Brittany Henderson

On January 30, 2018, the day after a Broward County jury returned its verdict, the lawyers for a former stewardess of the motor yacht Endless Summer filed an in rem action against the yacht itself in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida to execute on the judgment, and the court ordered the vessel arrested and placed in substitute custody. The verdict, after a six-day trial before Broward Circuit Judge Carlos Rodriguez, was $70,560,050 against Island Girl Ltd., the company that owned the 156-foot yacht and had employed both the stewardess and the deckhand who raped her aboard it. Brittany Henderson tried the case with Bradley J. Edwards of Edwards Pottinger, the Fort Lauderdale firm she had joined as a law clerk in 2014, and with Adam Horowitz of Horowitz Law. The plaintiff’s side, she said after the verdict, had proposed settlements with the owner and its insurer within the policy limits, in anticipation of “an excess verdict that would result in our owning the yacht,” and the offers were rejected.

Henderson is a named partner of Edwards Henderson in Fort Lauderdale, where her practice is complex civil litigation for survivors of sexual abuse and violent crime, and her verdicts and settlements have helped secure well over half a billion dollars for survivors. She represents more than 200 of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims. She joined the Epstein litigation in 2014 as a law clerk on the Crime Victims’ Rights Act case that produced a 2019 ruling that federal prosecutors had violated the victims’ rights by entering Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement without conferring with them and then concealing it; she helped create the confidential program that paid his survivors more than $121 million from his estate without a public filing in any survivor’s name; she was among the lawyers for the classes in the settlements that produced $290 million from JPMorgan Chase and $75 million from Deutsche Bank, $365 million from two of the world’s largest banks, and then $72.5 million from Bank of America; and in February 2026 she and Edwards asked two federal judges to order the Justice Department to take down the files in which it had published survivors’ names.

Three People Aboard

The Endless Summer was docked for a refit at the Universal Marine Center on the New River in Fort Lauderdale in February 2015. Three Island Girl employees lived aboard: Kurt Tomecek, the project manager; Rafal Dowgwillowicz-Nowicki, a 39-year-old deckhand from Poland; and the stewardess, who was 20 and about two weeks into the job. Early on February 25, Dowgwillowicz-Nowicki came back from a night of drinking at a bar, forced his way into her cabin on the lower deck and raped her for about an hour, threatening to kill her if she did not comply. Tomecek’s quarters were two decks above. She alleged that the crew had been issued no radios, that the onboard communications system was not working, and that the company’s rule against intoxicated crew returning to the yacht had no one aboard to enforce it. “She screamed for help and couldn’t be heard,” Horowitz said. Dowgwillowicz-Nowicki was charged with four counts of sexual battery, pleaded guilty in December 2016, served a two-year prison sentence and was deported to Poland.

On November 2, 2015 her lawyers wrote to Island Girl identifying it as a responsible party. She sued Tomecek in Broward County circuit court on February 22, 2016, and on July 13, 2016 filed an amended complaint against Island Girl and Tomecek for negligence under the Jones Act, for unseaworthiness and for maintenance and cure, the medical care and unearned wages owed to an injured seaman: remedies written for commercial shipping, applied here to a young woman working aboard a private yacht. Island Girl disputed throughout the state case that a yacht docked for refit was a vessel in navigation and that a stewardess aboard it was a seaman, the two classifications on which the Jones Act and unseaworthiness claims depended. Trial began on January 23, 2018. Judge Rodriguez denied the owner’s motion for a directed verdict on seaman status and the general maritime law, and the plaintiff’s expert testified that the yacht was in navigation. The plaintiff’s team had to connect the facts of her employment and the yacht’s status to the maritime rules submitted to the jury, and the verdict form separately addressed liability, maritime status, causation and damages, so that each finding stood on its own footing.

On January 29, 2018 the jury found that she had been acting in the course of her employment as a crew member of a vessel in navigation, that Island Girl was negligent and that its negligence legally caused her damages. It awarded $70,000 in net lost wages and earnings to the date of trial, $4,200,000 in future net lost wages and earnings, $3,550 in past medical and hospital expenses, $286,500 in future medical expenses, $6,000,000 for past pain, suffering, mental anguish, inconvenience and loss of enjoyment of life, and $60,000,000 for the same losses in the future: $70,560,050. Henderson helped develop and present the evidence on every element: the plaintiff’s crew duties, her seaman status, the yacht’s legal status as a vessel, the security conditions aboard, her employment losses, her treatment and her continuing injuries. The future-earnings evidence rested on the plan, discussed with advisers before the assault, to become a superyacht engineer. Edwards argued that Island Girl had left her no way to reach Tomecek in an emergency and should have known that the deckhand “posed a risk of perpetrating unwanted sexual contact” against her. The civil trial answered the question the criminal case did not reach: the vessel owner’s own negligence, and its responsibility for the survivor’s economic, medical and personal losses. “She is an extraordinary person who had to unnecessarily endure tremendous injury that will last forever,” Edwards said after the verdict. “This jury recognized that.”

Six Months From July 13, 2016

Island Girl answered the federal in rem complaint on March 1, 2018, denying that the Endless Summer was a vessel at all, and on the same day filed a counter-petition for exoneration from or limitation of liability under 46 U.S.C. §§ 30501–30512, pleaded in the alternative in case the yacht was found to be a vessel. The Limitation of Liability Act is the old maritime rule that caps a shipowner’s exposure at the value of the vessel; had the petition succeeded, a $70,560,050 judgment would have been measured against the worth of one yacht. Henderson’s client moved to dismiss the petition as time-barred and as barred by the state judgment. Island Girl’s answer was that the six-month clock could not have started while it disputed whether the yacht was legally a vessel, and that it began only on January 29, 2018, when the jury found that the Endless Summer was a vessel in navigation.

Judge Darrin P. Gayles rejected that position on August 27, 2018. Under 46 U.S.C. § 30511(a) an owner must file within six months after a claimant gives written notice of a claim, and in the Eleventh Circuit the deadline is jurisdictional, so he treated the motion as a challenge to the court’s power to hear the petition. He applied both of the circuit’s tests for written notice, the reasonable-possibility test of Paradise Divers and the three-part demand test of P.G. Charter Boats, and found that the amended complaint of July 13, 2016, which pleaded Jones Act negligence and unseaworthiness arising from the assault aboard the yacht, satisfied either one: it gave written notice of a reasonable possibility that the claim would exceed the yacht’s value, and from that day the burden of investigating fell on the owner. “Island Girl’s loose interpretation of written notice and the applicable statute of limitations is without merit,” he wrote. “The mere possibility that a jury could find that the Endless Summer was a vessel was sufficient to present a reasonable possibility of a claim.”

The owner could have filed a protective limitation petition while preserving its argument that the yacht was no vessel, and Judge Gayles observed that Island Girl was doing exactly that in his court, denying vessel status in its answer and claiming limitation in its counter-petition on the same day. “Nothing prevented Island Girl from making these same alternative arguments within the six-month statute of limitations,” he wrote. He dismissed the counter-petition as untimely, with prejudice, and did not reach the res judicata argument. The ruling left Henderson’s client free to continue enforcing the judgment, with the yacht under arrest, without the restrictions a limitation proceeding would have imposed. The prior pleading, the statutory deadline, the vessel arrest and the federal enforcement procedure were the instruments that made the jury’s award collectible.

Thirty-Four Confirmed Minors

Henderson had come to the Baca trial from four years on another case. On September 24, 2007 the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida signed a non-prosecution agreement with Jeffrey Epstein, and an email in the office that same day said, “I have compiled a list of 34 confirmed minors.” No one in the office conferred with the victims before signing. On January 10, 2008 the FBI wrote to two of the victims, Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2, that the case was “currently under investigation.” Epstein’s lawyer Jay Lefkowitz had written to the line prosecutor, “Please do whatever you can to keep this” agreement “from becoming public,” and the office had told Epstein’s counsel that the agreement would not be “made public or filed with the Court.” In 2008 Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 petitioned the United States District Court in West Palm Beach under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, and Bradley Edwards represented them; the case is Doe v. United States, No. 08-80736.

Henderson joined Edwards’s Fort Lauderdale practice in 2014 as a law clerk, while she was still a student at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law and while the case was already years underway. Its question was whether federal prosecutors had violated the victims’ statutory rights by negotiating and concealing the agreement that ended the first federal investigation of Epstein. She and Edwards wrote the motion for partial summary judgment before she graduated; she interviewed many of the victims, traveled with Edwards and sat in regular meetings with Epstein’s lawyers. On February 21, 2019 Judge Kenneth A. Marra granted the motion on the right to confer and denied the government’s cross-motion. He held that “the rights under the CVRA attach before the Government brings formal charges against a defendant,” that the right to confer “must extend to conferral about non-prosecution agreements,” and that “once the Government failed to advise the victims about its intention to enter into the NPA, a violation of the CVRA occurred.” He did not rule that the decision not to prosecute was itself improper. “Particularly problematic,” he wrote, “was the Government’s decision to conceal the existence of the NPA and mislead the victims to believe that federal prosecution was still a possibility,” and he found that “Epstein’s counsel was aware that the Office was deliberately keeping the NPA secret from the victims.”

Henderson has said that what the case uncovered about the government’s treatment of the victims settled the direction of her career. “It created this fire in me; I just couldn’t stand it,” she said. “I wanted to do whatever it took for the rest of my career to make sure that things were fair for victims.” She had taken her bachelor’s degree in political science at Auburn University in 2011, having first planned on medicine, and interned at the Lee County courthouse in her senior year; at Nova Southeastern she served on the executive committees of the Nova Law Review and the Moot Court Society and graduated magna cum laude. She has been admitted to the Florida Bar since 2015 and is also admitted in New York and the District of Columbia, and in 2016 a sexual-abuse case she litigated with Edwards in federal court in Chicago produced a jury verdict for the plaintiff. In 2019 she became a full-time partner at Edwards Pottinger. By then she and Edwards were working with the federal prosecutors in Manhattan while continuing the civil cases, and helping build the cases against Ghislaine Maxwell and Jean-Luc Brunel. In July 2019 she sat in the New York courtroom for Epstein’s bond hearing with a client, and two of his victims addressed the judge. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything more powerful in my entire life,” she said. “The courage they had to get up and say those words to the man who had abused them.” She and Edwards told the story of the litigation in Relentless Pursuit: My Fight for the Victims of Jeffrey Epstein, published by Simon & Schuster in March 2020 and written after work over several months from more than 800 pages of material. “Brad and I spent so much time trying to distill the book down to what people would actually care about,” she said. By then, the case that shaped her first years of practice had also defined its direction: representing survivors of sexual abuse and violent crime, in courtrooms and in the confidential processes built alongside them.

Two Hundred Twenty-Five Claims

Epstein was arrested in July 2019 and died in his Manhattan jail cell the following month, and the civil claims against him became claims against his estate. Henderson helped create and open the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program, which a Virgin Islands court approved in June 2020 and which opened for claims on June 25, 2020. Its premise was that a survivor should not have to choose between compensation and privacy: a claimant could submit a confidential claim against the estate without filing an individual public lawsuit. Jordana H. Feldman administered it independently, working with Kenneth Feinberg, who had overseen the compensation funds for the September 11 victims and for the clergy-abuse claimants of the New York archdiocese. The program could draw up to $630 million from the estate; a survivor had nine months to file; claims barred by statutes of limitations were still considered; there was no cap on an individual award beyond the size of the estate; and each claim was evaluated on its own. The program described itself as a “voluntary, non-adversarial, confidential claims resolution program.” Lawyers for at least 69 women supported it when it opened, and Edwards, who had helped develop it, said, “We have confidence that the program will be the most successful of its kind.”

A claimant could present her account and supporting materials privately and avoid the public filing, the repeated depositions and the cross-examination that an individual suit or trial would have brought. The administrator determined eligibility and an individualized award, communicated the offer without publicly identifying the claimant, and applied consistent procedures across every file. Participation was voluntary, and acceptance required a release of claims against the estate, so that each survivor kept the choice at every step, including the choice to walk away; a woman who took an award could still speak to law enforcement, take part in criminal investigations and tell her story publicly. “One of the most attractive features of this program is confidentiality and the ability to keep this information private,” Feldman said when it opened, and many women, she said, had hesitated until they learned of it.

The program had expected about 100 claimants. It received approximately 225 claims, more than twice the number initially anticipated. Roughly 150 people were found eligible, 92 percent of those receiving offers accepted them, and when Feldman announced its closing on August 9, 2021 it had paid more than $121 million, directly from the estate, without a public filing bearing any claimant’s name. She said she had run it “entirely free from any interference” from the estate, that “Every claimant had an opportunity to be heard in a safe space,” and that “Confidentiality served as a cornerstone of the program.” She said that “no amount of money will erase the years of pain these victims have endured because of Jeffrey Epstein,” and that the claims had been resolved “beyond the glare of public proceedings and without the costs and confrontation of litigation.”

Jane Doe 1

Epstein had been a client of JPMorgan Chase from 1998 to 2013, through his 2006 arrest and his 2008 guilty plea in Florida, and a client of Deutsche Bank from 2013 to 2018. In 2022 class actions were filed against both banks in the Southern District of New York, each led by a plaintiff suing as Jane Doe 1; the woman leading the Deutsche Bank case said Epstein had abused her from 2003 to 2018. The complaints alleged that JPMorgan had turned a blind eye to his trafficking despite warnings from its own compliance staff and that Deutsche Bank had missed the red flags in his accounts. Henderson’s firm, by then Edwards Henderson Lehrman, was co-counsel with Boies Schiller Flexner. On June 12, 2023 Judge Jed S. Rakoff certified the JPMorgan class, the women sexually abused or trafficked by Epstein during the years the bank maintained his accounts and through his death on August 10, 2019, and the same day the bank agreed to pay $290 million. The court appointed Boies Schiller and Edwards Henderson Lehrman class counsel, and Henderson was among the lawyers on the settlement papers. The Deutsche Bank class covered women abused or trafficked by Epstein or his associates from August 19, 2013 until his death, and that bank agreed to pay $75 million.

These were the first cases to hold major banks financially accountable for the role their services played in facilitating Epstein’s trafficking. Each settlement carried its own class definition, fund, release and final-approval order. Under the JPMorgan plan a claims administrator, for which the parties proposed Simone Lelchuk, who already held that role in the Deutsche Bank case, would receive a confidential questionnaire and release from each class member, weigh the severity of the harm, the woman’s relationship with Epstein, her cooperation with investigations and any recovery she had received from the Deutsche Bank fund, and allocate an individual share, with every submission held in confidence. The plan sent notice by mail to the women who could be identified and by publication in USA Today, and called for allocations within ninety days of final approval. Judge Rakoff gave the JPMorgan agreement preliminary approval in June 2023, calling it a “really fine settlement.” On October 20, 2023 he approved the Deutsche Bank settlement: “This is, in the court’s view, a terrific settlement.” On November 9, 2023 he gave the JPMorgan settlement final approval for a class of more than 100 women. Judge Rakoff said that “in my 27 years on the bench, I have not seen such a good settlement arrive in such a short order.” Neither bank admitted wrongdoing. Deutsche Bank said it had made an error in taking Epstein on as a client, and JPMorgan, which in September 2023 had agreed to pay the United States Virgin Islands $75 million to settle the territory’s own claims, said it regretted its association with him. David Boies said the case “was a wake-up call for banks” to keep track of who their clients are. The two agreements produced $365 million from two of the world’s largest banks. The banks’ conduct was pleaded and argued on the public docket; each survivor’s account went only to the claims administrator, and the approved funds moved from evidence and negotiation into notice, claims review, allocation and distribution without exposing any individual account of abuse.

An Account in Her Name

The third bank case began on October 15, 2025, when a Florida woman suing as Jane Doe filed a proposed class action against Bank of America in the Southern District of New York, with Boies Schiller and Edwards Henderson as her lawyers. She said that she had met Epstein in 2011 while living in Russia, that he had abused her at least 100 times between 2011 and 2019 and paid her repeatedly to further his trafficking, and that his money was wired in and out of her Bank of America accounts. The complaint alleged that in 2013, at the direction of Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, she opened a Bank of America account through which Kahn sent her rent money; that in 2015 Kahn’s assistant told her Epstein was adding her to the payroll of a “sham company” whose funds would flow through it; and that the bank treated her as a “preferred customer” though she had no prior income or wealth and no legitimate way to earn income in the United States. It alleged that the bank ignored repeated red flags of criminality in Epstein’s transactions in the decade after his first prosecution, among them about $170 million that Leon Black transferred to Epstein with no known business reason, and that it filed the Suspicious Activity Reports the law required only after Epstein’s death in 2019. Black has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. Sigrid McCawley of Boies Schiller said, “we are taking another important step forward toward justice for survivors.” Bank of America answered that the complaint at most alleged that it had banked wealthy clients affiliated with Epstein, and that the suit was an attempt to “radically expand liability for banks.”

On January 29, 2026 Judge Rakoff let two claims go forward, that the bank knowingly benefited from a sex-trafficking venture under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act and that it obstructed the government’s enforcement of that law, and trial was set for May 11. In a 42-page opinion in February he explained why. Jane Doe “plainly alleges,” he wrote, that the bank provided non-routine services to help Epstein; she became a “premier” customer who moved large sums while the bank had “every reason to know” of Epstein’s part in the transfers and of his sex crimes; the bank “turned a blind eye” to the press reports about him and did not inquire into “the way large transfers passed in and out of an account allegedly owned by an impecunious young woman”; and one of its employees, who had been Epstein’s banker at JPMorgan Chase and at Deutsche Bank, is alleged to have had “direct personal knowledge” of the trafficking. The plaintiff moved for class certification on February 17, the bank answered on February 19, and the parties mediated before Layn Phillips, the former federal judge who had also mediated the JPMorgan case, on February 20 and March 9. They reached agreement in principle on March 11, signed a term sheet on March 15 and a stipulation of settlement on March 27, 2026, with Edwards, Henderson and Dean Kaire signing for Edwards Henderson.

The class is every woman sexually abused or trafficked by Epstein, or by anyone connected to him, between June 30, 2008 and July 6, 2019, the years in which Bank of America, Merrill Lynch or BofA Securities held accounts for Epstein, his co-conspirators and his entities. Bank of America agreed to wire $72.5 million into a settlement fund within fifteen business days after preliminary approval and receipt of the fund’s wiring instructions. Lelchuk, of Resolution Services LLC, again administers the claims: each woman submits a confidential questionnaire and release under penalty of perjury within sixty days of notice; her allocation turns on the circumstances, severity, type and extent of the abuse, the nature and duration of her relationship with Epstein, her cooperation with government investigations or with the litigation, and the impact on her; the questionnaires go to no third party without her written consent unless the court directs otherwise; and nothing in the settlement releases any claim against any natural person who abused her. Any remainder goes to a charity the parties choose. Bank of America made no admission of liability, said it had provided routine banking services, and said the resolution “allows us to put this matter behind us and provides further closure for the plaintiffs.” Boies and Edwards said the settlement “represents a favorable and fair result for the Class.”

Judge Rakoff granted preliminary approval on April 2, 2026; at that stage, counsel estimated that approximately sixty to seventy-five survivors could submit claims, and he directed the lawyers to give him a broader list of publications in which to announce the fund. At the final hearing on August 27, 2026 he found that the class had been properly served and approved the settlement from the bench, with a written order to follow that week. “No amount of money can make up for the wrongs that they suffered and the harms that they still feel,” he said; the fund was “actual justice, even if partial,” “as opposed to mere talk,” and “A substantial number of Epstein victims are receiving substantial amounts of money.” The fund uses confidential questionnaires, releases and individualized eligibility and allocation decisions to compensate survivors while protecting their privacy.

Every Hour Matters

Henderson is the founder of The Survivors, Inc., a nonprofit that supports victims through survivor-led life coaching and peer support, one of the two nonprofit organizations serving survivors of sexual abuse that she has co-founded; she helped a client establish the SOAR Foundation; and she is secretary of the board of CHILD USA, the child-protection think tank. She has given keynotes at CrimeCon in Las Vegas and for the National Crime Victim Bar Association. In 2025 she worked with members of Congress to support passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and after government document releases exposed the personal information of more than 100 victims she pressed for the protection of survivors’ identities.

On January 30, 2026 the Justice Department released more than 3.5 million pages, 2,000 videos and 180,000 images of Epstein material, which Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche described as about half of the more than six million documents the department had collected, and the files carried the names of survivors it had promised to redact, among them at least one woman who had never come forward. Two days later Henderson and Edwards, whose firm represents about 300 survivors, wrote to Judges Richard M. Berman and Paul A. Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York. “That expectation was shattered on January 30, 2026,” they wrote; the department “has possessed the names of victims that it promised to redact for months,” and “A simple name search would have prevented this entirely.” They asked for an immediate takedown of the department’s website hosting the materials and for a special master to oversee redaction and republication. “For the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, every hour matters,” the letter said. “This Court is the last line of defense for victims who were promised protection and instead were exposed.” The next day the department told the court that it was “removing documents that inadvertently were produced and contain victim-identifying information,” that it had taken down “several thousands of documents and media,” and that the exposures were the product of “technical or human error.”