By Nivedita Balu and Tatiana Bautzer
TORONTO/NEW YORK, Feb 18 (Reuters) – Morgan Stanley opened accounts for Jeffrey Epstein’s trusts between 2015 and 2019, years after the financier was convicted and registered as a sex offender under a 2008 plea deal, documents released by the U.S. Justice Department show.
The emails made public by the DOJ, which published more than 3 million pages on January 30, 2026, show Epstein’s associates and investment entities continued securing banking relationships at Morgan Stanley long after his 2008 conviction, underscoring how Wall Street managed a client whose reputational risks were widely known.
The accounts were opened during a period when other large Wall Street banks, including Deutsche Bank and JPMorgan, were distancing themselves from him.
Epstein, in exchange for immunity, pleaded guilty in 2008 to a Florida state prostitution charge and served 13 months in jail. He was later arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking dozens of underage girls.
During the intervening years a 2016 defamation lawsuit was filed by Virginia Giuffre against Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Media scrutiny also intensified around Epstein including with the publication of investigative articles by the Miami Herald in 2018. Epstein died by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019 while awaiting trial.
Morgan Stanley’s opening of an account in 2019 came two years after the bank’s risk officers had closed another Epstein trust account in 2017, according to the emails released in the documents by the DOJ.
A source familiar with the matter said that Morgan Stanley closed one of Epstein’s accounts in 2017 after the bank notified him of its decision to end their banking relationship.
Another account, the source said, was opened in 2019 but was closed shortly afterward. The source did not provide more specifics about why the bank closed Epstein’s account or an exact timeframe for these decisions.
The emails show that communications with the bank were handled by Epstein’s longtime accountant, Richard Kahn, whose lawyer did not respond to a request for comment. Kahn is currently one of two executors of Epstein’s estate, who paid $105 million in cash to the U.S. Virgin Islands to settle claims the territory was used as a base for sex trafficking operations.
The executors of the estate also set a restitution fund that paid out $121 million to victims. The other executor of the Epstein estate is Darren Indyke, whose lawyer also did not respond to a request for comment.
Reuters found no evidence of any wrongdoing on the part of Morgan Stanley or the executors of Epstein’s estate, and there was no evidence from the documents that Epstein had directly communicated with the bank.
Under U.S. regulatory rules, banks must identify and verify customers and beneficial owners, and monitor suspicious transactions as part of customer due-diligence requirements.
Reuters could not determine what specific due‑diligence steps, if any, Morgan Stanley had conducted when opening Epstein-related accounts.
Morgan Stanley is one of a number of Wall Street banks that maintained a banking relationship with the New York financier over the years. Other banks have faced scrutiny over their ties to Epstein and Maxwell, who was found guilty in 2021 for her role in helping Epstein.
Epstein had been a JPMorgan client from 1998 until 2013, when the New York-based bank terminated the relationship.
In December 2018, Deutsche Bank had notified Epstein of its intention to close his accounts and completed the closures after his July 2019 arrest, Reuters previously reported.
JPMorgan confirmed to Reuters for this story that the bank had terminated its banking relationship with Epstein in 2013. Deutsche declined to comment for this story about the dates Epstein’s accounts were closed.
BANK ACCOUNTS OPENED
Documents show that Morgan Stanley’s relationship with Epstein‑linked entities was active in 2015. In an email forwarded to Epstein dated April 17, 2015, Kahn wrote: “Morgan Stanley account is open and funded with 5,000,000.”
Some parts of the documents have been redacted or corrupted, making some words illegible.
According to a February 6, 2016 email that appears at the end of a back‑and‑forth with Epstein, Kahn wrote that a “Morgan Stanley=existing brokerage account in stc name currently has approximately 17,250,=00(sic)”, a possible reference to a Southern Trust account. Reuters could not determine the exact amount in the account and whether it referred to thousands or millions of dollars. Southern Trust was one of Epstein’s companies.
On August 18, 2017, Morgan Stanley’s complex risk officer Rachel Kaplan sent a letter contained in the DOJ documents to Epstein and his lawyer Darren Indyke, addressed to the Southern Trust Co, saying the bank had decided to “terminate our current broker/client relationship.”
Kaplan, a vice president and risk officer at Morgan Stanley’s wealth management division, referred questions to Morgan Stanley. The bank declined to comment about its banking relationship with Epstein.
Two years later, on March 18, 2019, Kahn confirmed to Epstein the opening of a new account at Morgan Stanley, according to one of the documents. That account was opened for Butterfly Trust, one of Epstein’s financial entities. Butterfly Trust was cited in a 2020 settlement with the New York State Department of Financial Services that fined Deutsche Bank for allowing Epstein to withdraw suspicious amounts of cash.
(Reporting by Nivedita Balu in Toronto and Tatiana Bautzer in New York; Editing by Megan Davies, Diane Craft and Daniel Wallis)
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