The ongoing saga of the unreleased Jeffrey Epstein files has focused on the materials the federal government has under lock and key: the trove of evidence and redacted documents collected and produced in the process of multiple criminal investigations of the billionaire child sex trafficker. What’s received less notice are the documents that remain under seal in federal court — and that one of the judges responsible for keeping them under wraps has, through her Wall Street lawyer spouse, a wealth of connections to Epstein-linked financial institutions.
Earlier this month, Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz told the Washington Examiner that there was still “sealed material that should not be sealed” within the judicial system, charging that “there are judges who are protecting people. I know that for a fact.” Though he declined to name anyone, the Examiner found at least two Epstein-related cases in the Southern District of New York that remain under partial seal, one of which is the 2015 defamation suit against Epstein’s on-and-off lover and coconspirator Ghislaine Maxwell — a case in which the decision to seal documents were made by senior judge Loretta Preska.
Preska’s role in the saga is colored by the fact that her spouse is a partner at one of New York’s preeminent Wall Street law firms. Thomas Kavaler is a fifty-year veteran of Cahill Gordon & Reindel, a firm that, by its own description, “has thrived for a century by focusing on the most significant opportunities and complex challenges facing the top financial services firms and other multinational corporations.”
One of those challenges: when a major bank is sued by its own investors because its “particularly egregious” business relationship with a notorious billionaire pedophile and sex trafficker causes its share price to drop.
That was what happened in 2020 when Cahill Gordon defended Deutsche Bank after it was sued by a group of its investors over the fact that it had done business with Epstein long after he had been convicted and his crimes had become widely known. The suit alleged the bank and its top executives had serially violated due diligence processes to take on and keep as clients a variety of unsavory, ultrarich characters like Epstein, and the resulting fall in stock value led them to lose a significant amount of money. In the end, the case was settled in 2023 with a $26 million payout from the bank.
During and after the 2020–23 period in which that suit played out in the courts, Preska, who had been assigned the Maxwell defamation case in July 2019, made a series of orders to seal Epstein-related documents. And while Kavaler did not work on that particular suit against Deutsche Bank, he had represented it in other matters. What’s more, Cahill Gordon had represented Deutsche Bank, which counted Epstein as a client from 2013 to 2018, in court in dozens of cases over the past two decades.
What that means is that the judge responsible for having sealed a slew of Epstein-related documents — ones that could potentially implicate others who took part in his crimes or simply looked the other way — is within a few close degrees connected to the bank that spent years making money off Epstein after he was convicted and deemed a sex offender. Not only that, but because that bank paid her husband’s firm to defend it in a suit directly related to Epstein’s crimes, that judge has an indirect financial connection to the bank’s legal defense of its relationship to Epstein.
It’s an entanglement that was in some way inevitable given both Epstein and Cahill Gordon’s deep Wall Street ties.
“Hundreds of important people have either been clients or have worked there,” says attorney Josh Schiffer, who represented some of Epstein’s victims. “The relationships formed within these law firms between clients or clients and lawyers creates these other projects on the outside. It’s part of the value-add of these firms, being introduced to other clients.”
“Generally speaking, if it’s another partner at the firm handling the case, they’ll just wall off the spouse, and that’s considered sufficient,” says Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor who has called for the unsealing of the files.
But it’s not just one bank. Through her husband’s law firm, Preska has connections to a number of other financial institutions tied to Epstein, throwing an even darker shadow on her prior sealing of these documents.
Cahill Gordon has represented JPMorgan Chase more than a dozen times over the past twenty years, another bank hit with a class-action lawsuit over its business relationship with Epstein, one that persisted for many years after he registered as a sex offender. (A different law firm represented JPMorgan in that particular suit).
Cahill Gordon has also represented Bear Stearns, the now-defunct investment bank bought by JPMorgan after the 2008 financial crisis put it on the verge of bankruptcy. Bear Stearns was where Epstein got his start in the world of finance, becoming a limited partner over his five years there before leaving in 1981. It was also reportedly rife with sexual harassment by those at the very top.
Epstein continued to have a deep relationship with Bear Stearns long after his departure, staying on as a client until its collapse. Flight logs show that former chairman Alan Greenberg — who Epstein met through his first gig as a teacher at the private school Greenberg’s kids attended — flew at least twice on Epstein’s private jet in the 1990s, while the man who would become its CEO, James Cayne, had eleven phone numbers listed in Epstein’s address book and would reportedly order his subordinates to “take care of” the pedophile.
Preska has another, much more direct relationship to Bear Stearns than through her husband’s law firm: in 2014, she and Kavaler purchased a Manhattan penthouse for $8.7 million from its disgraced former chairman Richard Harriton, who sold it to them for $500,000 less than its original asking price. Harriton, who joined the firm in 1979 and came to head Bear Stearns’s clearing unit, was later fined $1 million and banned from the securities industry over allegations of fraud.
It is at minimum less-than-ideal optics that the judge who sealed these Epstein documents also bought a discounted multimillion-dollar penthouse from an executive of the firm with which Epstein was arguably most closely associated.
“Federal judges carry the duty to recuse themselves from any proceedings in which their impartiality might reasonably be questioned, even absent a good faith, timely, and sufficient party motion for disqualification alleging personal bias or prejudice,” says Anthony Alfieri, professor of law at the University of Miami and the founding director of its Center for Ethics and Public Service. Alfieri notes that “without more evidence of a legal or factual nexus linking the Epstein-related court proceedings before Judge Preska, Cahill Gordon & Reindel, and its clients, it is difficult to establish evidence” of any such bias.
Preska had unsealed a series of documents related to the case in 2024 but granted individuals time to appeal to keep their names suppressed. The files that she did eventually unseal ended up shedding little light on the activities of anyone but Epstein himself, with all of the names contained within having already been publicly outed as Epstein associates. Court records show that Preska sealed several more documents over the months that followed, some at the request of people who feared being named “would immensely disrupt and potentially endanger their lives” and including two letters to the court from people uninvolved in the case that contained “salacious” and “defamatory” content.
This isn’t the first time Preska’s corporate ties have led to controversy. In 2013, Preska rejected calls to recuse herself from a hacking case in which both her husband’s firm and her husband himself were impacted by the hack and ended up denying the accused hacker bail and giving him a maximum sentence. In 2022, Preska again refused to recuse herself from a securities suit against Citigroup over the fact that, as she put it, “the firm at which my husband is senior counsel . . . regularly represents Citibank and/or its subsidiaries.” (Preska wound up ruling in favor of Citigroup in that instance). Incidentally, Citigroup is another Cahill Gordon client with which Epstein had maintained a yearslong business relationship, albeit one that eventually went sour.
“It is a common and regular problem in not just the law but politics,” says Schiffer, who compares such entanglements to the lucrative day trading carried out by members of Congress. “There are many people where the appearance of impropriety is just appearance, but the value of extinguishing that appearance can’t be overstated.”
More recently, Preska gained notoriety for her harsh treatment of human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who found himself in a legal battle with Chevron after winning a historic judgment against the company. Preska put Donziger under an unprecedented two years of house arrest, denied his request for a jury trial, disqualified two of his lawyers, and appeared to have decided he was guilty before it was over, ultimately giving him a maximum prison sentence. Critics pointed out that Preska had served on the advisory board of the Federalist Society, which counted Chevron as a donor.
Jacobin reached out to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York for comment but has not yet received a response.
“In the Epstein cases, prior court-issued sealing orders raise several questions,” says Alfieri. “First, whether the orders were narrowly tailored or overbroad; second, whether the redaction of personal identifiers (names, birth dates) would provide sufficient protection for past victims; and third, whether the original justification or need for sealing has expired.”
“I really don’t understand why still to this day documents are not made public,” says Ramani. “What I expect to see more and more is media outlets filing and intervening to unseal those documents.”
That effort may be under way. According to court records, last week a district court vacated Preska’s earlier orders to keep documents under seal, which were challenged by the Miami Herald and Julie K. Brown, the newspaper and reporter who broke the bombshell story of the 2008 “sweetheart deal” that had effectively let Epstein off with a slap on the wrist.
Yet with the case remanded back to the Southern District of New York, it could also potentially create a situation where Preska may again be deciding which Epstein files will see the light of day — even as, through her spouse, she holds connections to numerous Epstein-linked firms.
The whole affair is a perfect illustration of the issues created by a political system that is increasingly financially entangled from top to bottom. That includes the US judiciary, which has been hit with a series of conflict-of-interest scandals over the past few years, as federal judges have sought to top up their six-figure salaries, which are many times the median US income but a fraction of the extravagant pay packets of business elites.
Separate investigations have found that more than 130 federal judges have broken the law by hearing cases involving companies that they or their family members owned stock in, and that a shocking number of judges don’t even disclose their spouses’ financial interests. This goes all the way to the Supreme Court, where justices have been hit with a number of embarrassing headlines over the intersection of their work with their private interests the past few years, Clarence Thomas chief among them.
The question is, as with congressmembers’ stock trades: when appearances of impropriety run rampant in a political system, how can people ever be sure their government is truly working for them — and not for the sake of their own personal investments?
Great Job Branko Marcetic & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
