The US Department of Justice claims Charlie Javice defrauded JP Morgan out of millions.
John Minchillo/Associated Press
Charlie Javice says JP Morgan is withholding thousands of documents that could help her case.Javice also said the US government has ‘cherry-picked’ the evidence in its case against her.Javice is facing federal charges after JP Morgan claimed she defrauded them out of $175 million.
Charlie Javice, the founder of the student financial aid startup Frank, was hit with criminal charges earlier this year after the Department of Justice said she defrauded JP Morgan out of $175 million when it acquired her company.
Now, the 31-year-old claims JP Morgan has failed to produce “likely thousands” of documents that could help her defense. She also said the US government’s response has been “deliberate inaction,” according to a Friday court filing obtained by Insider.
The filing says the missing materials that should have been shared during discovery are “potentially exculpatory.”
Those materials include internal documents from JP Morgan about its acquisition of Frank and its internal investigation of the company, the filing said.
Javice also said that internal communications from JP Morgan are missing, including “Slack chat communications that appear to span entire days” and “communications in which Frank’s General Counsel and COO likely participated in a non-legal, business role,” according to the filing.
“The Government seems content to rest its entire complaint (and theory of the case) on JPMC’s cherry-picked set of documents,” the filing reads.
In April, the federal prosecutors charged Javice with making false claims and submitting false data to JP Morgan after the bank acquired Frank for $175 million.
“She lied directly to JPMC and fabricated data to support those lies — all in order to make over $45 million from the sale of her company,” Damian Williams, a US attorney, said in an April statement.
Prosecutors said Javice lied to JP Morgan about the number of people relying on her company. In 2021, Javice told the bank that Frank had 4.25 million users. But the bank claims the platform never had more than about 250,000, Insider previously reported.
Prosecutors said Javice fabricated these numbers by providing the bank with millions of student names and emails that were “all fake,” Insider previously reported.
An Insider investigation found that Javice had a pattern of exaggerating her successes throughout her career. In particular, she misrepresented the fact that her company could double the amount of aid students received by helping them fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) form, student financial aid expert Mark Kantrowitz previously told Insider.
“Frank did nothing that would have affected the amount of aid the students would have received had they filed the FAFSA on their own,” Kantrowitz said. “That would not have led to a doubling of the amount of financial aid.”
The Department of Justice did not respond to a request for comment from Insider ahead of publication.