with one of Epstein’s assistants, but the details have not previously been reported. Staley swore in a deposition that it was his only Epstein-connected sexual encounter.)

Late in 2010, JPMorgan approved $50 million of additional credit to facilitate market trading by Epstein, whose criminal history would have rendered him untouchable at many mainstream banks. By now, he had about $212 million at the bank, nearly half of his estimated net worth. Yet fresh concerns were brewing.

Employees in JPMorgan’s anti-money-laundering division learned from media reports that the Justice Department was investigating whether Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency was feeding Eastern European girls and women into Epstein’s suspected sex-trafficking network. Plus, there were Epstein’s regular wire transfers, the credit cards and bank accounts he requested for teenagers and young women and his voluminous cash withdrawals. The anti-money-laundering employees were waking up, even if they didn’t grasp the significance of what they were seeing. “Sugar Daddy!” one exclaimed after noting that Epstein had sent about $450,000 to an 18-year-old.

From:

To: William D Langford
Subject: Jeffrey Epstein

One is mentioned in many of the recaps of the escapades as a willing participant and assistant when hosting visitors. She has received about 450,000 since opening from Epstein… The willing participant had some lovely debit charges and spends a good deal at spa establishments. He did pay other girls, many models no huge amounts. Sugar Daddy!

How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein - The New York Times

The bank’s head of compliance, William Langford, was especially alarmed. “No patience for this,” he emailed a colleague. Langford had joined JPMorgan in 2006 after years of policing financial crimes for the Treasury Department. He knew — and had warned colleagues — that companies can be criminally charged for money laundering if they willfully ignored such activities by their clients. He saw ultrawealthy customers as a particular blind spot; all the time that private bankers spent wining and dining these lucrative clients could cloud judgments about their trustworthiness. It looked like that was what was happening with Epstein. One of Langford’s achievements at JPMorgan was the creation of a task force devoted to combating human trafficking. The group noted in a presentation that frequent large cash withdrawals and wire transfers — exactly what employees were seeing in Epstein’s accounts — were totems of such illicit activity.

Early in the new year, Langford approached Erdoes, who was now running JPMorgan’s asset-and-wealth-management group. He told her that Epstein should be “exited.” Erdoes, however, said Staley was responsible for the Epstein relationship — an odd deflection, because Staley now worked in the investment-banking division, which didn’t control Epstein’s private-banking accounts. Yet JPMorgan’s “rapid response” team — activated at Langford’s urging — reached a similar conclusion: Langford should talk to Staley, because he “is friends with Epstein. He needs to understand the potential backlash to the firm given all of the work done to root out clients involved in human trafficking.”

Image


Staley, Erdoes and other JPMorgan employees were among the visitors to Epstein’s palatial townhouse on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Credit:  Bebeto Matthews/Associated Press

The meeting took place in January 2011. Staley by then had a reputation for running interference on Epstein’s behalf, repeatedly telling colleagues that he would trust Epstein with his daughters. (He meant it literally: Staley arranged for Epstein to coach one of his daughters on her education and career.) Now he allotted all of 15 minutes for the discussion with Langford. Langford said in a deposition that he started off by quickly explaining the human-trafficking initiative. In that context, how could the bank justify working with someone who had pleaded guilty to a sex crime and was now under investigation for sex trafficking?

Staley pushed back, saying that Epstein hoped to get his plea deal overturned in court. He told Langford to speak with Epstein’s attorneys. Langford was surprised — he had never spoken to a client’s criminal lawyer — but a month later, he got on the phone with Ken Starr, the former special prosecutor who pursued Bill Clinton for his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky and who was now representing Epstein. “Got all my points in,” Starr reported to his client afterward. “I said, no crimes, period. Inappropriate, yes. criminal, no. Bragged on you.”

At the request of Langford and other executives, Staley asked Epstein whether he was involved in sex trafficking. According to an internal bank memo, Epstein replied that “there was no truth to the allegations” and that he “was not expecting any problems” from law enforcement. Staley seemed to believe him.

Langford now had a choice. He could make a fuss about Epstein by talking to Dimon, appealing to the bank’s board of directors, pushing Staley or going back to Erdoes. But, he said in the deposition, he did none of those things.

That week, Staley sailed his yacht to Little Saint James. Epstein was on his way to Paris, and Staley emailed to let him know that the island was “paradise.” Days later, JPMorgan agreed to keep Epstein as a client.

Staley and at least one other executive alerted Epstein to the bank’s heightened sensitivity about his constant cash withdrawals. Apparently in response, Epstein altered his tactics. Instead of taking cash out of his personal accounts, he withdrew money from a JPMorgan account for Hyperion Air, which owned Epstein’s jets. In 2012, for example, nearly $300,000 was withdrawn from Hyperion’s account, more than enough to cover Epstein’s roughly $225,000 in payments to procure women that year, according to records we reviewed. Epstein told executives in the private bank that the withdrawals were to pay for jet fuel and other aviation expenses.

Where was all this money coming from? Epstein’s nine-figure fortune derived from multiple sources. Much originated with Wexner, the Limited founder who, to the everlasting bafflement of his friends, granted Epstein power over his personal finances and would later accuse him of misappropriating huge sums. After that billionaire cut ties to Epstein around 2007, tens of millions of dollars poured in from another billionaire, Leon Black, a founder of the private-equity firm Apollo Global Management; Black, himself a JPMorgan client, said the payments were for Epstein’s advice about taxes and estate planning.

And then there was JPMorgan. In addition to giving Epstein crucial access to the global financial system, the bank directly enriched him. There was $15 million from the Highbridge acquisition. And in 2011, even as senior officials like Langford wanted Epstein out, the bank paid him an additional $9 million. It was to settle a lawsuit that Epstein had brought years earlier against the Wall Street firm Bear Stearns, which JPMorgan bought in 2008. Erdoes went to Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to discuss the settlement.

To Epstein’s critics, the resolution of the Bear Stearns litigation was a fresh chance for JPMorgan to cut off the sex offender. And those critics now had a powerful new ally: Cutler, the general counsel.

Back in 2008, Cutler had signed off on Epstein remaining a customer. Now things were different. “This is not an honorable person in any way,” Cutler emailed Erdoes, Staley and others in July 2011. “He should not be a client.” Staley, however, insisted that the relationship was safe. Surely, if billionaires and prime ministers trusted Epstein, so could JPMorgan. Plus, it was a matter of fairness. Epstein had served his time. He deserved a second chance, Staley argued.

From:
To: Stephen Cutler, Mary Erdoes, Jes Staley and others
Subject: Re: epstein press


I just conveyed to Mr. Epstein our response to his proposal to settle his High Grade Fund and Bear stock claims together for $21 million.

From: Stephen Cutler
To: Mary Erdoes, Jes Staley and others
Subject: Re: epstein press


This is not an honorable person in any way. He should not be a client.

How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein - The New York Times

That was when Cutler invited Epstein to the bank’s headquarters for a meeting, the first of two conversations he had with the felon that fall. (Epstein also tried to arrange a meeting with Dimon, though there is no evidence that he was successful.) Around then, Cutler also learned that Epstein was classified as a Level 3 sex offender, meaning he had a high risk of committing additional crimes. Yet despite his misgivings, Cutler didn’t insist upon dismissing him.

It was another blown opportunity — and it showed how, despite the bank’s later attempts to pin the blame on Staley, responsibility for Epstein was shared across the institution. Executives like Cutler and Langford, while united in believing that he was a threat to the bank’s reputation, didn’t take a stand. Elsewhere in the bank, the combination of a thirst for profits and Epstein’s knack for making himself seem indispensable proved potent and hard to kick, the financial equivalent of a powerful narcotic.

Sure enough, just as more bank employees were losing patience with Epstein in 2011, he began dangling more goodies. That March, to the pleasant surprise of JPMorgan’s investment bankers in Israel, they were granted an audience with Netanyahu. The bankers informed Staley, who forwarded their email to Epstein with a one-word message: “Thanks.” (The bank spokesman said JPMorgan “neither needed nor sought Epstein’s help for meetings with any government leaders.”) And around that same time, Epstein presented an opportunity that, like the Highbridge deal years earlier, had the potential to be transformative.

This one involved Bill Gates, who had only recently entered Epstein’s orbit. In an apparent effort to ingratiate — and further entangle — himself with his bankers and the Microsoft co-founder, Epstein pitched Erdoes and Staley on creating an enormous investment and charitable fund with something like $100 billion in assets. The so-called donor-advised fund would be seeded with billions from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. More would come from JPMorgan clients. The bank would collect fees for administering the fund. Naturally, Epstein hoped to get a slice, too.

The idea gained traction inside JPMorgan — it was given the code name Project Molecule — but never came to fruition, apparently too big and complex to get off the ground. Epstein was frustrated, but in a few months he faced a much greater problem at the bank: His patron was suddenly on the outs.

From:

To: Jes Staley and one other
Subject:

Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Netanyahu.

From: Jes Staley
To: Jeffrey Epstein
Subject: Fwd:

Thanks.

------ Forwarded message ------

Against all odds, we have been granted a meeting with Netanyahu.

From: Jeffrey Epstein
To: Jes Staley
Subject: Re: Fwd:

surprisee suprise


Dimon had several core traits as the leader of America’s biggest bank. One was his willingness to micromanage; a 2010 profile in this magazine mentioned that “Dimon seemingly meddles in every detail.” The tendency is hard to square with his insistence that he didn’t know Epstein was a client even as his subordinates battled about the propriety of working with him. (As David Boies, one of the lawyers representing Epstein’s victims, told us, either Dimon knew about Epstein and lied in a sworn deposition or his subordinates kept him in the dark. “Neither is good,” Boies said.)

Another defining characteristic was Dimon’s habit of ruthlessly cycling through top executives. In 2009, Dimon pushed aside the two longtime executives running the investment-banking division and replaced them with Staley, who immediately became Dimon’s heir apparent. But by 2012, Staley was out of favor. That summer, in the wake of an investing fiasco that cost the bank billions, he learned that Dimon planned to shake up his leadership team — including by demoting him. (Dimon and others suspected that Staley had been leaking information about the so-called London Whale scandal to the media.)

Staley broke the bad news to Epstein, who had spent years nurturing his relationship with the would-be chief executive. Epstein devised a plan to salvage his investment. The British bank Barclays was searching for a new chief. Epstein enlisted a London power broker to plant seeds about Staley with senior bank officials. Staley was interviewed for the job, but it ultimately went to a Barclays executive. Six months later, in January 2013, Staley decided to leave JPMorgan after 33 years.

Image

Stephen Cutler (second from right), JPMorgan’s general counsel, wanted the bank to cut ties with Epstein in 2011 but ultimately didn’t insist on it, and the relationship continued. Credit: Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times

Epstein’s days at the bank also were numbered. That same month, federal banking regulators issued a cease-and-desist order against JPMorgan for anti-money-laundering lapses, including not adequately monitoring its customers’ transactions and failing to report suspicious activities to the government. The order was part of a wave of government actions against the bank, and it prompted the compliance department to get more aggressive — including when it came to Epstein. As part of a broader effort to reduce risk in the private-banking division, his accounts were among those marked as ripe for elimination.

Epstein’s personal banker, Justin Nelson, balked; he prepared a memo trumpeting Epstein’s large volume of business with JPMorgan and noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was “still clearly well-respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.” But when JPMorgan convened its latest meeting to determine Epstein’s future, the decision was made to kick him out of the bank.

In mid-July, Erdoes returned to Epstein’s townhouse. A deputy prepared talking points. Erdoes was to tell Epstein that “the repetitive nature of your cash transactions is a problem for us and our relationship with you.” Banking regulators had “a very low tolerance for cash activity when combined with your personal history.” These were essentially the same arguments that JPMorgan employees had made as far back as 2006. Finally, the bank was acting on them.


That fall, Epstein began moving his $176 million from JPMorgan to his new home at Deutsche Bank. (Years later, Deutsche would pay more than $100 million in settlements with victims and regulators who sued over the bank’s relationship with Epstein.) But JPMorgan was not ready to fully part ways with Epstein. He remained in regular contact with Nelson, his personal banker. A big reason was Epstein’s relationship with Leon Black, the private-equity billionaire. Epstein was acting as an intermediary between the bank and Black, trying to secure him loans and other financial services.

Erdoes and at least one other senior JPMorgan executive knew that Nelson was continuing to interact with Epstein, and for years after JPMorgan ostensibly washed its hands of its notorious client, the banker included Epstein in meetings with Black, showed up at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and even visited his Zorro Ranch in New Mexico. It was a testament to Epstein’s remarkable staying power — and to JPMorgan’s inability, when potential profits were on the line, to just say no.

Staley and Epstein were both gone from JPMorgan, but they remained close. There were dinners at Epstein’s townhouse, supportive messages (“The strength of a Greek army was that its core held shoulder to shoulder, and would not flee or break,” Staley wrote to his friend in 2015. “That is us”) and a visit that year with his family to Epstein’s island. Later in 2015, Staley landed a plum job: the chief executive of Barclays. Given Epstein’s role in putting Staley on the bank’s radar three years earlier, he deserved at least partial credit for what would most likely be Staley’s final act.

For a spell, everyone was happy. But in the summer of 2019, Epstein was arrested on his plane after it landed at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, and federal prosecutors charged him with sex trafficking; he then died by suicide in his jail cell. Suddenly, investigators, journalists and others were racing to understand how this man had prospered for so many years. His longtime bank was an obvious place to look.

JPMorgan went into damage-control mode. It opened an internal review — code name: Project Jeep — and discussed Epstein at board meetings. Late that year, the bank did something it should have been doing all along: It filed a report with federal regulators that retroactively flagged as suspicious some 4,700 Epstein transactions — totaling more than $1.1 billion and including hundreds of millions of dollars in payments to Russian banks and young Eastern European women who were brought to the United States, according to investigators working for Senator Ron Wyden who have been digging into Epstein’s financial backers. Banks are required to file such reports in real time to alert law enforcement to things like money laundering, sex trafficking and drug dealing. Doing it after the fact might have provided JPMorgan with legal cover, but it did nothing to help identify Epstein’s crimes as they were happening.

The bank’s current and former executives began pointing fingers. Erdoes and others blamed Staley for pushing to keep Epstein as a client. (The bank even sued him; the litigation was settled under confidential terms.) Staley — who would resign from Barclays in 2021 and be barred from being an executive in the British financial-services industry after an investigation into his relationship with Epstein — faulted Erdoes and others. Dimon said under oath that the decision to keep Epstein ultimately rested with Cutler.

The fallout for JPMorgan has been limited. In 2023, it paid $290 million to settle a lawsuit brought by roughly 200 of Epstein’s victims and an additional $75 million to resolve related litigation brought by the U.S. Virgin Islands, where many of Epstein’s crimes took place. The payments were a rounding error for a company that raked in more than $50 billion in profits that year. (The bank didn’t admit wrongdoing and is trying to force its insurers to cover some of the litigation costs.) No regulator took action against JPMorgan. No executives lost their jobs. Dimon remains one of the most powerful bankers in the world.

The apparent impunity alarmed Bridgette Carr, a law professor and human-trafficking expert whom the U.S. Virgin Islands hired after Epstein’s death to analyze JPMorgan’s role. Carr concluded that the bank enabled his crimes. “I am deeply worried here that the ultimate message to other financial institutions is that they can keep serving traffickers,” she told us. “It’s still profitable to do that, given the lack of substantial consequences.”

Read by Malcolm Hillgartner

Narration produced by Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by Anj Vancura

Susan C. Beachy and Julie Tate contributed research.

Source photograph for photo illustration: Palm Beach Sheriff’s Office/Associated Press

Prop stylist: Heather Greene

Read the takeaways from the investigation:


What We Know About JPMorgan’s Long Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein

Sept. 8, 2025

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

David Enrich is a deputy investigations editor for The Times. He writes about law and business.

Matthew Goldstein is a Times reporter who covers Wall Street and white-collar crime and housing issues.

Jessica Silver-Greenberg is a Times investigative reporter writing about big business with a focus on health care. She has been a reporter for more than a decade.

See more on: JPMorgan Chase & Company, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Sergey Brin, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation