Jes Staley’s wife files for divorce after ex-Barclays exec admits affair with Epstein employee: report
Jes Staley’s wife has filed for divorce a year after the former Barclays boss revealed he was unfaithful when testifying about his relationship with disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Debora Staley filed for divorce, which is currently under seal, on March 13 in New York after decades of marriage to the longtime bank executive, according to Bloomberg News.
Jes Staley, also a former JPMorgan executive, was fined about $1.4 million and banned from the British financial industry last year for downplaying his close relationship with Epstein.
Although Staley has repeatedly said she knew nothing about Epstein’s “horrendous activities,” she admitted she had consensual sex with one of Epstein’s employees — adding that she was “putting her marriage at risk” by being “open and honest.”
Staley’s attorney did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
Staley first met his wife while working for JPMorgan in Brazil in the 1980s, when Debora’s family founded Brazilian data center company Aceco TI – which landed Staley in hot water when the company was sold to KKR & Co in 2014.
Staley, then Barclays’ chief executive, spoke out in defense of his brother-in-law after he was fired from Aceco following the acquisition – which led to KKR withdrawing its business from Barclays, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Before taking the top job at Barclays, Staley was a top executive at JPMorgan for three decades – developing a close relationship with then-client Epstein, who died by suicide in a Manhattan jail in 2019 after being arrested on sex-trafficking charges.
After Epstein’s victims sued JPMorgan for allegedly profiting from his illegal sex-trafficking scheme, the bank sued Staley for allegedly withholding information about the serial pedophile that may have cost him a client.
The bank settled both victims and Staley in 2023.
Amid public controversy over his relationship with Epstein, Staley stepped down as CEO of Barclays in 2021 after six years at the British bank.
He was barred from working in the British financial industry last year for misrepresenting the closeness of his relationship with Epstein — at one point in a March 2011 email telling Epstein that he and Deborah considered them “deep friends.”
Staley has repeatedly denied allegations of wrongdoing in the friendship.
Last year, while filing for a financial industry ban, the banker testified that he had consensual sex with one of Epstein’s employees in a New York apartment – adding that he was putting his marriage “at risk” but was trying to be “open and honest.”
The judge in the case upheld the ban.
In a batch of Epstein files released by the Justice Department last month, Epstein asked an unidentified woman to buy a Snow White costume just weeks before the Disney princess was mentioned in an email from Staley.
“I would like to take pictures of you in a white Snow dress. You can find it in a clothing store,” Epstein wrote the woman on June 20, 2010, the first email reported by the Financial Times.
Three weeks later, Staley emailed Epstein: “That was great. Say hello to Snow White.”
During the court hearing, Staley denied any memory of referring to the women who were associated with Epstein as Disney characters or identifying people as “Snow White.”
Court documents in the JPMorgan case also revealed that Epstein used one of the Staleys’ two daughters, Alexa Staley, to communicate years after Staley took over at Barclays.
Epstein emailed Alexa five times, including a message in November 2016 to test whether her father was interested in becoming Treasury Secretary under President Trump, even though Epstein had no role in Trump’s transition team, according to legal documents.
Alexa forwarded the email to her father and he replied that he had spoken to her but said “not yet, but thank you.”
