A young woman erstwhile star entrepreneur, Charlie Javice, who was found guilty of defrauding one of the world’s largest banks, JPMorgan Chase, will be sentenced at a federal courthouse at Manhattan on Monday. 

While federal prosecutors are demanding a 12-year prison sentence and more than $300 million in restitution payments, Javice, now 33, asked the judge for mercy. In a letter she filed last week, she cited her grandmother, who is a Holocaust survivor, and her desire to have children. 

“While I still hope motherhood is in the cards for me, at this point I realize it is not guaranteed. Adjusting to this reality as I approach the age of 34 has been crushingly sad not only to me but also to my aging parents,” Javice wrote to the presiding district judge, Alvin Hellerstein, 91, in a letter filed last week.  

“My mom is now approaching the age at which my grandmother and great-grandmother were diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. The thought of not being there for my mom, or of not being able to give her grandchildren, is unbearable,” she added. 

If the judge decides to accept the prosecution’s recommendation and sentence Javice to 12 years in prison, she would be 45 years old when she is released, though many federal white collar offenders end up serving significantly less than their original sentences behind bars.

On March 28, after a five-week-long trial at the Southern District of New York, a jury found Javice and her company’s former chief growth officer, Olivier Amar, 49, guilty of bank fraud, wire fraud, securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit wire and bank fraud. 

Javice was in her mid-20s and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s prestigious Wharton undergraduate business program when she founded her start-up, Frank, in 2017. The online platform offered students a tool to navigate the notoriously arduous financial aid process by helping fill out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, a complex government form used to apply for aid for college or graduate school. 

The jury agreed with federal prosecutors that Javice had orchestrated a fraud when she told JPMorgan Chase executives that her company had more than four million users, when in reality it had fewer than 300,000. The bank, which was hoping to sell checking accounts and credit cards to young adults, purchased Frank for about $175 million in 2021.

About three weeks before the acquisition, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, personally met with Javice and enthusiastically told her “to get the deal done,” according to court documents. The fraud ultimately came to light when the bank began sending marketing emails to the users and found that the people named on the spreadsheets did not exist.

“For almost two years, Javice engaged in a brazen fraud, lying over and over about her company, Frank, and its customer base, in order to sell it for $175 million and make tens of millions of dollars for herself,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicholas Chiuchiolo wrote in his sentence submission, concluding that “the Court should sentence Javice … by imposing a term of 12 years’ imprisonment … and directing her to pay victim restitution.” 

The prosecutor asked that the court “order restitution to the victims in the amount of $300,922,397,” of which $283,462,397 should be paid to JPMorgan and $17,460,000 to the insurers. 

Defense attorneys disagreed with the calculation, describing in their court filing the “government’s proposed loss amount” as an “abstract arithmetic” and “entirely speculative.” Javice’s case, they wrote, “involved only a single sophisticated institutional counterparty, not ordinary investors, and caused no comparable hardship.” 

“Frank was a real company, not a fraud,” the defense wrote. “Its technology worked. It was free to use, simplified the bewildering FAFSA process, offered a suite of resources to college-bound students, and opened doors to higher education for individuals who might otherwise have been locked out.”   

During the trial the defense had pushed back against the fraud allegations, arguing that the bank knew exactly what it was buying, and that executives had buyer’s remorse after government regulations changed financial aid application procedures, making Frank’s technology inapplicable, and thus torpedoing the value of the investment. 

To punish Javice with a 12-year prison sentence is excessive, the defense wrote, arguing that “incarceration is not necessary ‘to protect the public from further crimes of the defendant.’” 

“Given the devastating and life-changing effects of this prosecution and the harsh lesson she has already learned, there is no risk of recidivism by Ms. Javice. Compounding these consequences with a period of incarceration would go beyond what is necessary to punish her for her role in the offense,” the attorneys wrote, saying that Javice had lost everything — her company, her career, and her reputation.   

In her letter, Javice reiterated that the last five years “have been defined by pain and loss—of my company, my career, my reputation, and many friendships.” 

But her original intention, she wrote, to help the student community was sincere, because she was raised to believe that “community and care are obligations, not options.” 

Born in Westchester County, an affluent suburb north of New York City, to a father who worked at a hedge fund and a mother who is a life-coach and a former teacher, Javice attended a private French-American school and later graduated from Wharton. 

“My life goals have always been rooted in service—a vision shaped by family,” her letter said. She detailed how she had started “a soup kitchen as a teenager,” worked in “a clinic for children with special needs,” helped “formerly incarcerated women find housing and jobs,” and initiated “apprenticeships for underserved youth in Israel.” 

It was her grandmother, she wrote, “who fled the Nazis,” who taught her that “education is the only thing you can take with you and the greatest gift one can give.” She added, “Frank was a culmination of everything I believed in.” 

Javice acknowledged the “poor choices” she made, and apologized for her mistakes.  

“I accept the jury’s verdict and take full responsibility for my actions. There are no excuses, only regret – I am truly sorry. At 28, I was out of my depth and made poor choices that still haunt me,” Javice wrote. 

Despite the remorse, Javice told the judge that she did not want the mistakes of her past to “define her future.”

“Still, hope is a stubborn thing,” she wrote. “As the day of my sentencing grows near, I am sustained by hope—hope that has been tested but never broken, and embodied in the words of Golda Meir: ‘Pessimism is a luxury that a Jew can never allow himself.’”  

Prosecutors were not moved. “Only on the eve of her sentencing does Javice now claim that she accepts responsibility,” they wrote. “Her self-serving assertions ring hollow when measured against her conduct.”

Last week, defense attorneys asked the judge to postpone the sentencing, citing health issues their client was dealing with. Judge Hellerstein requested further evidence as to what issues would prevent Javice, who relocated to Florida during the pandemic and is currently free on bail on a $2 million bond, from coming to New York. The court filing her lawyers then submitted was so heavily redacted that it was impossible to gather any comprehensible information.         

The judge denied the request, writing in his order that the evidence was “insufficient” and proved no “harm from a one-day appearance at sentencing.”

The defense team also requested that Javice remain free while they appeal her case, something that is not uncommon in white-collar, federal cases. The judge is expected to make a ruling on that matter during Monday’s hearing. 

The court docket also showed that Javice has hired an appeals attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, who recently argued in another case (in the same courthouse) that Sean “Diddy” Combs’s two prostitution convictions should be dismissed, as the Sun reported.

Javice’s defense is likely to raise on appeal that she did not receive a fair trial, because she was prosecuted together with her co-defendant, her company’s former top executive, Amar. 

Amar had argued during the trial that Javice had tricked him and that he was a victim of the scheme and not a co-conspirator. Javice’s attorneys said that their client was effectively facing two opponents in one trial, the government and Amar. 

The defense asked the judge to consider the two as “equal contributors to the conspiracy” and not punish Javice with a harsher sentence for having founded and led the company. 

“The Court should not apply a two-level role enhancement,” the defense attorneys wrote, “because Ms. Javice and Mr. Amar were equal partners in a two-person conspiracy.” 

A two-level role enhancement under Federal Sentencing Guidelines is an increase in a defendant’s offense level for being the leader of the crime. In their sentencing submission, defense attorneys argued at length that prosecutors had failed to show that “Javice directed or controlled Mr. Amar.”  

Amar is scheduled to be sentenced on October 20.