Jes Staley’s wife has filed for divorce just about a year after the former Barclays boss revealed he had been unfaithful during testimony over his ties to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Debora Staley filed a divorce petition, 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, who was also an exec at JPMorgan, was fined about $1.4 million and banned from Britain’s financial industry last year for downplaying his close relationship with Epstein.
Though Staley has repeatedly said he knew nothing about Epstein’s “monstrous activities,” he admitted to having consensual sex with one of Epstein’s staffers – adding that he was putting his marriage “at risk” by being “open and honest.”
A lawyer for Staley 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, where Debora’s family had founded Brazilian data center firm Aceco TI – which landed Staley in hot water when the company was sold to KKR & Co in 2014.
Staley, then CEO of Barclays, spoke out in defense of his brother-in-law after he was fired from Aceco following the acquisition – leading KKR to pull its business from Barclays, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Before taking the top spot at Barclays, Staley was a top executive at JPMorgan for three decades – forming a close relationship with then-client Epstein, who died by suicide in a Manhattan prison cell in 2019 after his arrest on sex trafficking charges.
After Epstein’s victims sued JPMorgan over accusations it knowingly profited from his illicit sex-trafficking scheme, the bank sued Staley for allegedly covering up information about the serial pedophile that might have gotten him dropped as a client earlier on.
The bank settled with both the victims and Staley in 2023.
Amid the public fallout from his ties to Epstein, Staley stepped down as CEO of Barclays in 2021 after six years at the British bank.
He was banned from working in the British financial industry altogether last year for mischaracterizing the closeness of his relationship with Epstein – at one point in a March 2011 email telling Epstein that he and Debora counted him among their “deepest friends.”
Staley has repeatedly denied allegations of wrongdoing to the friendship.
Last year, during his appeal of the financial industry ban, the banker testified that he had consensual sex with one of Epstein’s staffers at an apartment in New York – 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 Department of Justice 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 love to take photos of you in a Snow White costume. You can get it from the costume store,” Epstein wrote the woman in a June 20, 2010, email first reported by the Financial Times.
Three weeks later, Staley emailed Epstein: “that was fun. Say hi to Snow White.”
During court proceedings, Staley denied any memory of referring to women accompanying Epstein as Disney characters or identifying individuals as “Snow White.”
Court documents in the JPMorgan case also revealed that Epstein used one of the Staleys’ two daughters, Alexa Staley, to stay in touch for years after Staley took the helm at Barclays.
Epstein emailed Alexa five times, including a message in November 2016 to gauge whether her dad was interested in becoming Treasury Secretary during President Trump’s first term, though Epstein did not have a role in Trump’s transition team, according to legal documents.
Alexa relayed the email to her father and replied that she had spoken with him but that he had said “not yet, but thanks.”
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