Denise George

Denise George was the Attorney General of the U.S. Virgin Islands from May 2019 to December 31, 2022, after more than eighteen years as an assistant attorney general and prosecutor in the territory's Department of Justice. Governor Albert Bryan Jr. nominated her in March 2019, and she took office in May, weeks before Jeffrey Epstein's July 2019 federal arrest. She brought the territory's January 2020 civil enforcement suit against Epstein's estate and its December 2022 suit against JPMorgan Chase. Bryan fired her on December 31, 2022, four days after the JPMorgan filing. In an October 2023 interview with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, George said Bryan had asked her to grant Epstein a waiver of the territory's sex-offender travel-notice rule and later pressed her to settle the estate case for 80 million dollars through a mediator of his choosing; Bryan has said Epstein received no special privilege from his administration.¹²³⁴

Litigation Against the Epstein Estate

George filed the territory's case against Epstein's estate on January 15, 2020, in the Superior Court of the Virgin Islands, under the Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, the territory's racketeering statute. The complaint alleged that Epstein created a network of shell companies, charitable organizations, and individuals that participated in a decades-long pattern of trafficking and sexual abuse of girls and young women at his Virgin Islands properties. She later amended the action to add the estate co-executors Darren Indyke and Richard Kahn, Southern Trust Company, and other Epstein-created entities as co-defendants.⁵⁶

The case settled on December 1, 2022. The estate agreed to pay the territory 105 million dollars in cash, to return "more than $80 million in economic development tax benefits that Epstein and his co-defendants fraudulently obtained" through Southern Trust Company's Economic Development Commission certificate (the complaint put the taxes avoided at 80,576,236 dollars), to give the territory half the proceeds of the sale of Little St. James, which came to about 11 million dollars, and to pay 450,000 dollars for environmental remediation on Great St. James. The settlement resolved only the claims against the estate and the named co-defendants. Motley Rice, the territory's contingency counsel, stood to receive more than 23 million dollars of the 105 million.³⁷⁸ George stated that the settlement restored the faith of the people of the Virgin Islands that its laws would be enforced against those who break them. In January 2023 the financier Leon Black agreed to pay the territory 62.5 million dollars to resolve potential Epstein-related claims.⁶⁹

Suit Against JPMorgan Chase and Firing

George filed the territory's suit against JPMorgan Chase on December 27, 2022 in federal court in Manhattan, alleging that the bank knowingly facilitated, sustained, and concealed Epstein's trafficking and benefited financially from the relationship. The complaint invoked the federal Trafficking Victims Protection Act, the territory's Criminally Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the Virgin Islands consumer-protection statute, and the territory later sought 190 million dollars from the bank. The case settled in September 2023, with JPMorgan paying 75 million dollars to the Virgin Islands and 290 million dollars to Epstein's victims.¹¹⁰

Governor Bryan fired George on December 31, 2022, four days after the JPMorgan filing and roughly four weeks after the estate settlement closed. Bryan said the firing was unrelated to the suit, but acknowledged that George had filed the action against the largest U.S. bank without first informing him, and stated that he could not have an attorney general launching lawsuits he did not know about. Bryan appointed the Chief Deputy Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs, who had worked on the estate case with George, to serve in the role on an acting basis.²⁶¹¹

George later said she felt pressure to resolve the matters quickly and to avoid being part of a cover-up, telling Fortune in November 2023 that her bar license and her integrity were more important to her than the position, and that she would lose her job rather than be part of a conspiracy to conceal anything. Her account that she had felt threatened during the litigation drew renewed attention after the Justice Department's 2025 and 2026 Epstein file releases.¹¹²

Career Before the Attorney General's Office

George is a native Virgin Islander. She served more than eighteen years as an assistant attorney general and trial attorney in the criminal, civil, family, juvenile, white-collar, and public-corruption divisions of the territory's Department of Justice, and for more than thirteen years as director and lead prosecutor of its White Collar Crime and Corruption Division. As a member of the Child Abuse Task Force she co-authored the territory's first criminal child-abuse and neglect statute.⁶

Following Epstein's July 2019 arrest, George told the Virgin Islands Daily News that a civil claim filed in New York alleging abuse on Little St. James was not enough to open a local investigation: "It's not based on that type of hearsay, or news reports from another jurisdiction." She said an investigation could be opened if the woman filed a complaint.⁴

The Travel Waiver

Registered sex offenders in the territory must generally give 21 days' notice before travel. George's predecessor Vincent Frazer had allowed Epstein to give 24 hours' notice, an arrangement George told the FBI she believed Frazer granted under pressure from Governor John de Jongh, whose wife Cecile de Jongh managed Epstein's territorial office. Acting Attorney General Carol Thomas-Jacobs rescinded the arrangement in March 2019 after Epstein was detained in the Dominican Republic.³

According to the FBI's notes of its October 2, 2023 interview with George, released by the Justice Department on January 30, 2026, Bryan told her within her first two weeks in office that Epstein "wanted a waiver for a 21 day reporting requirement" and texted her that "you need to make a decision on the Epstein matter." She did not grant the waiver, and Bryan answered by email, "Thank you for your work on this." In July 2019 Epstein's attorney Erika Kellerhals asked George for a meeting about the waiver; Epstein's arrest on July 6 preceded it. The territory's complaint later alleged that at his last address verification, in July 2018, Epstein had refused to let territorial investigators and U.S. Marshals past the dock of Little St. James, calling it his "front door," and that his March 2019 travel notice for a ten-day trip to France omitted stops in Vienna and Monaco.³⁷

Pressure Over the Estate Case

George told the FBI that she consulted Bryan before filing the estate case and that he told her, "He's dead go for it." She retained Motley Rice, whose forensic accountants traced companies and LLCs connected to Southern Trust. According to the FBI notes, her investigation concluded that the co-executors Kahn and Indyke "were participants in the human trafficking operation," and that "INDYKE was in charge of coordinating female to female marriages to gain immigration status in the United States. The females would be threatened if they attempted divorce." Kahn and Indyke were not charged and have denied wrongdoing. Estate employees, George said, "had nondisclosure agreements and were informed if questioned by law enforcement to say nothing and alert Kellerhals." When Motley Rice began interviewing them, Bryan's chief legal counsel David Bornn, a former Kellerhals employee, called George to relay that Kellerhals wanted to know what she was investigating; George replied that it was none of Kellerhals's business.³

George said Bryan's "original tone of 'Go for it' changed to 'End it quickly,'" that he questioned why she was interviewing certain people and requesting documents, and that he said, "originally when I said go ahead I didn't think it was going to go this far. I can't get you to let this go?" According to the FBI notes, he told her to settle for 80 million dollars "and to pursue mediation and select Henry Smock" as mediator, told her "that the Epstein estate just wanted to clear people," and later said "he was sick of her not doing what she was told to do." Henry Smock had assisted Epstein in the 1998 purchase of Little St. James and served as counsel to the Virgin Islands Economic Development Authority board. George said Bryan sent Carlton Dowe, director of the Virgin Islands Port Authority, to urge a settlement; she told Dowe that Bryan "would have to fire her to get what he wants," and Dowe replied that "it would be political suicide to fire her at least before the election." The estate settled weeks after the November 2022 election for 105 million dollars.³⁶

Early in the case George intervened in the victim compensation program the estate proposed in November 2019, which required claimants to release claims against "any person or entity arising from or related to Mr. Epstein's conduct"; the territory alleged the program would "shield its participants from liability." After the intervention an advocate was retained for claimants, and the fund's independent administrator paid nearly 125 million dollars to about 150 women.⁶⁷

After the Firing

George told the FBI that "several reasons were provided to the press but a listed reason was that no attorney general was going to file anything without notifying the Governor." After she gave news interviews about her tenure she received a cease-and-desist letter, and an unknown man came to her house, which she took as "a message that we can reach you at your home." She later joined the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Virgin Islands as a federal prosecutor. Government House spokespersons did not respond to questions about the FBI notes; Bryan later called the account "noise" and nothing new, and said at a March 2, 2026 briefing that the record "shows no instance where he was afforded any special privilege by this administration."³⁴

The JPMorgan case was carried to settlement by her successors, including Attorney General Ariel Smith, who had been Civil Division chief on the estate case. In 2024 Bryan appointed Gordon Rhea, who had represented Kahn in the estate litigation, as attorney general; Rhea said he would recuse himself from Epstein matters. The territory received about 180 million dollars in Epstein-related settlements after Motley Rice's fees, and as of January 2026 the Bryan administration had not filed the full accounting of the money that a 2024 territorial law requires.³⁴⁶