Sigrid S. McCawley

On April 22, 2016, in a law office at 575 Lexington Avenue in Manhattan, Ghislaine Maxwell sat for the deposition that Sigrid S. McCawley had noticed on behalf of Virginia Roberts Giuffre. The questioning ran nine and a half hours and the transcript came to 418 pages, nearly every name in it other than Maxwell’s and Epstein’s later blacked out. Maxwell said she had met Jeffrey Epstein “at some point in 1991” and had begun working for him in 1992, that the work was “consulting, and what I did was I helped with decorating houses and in hiring staff to help run those houses,” and that “a very small part of my job was from time to time to find adult professional massage therapists for Jeffrey.” She said “I never saw any inappropriate underage activities with Jeffrey ever,” that “I have never seen anybody have sexual intercourse with Jeffrey, ever,” and that Giuffre “has lied about me from the beginning to the end.” She acknowledged staying in contact with Epstein after his 2008 guilty plea. Asked whether she had been his girlfriend, she answered, “There were times when I would have liked to think of myself as his girlfriend.”

McCawley and David Boies wrote to Judge Robert W. Sweet afterward that Maxwell had been so evasive that they needed to question her again, and that she had claimed any sexual interactions were with adults: “The court should compel defendant to answer all these questions.” Sweet granted the request, and Maxwell sat for a second deposition in July 2016. Four years later the April transcript became the basis of perjury charges against her, and her lawyers fought to keep it sealed, arguing that publication would impair her right to a fair trial. The Second Circuit rejected her arguments, and on October 22, 2020, Judge Loretta A. Preska released the transcript at the request of Giuffre and the Miami Herald. McCawley called the release “a long-time coming and a welcome step towards revealing the evidence” of the scope of the trafficking ring. A jury convicted Maxwell in 2021, and in June 2022 she was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Obvious Lies

The case had reached McCawley by referral. In 2014 Boies told her that he had a client who might be a good fit given her pro bono work for abused and neglected children; she had recently returned from leave after the birth of her fourth child. The client was Giuffre, who had come to Boies Schiller Flexner late that year, after a December 30, 2014 court filing in which, as Jane Doe 3, she had publicly accused Epstein of trafficking her as a minor and had named Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew. McCawley met her in New York right away and became her lawyer in February 2015. Giuffre told her what she wanted: “I just want the people who have harmed me off the streets.” “And I said to her, ‘I’m not a criminal lawyer, I’m so sorry. … But let me see what we can do.’” The first meeting, McCawley said later, “essentially turned my life upside down, to put it bluntly.” “I had no idea what I was getting myself into,” she said. “I certainly didn’t understand the breadth and the depth of the trafficking.”

The abuse itself lay beyond the statute of limitations. What Maxwell did next supplied the claim: she publicly called Giuffre’s allegations “obvious lies,” and in September 2015 McCawley sued her for defamation in the Southern District of New York, before Judge Sweet, in a suit that let Giuffre set out the abuse in detail without the limitations period standing in the way. “It opened a window for us to be able to really come after the perpetrators and try to prove that this sex trafficking operation existed,” McCawley said. Boies described the target the same way: “We were not only going after [Ghislaine] Maxwell, but we were, through that, going after the entire Epstein machine.” Sweet held his hearings in person, which put McCawley in New York almost every other week, and the depositions and discovery from the case have been released over the years since. The parties executed a settlement in May 2017, and the case closed the next day.

Epstein had pleaded guilty in 2008 to two Florida state charges, registered as a sex offender, served thirteen months of an eighteen-month sentence and avoided federal charges. “He got off with a slap on the wrist,” McCawley said. “This is corruption at a high level of government.” What she was looking at, she said, was “the longest-running sex trafficking scheme in history that I’ve ever come across.” From 2014 on, the work ran across overlapping civil and criminal proceedings against Epstein, his estate, Maxwell and the other people tied directly to the abuse: survivors’ privacy had to be protected, their testimony developed over long periods, and assets and defendants pursued wherever they could be found. When Dershowitz said that Paul Cassell and Bradley Edwards, the lawyers who had filed the Jane Doe 3 papers, should be disbarred, and they sued him for defamation, McCawley represented Giuffre as a witness in that case and was herself subpoenaed. She came to represent eight survivors, Maria Farmer and Annie Farmer among them, in personal-injury suits against Epstein’s estate in federal court in New York, which Magistrate Judge Debra Freeman stayed so that the parties could pursue the compensation program set up by the estate; that program went on to pay roughly $150 million in restitution to more than 125 survivors.

A Strong Presumption of Access

Julie Brown and the Miami Herald moved in April 2018 to unseal the whole Giuffre v. Maxwell docket; Dershowitz sought three documents he said would show that Giuffre had invented her accusations against him, and Michael Cernovich sought the summary-judgment record. On July 2, 2019, a Second Circuit panel of Judges Cabranes, Pooler and Droney vacated the district court’s sealing orders of November 2, 2016, May 3, 2017 and August 27, 2018, ordered the summary-judgment record unsealed with minimal redactions and remanded for a document-by-document review of the rest, holding that to such materials “a strong presumption of access attaches, under both the common law and the First Amendment.” Days later, on July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges. McCawley called Giuffre that night. “We both cried,” she said; it was “really special” to tell her that the thing she had most wanted had happened. Epstein died in his Manhattan jail cell on August 10, 2019, a death the city’s medical examiner ruled a suicide.

On August 27, 2019, Judge Richard Berman, who had to decide whether to dismiss the indictment because the defendant was dead, a step usually taken on paper, instead opened his courtroom to the women Epstein had abused. Sixteen of them spoke, and lawyers read statements from more than a dozen others. Giuffre told the court that she had been fifteen and working at Mar-a-Lago when she was recruited to perform sex acts on Epstein: “My hopes were quickly dashed and my dreams were stolen.” Jennifer Araoz said, “He robbed me of my dreams, of my chance to pursue a career I adored.” Courtney Wild said, “He is a coward.” Berman defended the hearing: “Public hearings … promote transparency.” McCawley has described that day as showing “that sisterhood of survivorship.” On July 2, 2020, Maxwell was arrested. “This morning was a very joyful and tearful filled morning,” McCawley told ABC’s Nightline. “It was a wonderful moment in my journey with these survivors to be able to call them and tell them that the one person whose been out in the public without being held accountable was finally in prison.”

Giuffre sued Prince Andrew in federal court, alleging that he had sexually abused her when she was a minor in London, in New York and on Little St. James, Epstein’s island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, with Epstein arranging it; her complaint included the photograph of the prince with his arm around her waist, taken, she said, shortly before he abused her. In January 2022 the court denied his motion to dismiss, which had rested on the argument that Giuffre’s earlier settlement with Epstein barred the suit, and on February 15, 2022, Boies filed the parties’ joint letter: the prince would “make a substantial donation to Ms. Giuffre’s charity in support of victims’ rights,” “has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre’s character,” and “accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse”; he “regrets his association with Epstein” and “pledges to demonstrate his regret” by supporting the fight against sex trafficking and its victims. The parties told the court they would move to dismiss within thirty days of Giuffre confirming receipt of the settlement. In December 2023 Judge Preska ordered the remaining sealed material in Giuffre v. Maxwell unsealed, and on January 3 and January 8, 2024, McCawley filed the documents with the court on a rolling basis under that order, after conferring with Maxwell’s counsel and holding back only material on three Does whose status the court was still reviewing. Her Epstein-related advocacy was chronicled in the Netflix documentary Filthy Rich. By 2025 she was still pressing to unseal thousands of pages of court records that had come to be called the Epstein files, was in Washington answering reports that Maxwell might receive a reduced sentence or a pardon, and had a class action pending in the Southern District of New York against Epstein’s lawyer and his accountant, whom she called “two of the centerpieces of his operation.”

The Two Primary Banks

In early 2021 Boies, McCawley and their co-counsel Bradley Edwards of Edwards Pottinger, later Edwards Henderson, in Fort Lauderdale decided, in the words Boies and Edwards later gave the court under oath, “to make a concerted effort to develop cases against JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank, the two primary banks on which Epstein had relied.” Epstein had been a JPMorgan client from 1998 to 2013, when the bank ended the relationship, and a Deutsche Bank client from 2013 to 2018. The banks’ own records had already begun to come out. On July 7, 2020, the New York Department of Financial Services announced that Deutsche Bank would pay $150 million under a consent order, the first enforcement action by any regulator against a financial institution for its dealings with Epstein: the bank had processed hundreds of transactions totaling millions of dollars that should have prompted more scrutiny, among them payments to people publicly alleged to be his co-conspirators, settlement payments of more than $7 million, more than $6 million to law firms, payments to Russian models, women’s school tuition, hotel and rent expenses, numerous payments directly to women with Eastern European surnames, and periodic cash withdrawals of more than $800,000 over about four years. Conditions set by the bank’s reputational-risk committee had never reached most of the account team, and a compliance officer had misread them. “The Bank inexcusably failed to detect or prevent millions of dollars of suspicious transactions,” Superintendent Linda A. Lacewell said. At JPMorgan the record ran further back. The bank had filed multiple suspicious-activity reports on Epstein’s accounts in 2002, and he had withdrawn more than $175,000 in cash from a JPMorgan account in 2003 and nearly $1 million in 2004 and 2005. In 2010 Jes Staley, then a senior JPMorgan executive, emailed Epstein after a visit to his home, “That was fun. Say hi to Snow White,” and Epstein replied asking “what character would you like next?”

The theory McCawley and her colleagues built was that the banks’ services had crossed from ordinary banking into knowing participation in, or benefit from, a trafficking venture, which the Trafficking Victims Protection Act makes civilly actionable; it was the first case of its kind under that statute against banks. The evidence was the banks’ own paper: wire transfers, cash withdrawals, account-opening files, compliance alerts, internal escalations, customer-monitoring decisions and suspicious-activity reports, set beside survivor testimony and the duties the banks had to monitor what moved through them. Read in sequence, a bank record showed who controlled an account, where the money went, how often the pattern repeated, what the bank knew and what its employees did when a system flagged the activity. A transfer could tie Epstein to an associate, a survivor, a property or a service provider; a compliance alert could show that the bank’s own system had identified the activity as unusual, and the escalation and reporting records showed what review, if any, followed. The lawyers assembled those sequences across years of activity and matched them to the chronology of the venture and to what survivors could describe: the abuse, their financial dependence on Epstein, travel, housing, medical care, immigration worries, and communications that his employees controlled. The survivors alleged that the banks had let Epstein withdraw large amounts of cash to pay women who took part in the abuse or recruited others, had violated anti-money-laundering laws and had failed to conduct due diligence. “It required not only his masterful manipulation to run this operation for over 20 years,” McCawley said; the records showed “that Epstein didn’t act alone.”

Jane Doe 1, a former ballet dancer who said Epstein had abused her from 2003 to 2018, filed the JPMorgan case in the Southern District of New York on November 24, 2022, with Boies, McCawley, Edwards, Brittany Henderson, Paul G. Cassell, Dean M. Kaire, Daniel Crispino, Alexander Law and Andrew Villacastin among her counsel, and a companion case against Deutsche Bank whose complaint said the bank “chose profit over following the law.” Both cases went to Judge Jed S. Rakoff. In March 2023 JPMorgan sued Staley, its former executive, claiming that he was responsible for the suits the bank now faced. On May 1, 2023, Rakoff issued the opinion behind his March 20 bottom-line order, leaving four claims standing against JPMorgan, that it had knowingly benefited from participating in the venture, that it had obstructed enforcement of the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, that it had negligently failed to prevent physical harm, and that it had negligently provided non-routine banking services, and against Deutsche Bank the claim that it had knowingly benefited from Epstein’s operation. Deutsche Bank, facing a September 5 trial, formalized a $75 million settlement on May 11, 2023. The two firms’ joint statement called it “the culmination of two law firms conducting more than a decade-long investigation to hold one of Epstein’s financial banking partners responsible for the role it played in facilitating his trafficking organization.” Eligible survivors would receive a minimum of $75,000 and, depending on circumstances, as much as about $5 million. Staley was deposed over the weekend of June 10 and 11, 2023.

The Quintessential Class Action

On June 12, 2023, Rakoff certified a class under Rule 23(b)(3) of all women sexually abused or trafficked by Epstein while JPMorgan maintained accounts for him or his entities, with Jane Doe 1 as class representative and Boies Schiller Flexner and Edwards Pottinger as class counsel. The common questions he listed were “Whether Jeffrey Epstein ran a sex-trafficking venture;” “Whether JP Morgan knew (or recklessly disregarded) that such a venture existed;” “Whether JP Morgan participated in that venture;” “Whether JP Morgan obstructed the enforcement of the TVPA with respect to Jeffrey Epstein’s sex-trafficking venture;” and, on the negligence claims, “Whether JP Morgan owed a duty to Epstein’s victims” and “Whether JP Morgan breached its duty to Epstein’s victims by providing banking services to Epstein.” JPMorgan had argued that the class was too small to certify, counting only 32 members if it began in 2007, the earliest point, it said, at which the bank could have known of trafficking from the 2006 police reports and news coverage; that many of the women had signed releases through the Epstein Victims Compensation Program whose forms released “any entities or individuals” that had provided services to Epstein; that Jane Doe 1 was atypical because she had been uniquely vulnerable to recruitment, because the statute of limitations ran against her, and because she had herself recruited at least one other victim; and that causation, coercion, the bank’s defenses and damages would all have to be decided woman by woman.

Rakoff answered each argument. “Several pieces of evidence … suggest that JP Morgan either knew or should have known” of the venture well before 2006, he wrote, pointing to the bank’s own suspicious-activity reports of 2002; with a 2002 start date the program’s data indicated “well over 100 people,” and its 137 applicants were “a reasonable indicator that the class well exceeds forty members.” The release language was ambiguous under New York law and could as easily reach “every person who gave Epstein a piano lesson,” and the related Deutsche Bank settlement had carved out Staley and Leon Black, which told against reading the release to protect banks. Vulnerability to recruitment was shared across the class and supported Jane Doe 1’s claims rather than undermining them; a limitations defense that would touch most class members “confirms her typicality”; she alleged that Epstein had forced her to recruit, the defense could be segregated if necessary, and her interest in a judgment against the bank was the class’s own. “Even a single common question of law or fact may suffice,” he wrote, and the core of the case was “a single controversy that can be resolved ‘in one stroke.’” He added that “the Court does not take a position on the ultimate merits of the claims asserted by Jane Doe.” The suit was, he wrote, “in many respects, the quintessential class action.”

The same day, JPMorgan agreed to pay $290 million. “We all now understand that Epstein’s behavior was monstrous,” the bank said, and “Any association with him was a mistake and we regret it.” Boies said that the “historic recoveries from the banks who provided financial services to Jeffrey Epstein, speak for themselves,” and gave his own accounting of who had failed the women: “The prosecutors failed them. The court system failed them. The legal system failed them. And the media failed them.” McCawley said the JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank agreements “are both life-changing and historic for the survivors,” that money which had once “flowed with impunity” was now being put to good, and that financial institutions “have an important role to play in spotting and shutting down sex trafficking.” Rakoff gave preliminary approval on June 26, calling it a “really fine settlement.” The class period ran from January 1, 1998 through August 10, 2019; class members had forty-five days from the notice date to submit a questionnaire and release, notice went by mail and email, through a case website and in USA Today, and the claims administrator would set each amount “based on the circumstances, severity, type, and extent of the alleged harm,” the nature and duration of the woman’s relationship with Epstein, her cooperation with government investigations and any recovery in the Deutsche Bank case. McCawley had helped carry the case through discovery and certification to that point; in September 2023 JPMorgan separately agreed to pay $75 million to the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein had owned two islands.

Rakoff granted final approval of the Deutsche Bank settlement on October 20, 2023, for a class of women and girls abused or trafficked by Epstein and his associates from August 19, 2013 to August 10, 2019: “This is, in the court’s view, a terrific settlement.” The bank paid $75,000,000 into a qualified settlement fund; the court found the settlement “fair, reasonable, and adequate and in the best interest of the Class,” kept “continuing jurisdiction” over its administration, interpretation and enforcement, including the distribution of the money, and approved a fee of 30 percent, $22.5 million. Boies called the case “a wake-up call for banks.” On November 9, 2023, the JPMorgan settlement came up for final approval over a last-minute objection from the attorneys general of sixteen states and the District of Columbia to a clause releasing the bank from future claims by any “sovereign or government” on behalf of women already in line for payment; Raul Torrez, New Mexico’s attorney general, wrote that the release “may have serious implications for future cases.” Boies answered that it would not serve survivors to “delay and renegotiate a huge recovery,” and Rakoff found the language “straightforward and justified” and approved the settlement for nearly 200 survivors, with a 30 percent fee of $87 million. “It should not be lost that this case sent a message, through this very substantial settlement,” he said, that banks “have a responsibility that perhaps was not fully recognized in the past,” and that “in my 27 years on the bench, I have not seen such a good settlement arrive in such a short order.” Simone Lelchuk, the claims administrator, agreed to report to him every three months on her decisions. “There are a tremendous amount of people who have been harmed here,” she told the court. “This was a fair and just resolution for the nearly 200 survivors who bravely came forward,” JPMorgan said.

Together the two funds held $365 million, more than twice the roughly $150 million that Epstein’s estate had paid to more than 125 survivors. Each settlement needed its own class definition, release, notice, confidential claim form, allocation rules, medical-lien procedure, treatment of public benefits and continuing supervision by the court, and each let class counsel litigate the recurring bank records and policies once while leaving every woman’s eligibility and amount to a confidential, individual process: she submitted a questionnaire and release rather than testifying in public, the materials were available in more than one language, the administrator decided eligibility and allocation independently, and medical liens and public benefits were handled inside the claims process. The two final approvals turned the financial record into enforceable funds run to pay each woman individually while protecting what she had disclosed. The firm’s team on the two cases was Boies, McCawley, Villacastin, Sabina Mariella, Daniel Crispino, Alexander Law, Virginia Su, Thomas McCawley, Josh Kolb and Olivia McKenzie. “This is a really shining example of the way that financial institutions going forward will have to be very mindful of not turning a blind eye to trafficking,” McCawley said.

An Account Opened in May 2013

The complaint against the third bank did not describe Epstein as its customer; it described the accounts of his co-conspirators, his associates and his victims. In May 2013, at the direction of Richard Kahn, Epstein’s accountant, a young woman who had met Epstein in 2011 while living in Russia opened an account at Bank of America. Kahn transferred about $14,000 into it and sent her rent money through it regularly; in 2015 his assistant told her that Epstein was adding her to the payroll of a “sham company” and that the money would arrive through the same account, and she did not know what the payments were for. Epstein and Kahn kept using accounts set up for her until 2019. From 2011 to 2019, she said, Epstein raped her, forcibly touched her and forced her into sex acts with other women on at least a hundred occasions, paid her repeatedly to further his trafficking, used her immigration status to control her, and wired his money into and out of her Bank of America accounts, more than 65 wires totaling $208,000 over several years. On October 15, 2025, as Jane Doe, a Florida resident, she sued the bank in the Southern District of New York on behalf of herself and the other women Epstein had abused, with McCawley, Boies and Villacastin and Edwards and Henderson as her counsel. McCawley said the suit meant “we are taking another important step forward toward justice for survivors.” Edwards said, “It is sad that only through lawsuits and Congress are we able to bring justice to this obvious problem.”

Doe’s amended complaint, filed in December after Rakoff had voiced skepticism about the original, alleged what else had moved through the bank: $170 million in cash transfers from Leon Black, then the chief executive of Apollo Global Management, to Epstein and his entities between 2013 and 2019, made without a known or apparent business reason and, the complaint said, “for several years were the primary means by which the sex-trafficking venture was funded”; a business operating account for MC2, the modeling agency owned by Jean-Luc Brunel and “financed entirely by Epstein”; and the arrival in 2016 of Paul Morris, who had been Epstein’s banker at JPMorgan and Deutsche Bank and whom the complaint called “intimately familiar with Epstein’s sex trafficking.” Kahn, it alleged, “often had to communicate with financial institutions on behalf of victims (including Jane Doe and other trafficking victims which should have raised other red flags),” and the bank “failed to timely file the SARs it was legally required to file until it was far too late”; the reports covering the Black transfers were filed in 2020. The bank, Doe alleged, “knowingly and intentionally benefited from the assistance and support it provided to Epstein, including from fees, referrals, and the development and preservation of relationships with Black and others.” Senator Ron Wyden had already written to the bank’s chief executive in April 2024 about its due diligence on $158 million in fees that Black paid Epstein for tax work from 2012 to 2017. The class period began on June 30, 2008, in the year of Epstein’s Florida guilty plea; the bank’s services and its monitoring of transactions after that date were what the claims concerned.

Bank of America moved to dismiss, calling the allegations “threadbare” and “razor-thin”; at best, it said, Doe had alleged that it banked high-net-worth clients affiliated with Epstein, which was “insufficient,” and she had identified no law-enforcement investigation that it had intentionally obstructed. Rakoff ruled on January 29, 2026, and explained himself in a 42-page opinion on February 11. Doe “plainly alleges,” he wrote, that the bank provided non-routine services that helped Epstein, among them letting her become a “premier” customer and move large sums while the bank “had every reason to know” that she had no way to earn legitimate income in the United States and that Epstein was behind the transfers; the way large sums passed through an account owned by “an impecunious young woman” “was surely enough to arouse suspicions and require inquiries, none of which Bank of America undertook.” The bank, he found, had plausibly “turned a blind eye to these repeated, detailed allegations” in the press by “utterly failing to engage in due diligence,” and one of its employees, the former Epstein banker, plausibly had “direct personal knowledge” of the venture. On the obstruction count he held that the deliberate failure to file suspicious-activity reports in and after 2019, once the federal investigation that produced Epstein’s arrest was public, plausibly alleged an intentional obstruction of that investigation. He dismissed the negligence counts as untimely and the counts that treated the bank as a perpetrator or an aider and abettor, and sent the two federal claims, knowing benefit and obstruction, toward a trial set for May 11. The bank said that “It’s important to understand the underlying facts have not been reviewed at this stage of the litigation. We look forward to a full review of the facts.”

Justice, Even If Partial

Black was not a defendant, but McCawley called him a “critical witness,” and his deposition was on the calendar for Monday, March 16, 2026. At a hearing the week before, Rakoff had pushed it back ten days because the parties were close; on the Monday itself, filings in Manhattan federal court disclosed that the bank had agreed to settle. Behind the filing were two mediation sessions before Layn Phillips, the retired federal judge, on February 20 and March 9, a settlement in principle on March 11 and a term sheet signed on March 15. The investigation that brought the bank to the table had taken, by the lawyers’ sworn account, more than ten thousand hours: confidential interviews of more than fifty people, dozens of survivors among them, in the United States and abroad; thousands of documents reviewed before filing and hundreds of thousands of pages produced and reviewed in discovery; ten depositions taken or defended, with more under way; and reports prepared or rebutted for nine expert witnesses. The Boies Schiller side of the team was Boies, McCawley, Villacastin and twenty other lawyers; Edwards and Henderson led their firm’s. McCawley paid tribute to the “brave and fearless voices” of the women and called the settlement “one more step on the road to much deserved justice.” Wyden called it “a step towards justice and a vindication of my staff’s investigation” and said the bank had “willfully looked the other way” as Black paid Epstein.

The stipulation of settlement, dated March 27, 2026, and signed for the class by Boies, McCawley, Villacastin, Rachael Schafer, Daniel Crispino, Megan Nyman, Edwards, Henderson and Dean Kaire, and for the bank by Jones Day, provided “$72,500,000 U.S. Dollars in cash to be paid by wire transfer to the Qualified Settlement Fund” for “all women who were sexually abused or trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, or by any person who is connected to or otherwise associated with Jeffrey Epstein” between June 30, 2008 and July 6, 2019, the day of his last arrest. Bank of America would also pay the costs of notice and administration outside the fund, including the settlement website, publication in USA Today and in Gazeta Wyborcza, and claim assistance, so that none of it came out of the money for the class. The bank maintained that it “did not participate in, assist, support, facilitate, or know of, Epstein’s criminal sex trafficking venture” and made “no admission of liability, fault, damages, or any form of wrongdoing whatsoever”; claims against Epstein’s estate and against the men who had abused class members were carved out of the release. Boies and Edwards told the court why the class should take the money now rather than try the case: “participation in trial is intrusive and burdensome for survivors of sexual abuse,” “trial testimony often requires survivors to revisit traumatic experiences and may implicate significant privacy concerns,” and “This Settlement avoids the need for potentially retraumatizing Class Members while still providing them a substantial recovery.” The sum, they wrote, “represents a lifechanging recovery for the Class Members, available to them now.”

Rakoff granted preliminary approval on April 2, 2026. “While it’s perhaps extremely likely that the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s monstrous acts can never be fully compensated,” he said, they “are entitled to receive just compensation from any person or entity” that had facilitated the trafficking, and “It’s not fair to penalize those persons or entities that were drawn into his wide orbit”; he wanted to make sure that “nobody is left out,” and he gave the lawyers until that Friday to compile a list of publications that could reach victims he said numbered in the hundreds. Boies estimated that at least 60 to 75 women might be eligible: “There may be more we haven’t identified.” A class member had until May 13 to opt out by signed letter and until June 12 to submit, online or by mail, a confidential questionnaire and release, available in English, Russian and French, signed under penalty of perjury and submitted only by the claimant herself; submitting it “does not guarantee that you will receive an allocation.” Simone K. Lelchuk, the fund administrator, would decide who qualified and how much each woman received, weighing the circumstances and severity of the abuse, the woman’s relationship with Epstein, her cooperation with investigations and the impact on her; she could ask to meet a claimant, her eligibility decision was final, and before paying she had to search for Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE and Veterans Affairs liens, which would reduce a payment. Any remainder would go to a charity chosen by the parties. The settlement website listed the class counsel: Sigrid McCawley and Andrew Villacastin of Boies Schiller Flexner at 55 Hudson Yards, and Brad Edwards and Brittany Henderson of Edwards Henderson in Fort Lauderdale.

On August 27, 2026, at the Daniel Patrick Moynihan courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, Rakoff heard three objectors argue that the deal was overbroad because it required them to give up related claims against the bank and other potential defendants without compensation, and that it should not cover claims materially different from Jane Doe’s. He rejected both arguments, found that “The settlement class has been properly served,” and granted final approval, saying the settlement would give many victims “substantial” compensation and “justice, even if partial.” The bank said the resolution let it “put this matter behind us” and provided “further closure for the plaintiffs,” and that it denied “each and all of the claims and contentions” in the suit. With JPMorgan’s $290 million and Deutsche Bank’s $75 million, the three bank settlements that McCawley’s team had brought before Rakoff in three years came to $437.5 million.

Virginia’s Law

Giuffre died in 2025. Her memoir, Nobody’s Girl, published after her death, recounts her recruitment at sixteen by Maxwell and what followed, and her nonprofit, SOAR, had made the statute of limitations one of its goals. McCawley had been arguing the point for years. “My position is that needs to be eviscerated,” she said of the limitations period; “There should be no window on the amount of time that it takes someone to come to terms with their abuse.” Boies’s answer, early in the Giuffre work, had been “Well Sigrid, we’re just going to have to change the law.” She drafted the bill. On February 10, 2026, at a morning news conference in Washington, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer and Representative Teresa Leger Fernández of New Mexico, chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, introduced the federal proposal known as “Virginia's Law,” named for Giuffre, with her family present; her brother Sky Roberts told the room, “Virginia’s Law is more than legislation. It is a change in the truest form.” Schumer said that “Justice should not expire” and that “healing does not run on a government clock.” Leger Fernández said that “It takes years for victims of abuse to feel safe enough to come forward,” that “time should never be a weapon in the abuser’s arsenal,” and, of Giuffre, “Her courage unlocked the first set of gates that were protecting the rich and powerful.” The bill eliminates the statute of limitations for key federal civil claims brought by survivors of trafficking and sexual exploitation and clarifies that traffickers cannot escape accountability by committing abuses in another jurisdiction; it would create a civil cause of action for certain crimes and eliminate limitations periods for specified civil actions. Senator Charles Schumer introduced it that day as S. 3815; the bill was read twice and referred to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where it remained as of August 2026. “The law just hasn’t caught up,” McCawley said. In her public advocacy on the enforcement of the trafficking laws she has pressed the same three points: that survivors disclose late, that powerful organizations keep secrets, and that a civil remedy has to stay within reach.

Oscar Reversed

McCawley’s first large results came in commercial class actions. In the shareholders’ securities-fraud case against Halliburton, the Fifth Circuit’s rule in Oscar Private Equity Investments v. Allegiance Telecom required plaintiffs to prove loss causation before a class could be certified. The firm took the question to the Supreme Court, and on June 6, 2011, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the Court that securities-fraud plaintiffs need not prove loss causation at class certification: “We hold that they need not.” The case went back up in 2014, and on June 23 of that year the Court kept the Basic presumption of reliance while holding that defendants “must be afforded an opportunity before class certification to defeat the presumption through evidence that an alleged misrepresentation did not actually affect the market price of the stock.” The litigation resolved for $100 million. “But instead, we took it to the United States Supreme Court and got Oscar reversed,” Boies said, and McCawley, he said, was a big part of that. In Pokorny v. Quixtar, the Amway fraud and racketeering case in the Northern District of California, the firm represented a class of several hundred thousand current and former distributors in the company’s multi-level marketing program; on November 3, 2010, the parties signed a settlement agreement providing economic and injunctive relief valued at $155 million and moved for its approval. Her other commercial work has included a multimillion-dollar international arbitration, actions across the country over the theft of an insurance company’s trade secrets, the defense of a Fortune 500 company in a nationwide class action that ended with a favorable ruling from the Colorado Supreme Court, lead-counsel roles in trust actions involving challenges over $2 billion, the defeat of an intellectual-property challenge to a national call-distribution company’s business model, the recovery of millions of dollars for employees, including an argument before the California Court of Appeal, and a constitutional challenge, on behalf of condominium associations, to provisions of a developer-owned project.

The pro bono work that first drew Boies’s attention continues. In July 2021 Sage Humphries, a Boston Ballet dancer, and Gina Menichino sued Mitchell Taylor Button in federal court in Nevada, and in September 2021 an amended complaint added his wife, Dusty Button, who had danced with Boston Ballet from 2012 to 2017, and three more plaintiffs, Rosemarie DeAngelo, Danielle Gutierrez and a minor identified as Jane Doe 100. Menichino had taken lessons from Taylor Button at thirteen and alleged that he assaulted her twice in 2010; Humphries alleged that Dusty Button held her down while her husband penetrated her without her consent, and that the couple enticed her across state lines with threats, intimidation and promises to advance her career in exchange for sex acts, which the complaint pleaded as sex trafficking. The Buttons’ lawyer, Marc Randazza, denied the allegations and moved to dismiss under Nevada’s statute of limitations; the court denied the motion. “Taylor and Dusty Button can no longer use the dance world to perpetrate their criminal behavior against young girls,” McCawley said. “Brave women are now coming forward and saying this must stop.” She represents the dancers without fee, and by the fall of 2025 the court had heard argument on summary judgment and the case was headed for trial. She has also represented Olympic snowboarders who alleged sexual abuse by their instructors; in September 2025 she and her partner Kenya Davis went to trial in the Southern District of New York for Drew Dixon against L.A. Reid; she defended the publicist Leslie Sloane and Vision PR in the defamation suit Justin Baldoni brought and won their dismissal; and she represents Blake Lively and her publicist in the dispute over the set of It Ends with Us.

Naples, Sixth Grade

She was born in upstate New York and moved to Naples, Florida, with her mother, Jean Pasker, and two older sisters as she entered sixth grade. Her mother raised the three girls alone, often working three jobs. “She just didn’t stop—ever,” McCawley says. At the University of Florida she took a bachelor’s degree in history with highest honors, served as Panhellenic president, was inducted into Florida Blue Key and the university’s Hall of Fame and received its Presidential Recognition for Outstanding Leadership; at its Levin College of Law she graduated with honors, competed on the trial team and worked on the International Law Journal. She clerked for Judge Jose A. Gonzalez Jr. of the Southern District of Florida. “Sigrid was very bright and always very determined,” the judge said years later. “I’m very happy for her success, but not at all surprised by it.” She served as liaison to Ambassador Richard N. Gardner on the President’s Advisory Committee on United States Trade Relations, worked briefly at Morgan Lewis & Bockius in Washington, and joined Boies Schiller’s Florida office as an associate in 2001; Boies has worked with her since. She had met her husband, Dan McCawley, a commercial real-estate lawyer who coaches their children’s teams, at a World Series watch party in 1997, and after two years in Washington they settled in Fort Lauderdale, his hometown, where they have lived in the same house for sixteen years with their four children, Kincaid, the twins Max and Zac, and Maddy. She chaired the board of ChildNet, which protects abused and neglected children in Broward County, from 2015 to 2017 and again from 2019 to 2020, served on the American Bar Association’s Commission for At Risk Youth in 2010, and sits on the boards of the Jack and Jill Children’s Center and the Broward Community Foundation. She is admitted in Florida, the District of Columbia and New York, and in 2020 The American Lawyer named her its Litigator of the Year.

She is a managing partner of Boies Schiller Flexner, with more than twenty years in complex litigation and arbitration, and in the Epstein matters her work has run from the first conversations with survivors through witness development, the financial investigation, class procedure, examinations, settlement negotiation and the design and running of the claims processes. She has described the representation as carrying the weight of a client’s life and trauma, and as requiring the lawyer to validate what happened. “The scars of that abuse don’t go away,” she says; they “resurface at different trigger points for different people.” She turns away many cases: “If I can’t take it, I’ll find them someone who will.” Boies: “I think that her genuine concern for them comes across and her total commitment to them comes across.” Dan McCawley: “Only Sigrid has clients who tell her they love her.” “She cares to a fault.” Dawn Schneider, her longtime adviser: “She walks what she talks.” Forbes wrote of one of her cases, “With ironclad interrogation skills, McCawley won the day hands-down.” “Most of the time, women have to try twice as hard as their male counterparts,” she says of the profession. What she wants for the women she represents she put plainly in 2020: “I want these women to feel satisfied that they have found some peace in this, and some justice in this.” What they have given her she put this way: “The survivors I’ve had the privilege of working with have changed me. They’ve given me hope.” The hope, she said, is “to survive those atrocities and still move forward, still fight, still live.” “That’s what keeps me going. It’s only made me a better person.”