It’s her own application for federal aid.
Fallen fintech phenom Charlie Javice, convicted of tricking JPMorgan Chase into paying $175 million for Frank, her student financial aid website, is asking a federal judge for a no-jail sentence and zero restitution.
Late Monday, lawyers for Javice, 33, filed nearly 300 pages of legal arguments and support letters ahead of her scheduled September 29 sentencing on four counts of defrauding the largest US bank.
A Manhattan jury found in March that Javice falsely told JPMorgan that Frank possessed contact data for more than 4 million high school and early college students, a database that bank officials were eager to target with marketing pitches. In fact, as the bank later realized, Frank had data for just under 300,000 students.
Javice’s presentencing submission cites her Holocaust-surviving grandmother, her yearslong struggles with infertility, and a commitment to charity that began, according to her mother, in grade school.
Javice, who grew up in White Plains, New York, was 7 when she “slipped into” a local soup kitchen and started serving meals.
“By nine, she was essentially running the place — organizing volunteers, assigning stations, making sure everyone was fed,” the mother, Natalie Rosin, wrote in one of 114 support letters from friends and family.
At 14, she was protesting the genocide in Darfur, and at 16, “she helped build an orphanage and taught English to Karen refugee children in Thailand,” her father, Didier Javice, wrote.
Javice’s grandmother, a Holocaust survivor, “often said that the only thing she carried from Europe was her education,” her lawyers wrote. “Ms. Javice built Frank on that conviction, seeing education as survival, dignity, and freedom.”
Crystal Behar, owner of the Miami studio where Javice taught Pilates, described how Javice sometimes taught for free and always “makes everyone feel important.”
“You should see the smiles (and the sweat!) when class wraps up,” the studio owner wrote.
Even Javice’s OB-GYN joined the leniency effort, writing about the “hope, the heartbreak, the courage” of her patient’s “IVF journey.”
“Her dreams of motherhood have been put on hold,” said a letter to the judge from her longtime partner, Elliot Bertram.
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“She is so much more than her worst moment,” he wrote. “She is kindness, resilience, and hope. She is someone who, even now, believes in the possibility of redemption and the power of second chances. I ask you, with all the humility and love I can muster, to show mercy. Let her remain with those who need her most. I promise you, she will make that chance matter.”
Javice’s lawyers separately submitted an 83-page filing signed by attorney Sara Clark of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan in Miami and Houston.
It calls Javice, “a 33-year-old woman whose life has been defined by service to others, whose company brought hope to hundreds of thousands of first-generation college students, and whose singular lapse in judgment at age 28 now threatens to erase not just her future, but the future of the family she hopes to create.”
The presentencing submission argues for “a sentence substantially below” the 12 years recommended by federal prosecutors.
Federal probation officials have separately told US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein that the bank’s loss from the fraud totals $197 million.
“Ms. Javice objects to any restitution generally,” her lawyers wrote in a separate response to federal probation officials’ recommendation for a still-higher $299 million in restitution.
JPMorgan “obtained real economic value” when it purchased Frank, which had value beyond its student client list, Clark argued.
“Even Elizabeth Holmes, whose fraud endangered health and defrauded multiple investors of $120 million, received only 135 months’ incarceration,” amounting to just over 11 years, the lawyer wrote.
Prosecutors in Javice’s case were barred by the judge from showing the jury texts in which she and her second-in-command codefendant, Olivier Amar, commented in real time on Holmes’ 2022 sentencing.
“Discrimination at its finest,” Javice had texted Amar. “She defrauded sophisticated assholes where it was a blimp of nothing.”
