Bradley J. Edwards

June 2008

Bradley Edwards was thirty-two and had just opened his own firm when a young woman named Courtney Wild came to see him.

She told him she had been sexually coerced at fourteen by a wealthy man in Palm Beach named Jeffrey Epstein.

Edwards had never heard of him.

By then Epstein had already been handled. Federal prosecutors had entered a non-prosecution agreement, he had received a sentence measured in months at a minimum-security facility followed by house arrest, and the terms had been kept from the people he had abused. The victims did not know the deal existed. Other lawyers looked at the situation and moved on to the next case.

Edwards did not.

Doe v. United States

The federal Crime Victims' Rights Act guarantees crime victims certain rights, among them the right to confer with prosecutors and to know what is happening in their own cases.

Edwards brought Doe v. United States under that statute, arguing that prosecutors had denied those rights by concealing the non-prosecution agreement.

In February 2019 the district court agreed. Prosecutors had violated the survivors' rights by entering the agreement without conferring, and by continuing to communicate as though a federal prosecution remained possible. The ruling validated the core of the challenge, and the court directed further briefing on what relief the Act permitted once a violation had been found.

Edwards prosecuted that case pro bono for more than ten years. A decade of litigation, against the federal government, for no fee, on behalf of women who had been fourteen and fifteen years old.

It cost him. He came close to losing everything in the process.

Over those years he located and represented more than twenty of Epstein's victims and mapped an organization built to stay invisible. In July 2019, when federal prosecutors in New York arrested Epstein and set a bond hearing, Edwards flew to New York with Courtney Wild so that she could be in the room.

He wrote a book about it, Relentless Pursuit, with his partner Brittany Henderson. He and Henderson were also central to establishing the Epstein Victims' Compensation Fund, a confidential claims process that paid survivors from the estate after Epstein's death foreclosed a criminal trial.

The Banks

An operation that size does not run on cash in envelopes. It runs through financial institutions.

Survivors alleged that JPMorgan Chase and Deutsche Bank had provided the services that enabled and profited from Epstein's trafficking venture, and had gone on providing them past the point where the warning signs were obvious. The claims proceeded under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and related theories.

Edwards was lead counsel in the JPMorgan action, and the threshold fight was whether the claim could exist at all — whether a bank can ever be answerable for what its customer does. The district court held that it could. It allowed the central trafficking and negligence claims forward, permitted class proceedings, and opened discovery into what the bank's own monitoring had seen and what it did about it.

Both cases settled in 2023 with final approval: $290 million from JPMorgan, $75 million from Deutsche Bank, each through its own court-supervised class and claims process.

Converting those agreements into money in survivors' hands was a separate discipline from winning them. The central problem was building a process that could evaluate and pay claims without making private histories part of a public trial record — confidential submissions, eligibility standards applied out of view, allocation supervised by the court. Edwards's work ran from the contested pleadings all the way into those terms.

Bank of America

In 2025 Edwards joined Sigrid McCawley and the plaintiffs' team in a parallel action against Bank of America, representing the named plaintiff and the proposed class.

The Bank of America case was built through more than fifty interviews, dozens of them with survivors, ten depositions, review of hundreds of thousands of pages, and consultation with nine experts.

Mediation sessions in February and March 2026 produced a $72.5 million cash fund. Judge Jed Rakoff granted preliminary approval on April 2, 2026, moving it into claims administration. As of August 12, 2026, the final-approval hearing is scheduled for August 27.

$70,560,050

A crew member on a yacht was sexually assaulted by a coworker.

The vessel's owner did not begin by disputing the assault. It began by disputing whether maritime law applied at all — whether a docked yacht is a vessel in navigation, and whether she counted as a seaman. If either answer was no, her claim collapsed before anyone reached the merits.

Edwards tried it to a Florida jury in 2018 and proved the whole chain, starting with the two questions the owner had hoped would end it. The verdict form recorded findings for her on crew status and vessel status, and then on negligence and legal causation.

On damages, Edwards gave the jury a separate evidentiary basis for each category — lost wages, future earning capacity, medical expenses, and noneconomic harm — rather than asking for one undifferentiated sum.

The total was $70,560,050.

Practice

Edwards is board certified in civil trial law and a founding partner of Edwards Henderson in Fort Lauderdale, where the practice represents survivors of violent crime and sexual abuse. He graduated with honors from the University of Florida, where he played collegiate tennis, and took his law degree at Florida State University College of Law. He is admitted in Florida, New York and the District of Columbia.

He has published on crime victims' rights in national journals and speaks around the country on representing survivors. His litigation has paired large verdicts and settlements with sustained work to establish and enforce victims' rights in court.