It took Jennifer Sharkey more than eight years to get a trial over her dismissal from JPMorgan Chase & Co. A Manhattan jury took only five hours to find the former wealth manager was fired illegally and award her $1.13 million in damages. Now, a judge may throw the verdict out and, without a settlement, Sharkey could end up where she started.
A jury of five women and three men Tuesday found Sharkey was fired in retaliation for threatening to dump a client and that the bank violated whistle-blower protections in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The panel rejected the bank’s claim that Sharkey was dismissed because she lied to her boss on multiple occasions. Sharkey was awarded $563,000 in backpay and $563,000 for emotional damage.
That was before lunch on Tuesday. Later in the day, U.S. District Judge Denise Cote called the verdict "substantially flawed" and told both sides she will likely have to order a new trial unless they manage to hammer out a settlement.
"The award of emotional damages says to me that the jury was prejudiced against the bank," Cote said after JPMorgan Chase asked her to throw out the jury verdict. "That undermines the entire verdict."
Both sides declined to comment after the hearing.
Sharkey claimed she was let go in 2009 after telling her superiors she planned to end JPMorgan Chase’s relationship with a client who had about $14 million at the bank. She testified she was worried the diamond seller who had also founded a phone calling-card business might have been involved in fraud and money laundering.
“I was fired the next day,” Sharkey testified in Manhattan federal court.
The case marked a rare trial of Sarbanes-Oxley whistle-blower claims in a dispute that got its start in the months following the discovery that Bernard Madoff used JPMorgan Chase bank accounts in his Ponzi scheme. Because of a pretrial ruling by the judge, Sharkey wasn’t allowed to testify about client-screening procedures at JPMorgan Chase in the wake of the Madoff fraud.
"Of course I’m very happy -- 8 1/2 years," Sharkey said before the jury’s verdict was upended by the judge.
Sharkey got her day in court after years of delays, including two appeals that reinstated her claims. A judge who said at a pretrial hearing that he’d “do anything to get rid of this case” was replaced with Cote.