‘The Butterfly Trust’: How Deutsche Bank maintained Jeffrey Epstein as a client until he was arrested

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https://fortune.com/2026/05/17/jeffrey- ... an-sewing/

On a Friday morning in May 2019, months after Deutsche Bank claimed to have severed its relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and just weeks before he was arrested, one of the financier’s longtime bankers sat at his desk in Deutsche Bank’s midtown Manhattan headquarters, scrolling through the bank’s internal systems. The numbers on his screen didn’t match the story his institution had begun telling the outside world.

“Since the client intends to have the rest of their accounts closed this week or next, let’s agree on what is still open,” Stewart Oldfield, then a director in Deutsche Bank’s U.S. wealth unit, wrote to colleagues on May 10, under the subject line, “Epstein account closure.” He added a line that showed the bank had still not made a clean break with Epstein: “I think some of the accounts are zero balance but still open.” Oldfield’s messages were contained in the cache of 3 million files on Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice.

Oldfield didn’t respond to repeated Fortune requests for comment.