• Lawyers for Charlie Javice on Friday moved for a mistrial in her fraud case.
• Defense argued her right to a fair trial was "compromised" after opening statements were shortened.
• Prosecutors allege Javice defrauded JPMorgan Chase before it bought her student aid startup, Frank.

Lawyers for Charlie Javice on Friday moved for a mistrial in the fraud case against her, arguing her right to a fair trial had been "irreparably compromised."

Her lawyers argued that Javice's right to a fair trial was compromised when the judge unexpectedly ordered her defense counsel's opening statement to be shortened, which they called a violation of her Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights.

"Our motion for a mistrial was based on the fundamental principle that Ms. Javice has a constitutional right to a fair trial, which includes adequate time for her counsel to present a full and complete opening statement," a representative for Javice's legal team told Business Insider. "The abrupt and unexplained reduction in our time significantly hindered our ability to provide the jury with a clear and comprehensive presentation of the facts and legal arguments central to this case."

In addition to having the defense's opening statement cut short, Javice's lawyers argue that the court misstated jury instructions regarding the elements of wire fraud, which prejudiced them against the defendant.

The court told the jury that, in order to convict on the wire and bank fraud charges facing Javice, the government has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Javice made intentional false and misleading statements with the intention to deceive, her lawyers say.

However, her lawyers argued in their motion for a mistrial that the court did not adequately inform the jury panel about a key element of the law, which requires the government to prove any false statements amounted to material misrepresentations — a higher legal standard requiring the prosecutors to prove a reasonable person would have been convinced to act due to the false claims and that the false claims were relied on when deciding to enter the deal.

"To guarantee Ms. Javice's Fifth Amendment rights, a mistrial is the only appropriate remedy," the motion from Javice's attorneys says.

The mistrial motion stems from the trial's opening statements, which began Thursday in the fraud case against Javice and her Olivier Amar, who prosecutors say defrauded JPMorgan Chase before it bought the student aid startup.

Javice and Amar are charged with bank fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud after prosecutors say they exaggerated the customer base of their student loan-focused fintech startup in an effort to trick the bank into buying it.

JPMorgan Chase bought Frank in 2021 for $175 million after Javice and Amar said the company had more than 4 million users — a number that prosecutors now argue had been artificially inflated.

Representatives for the US Attorney's Office Southern District of New York did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• A lawyer for Charlie Javice told jurors JPMorgan Chase didn't do enough to vet her startup.
• Prosecutors said Javice defrauded JPMorgan Chase before it bought Frank.
• In openings, prosecutors painted her as a fraud. Her lawyer called her an "incredible young woman."

Prosecutors told a federal jury Thursday that Frank's founder Charlie Javice and her second in command, Olivier Amar, earned millions by defrauding JPMorgan Chase.

The bank purchased the company in 2021 for $175 million after the then-executives said Frank had more than 4 million users.

Prosecutors say that those numbers were dramatically inflated.

"They had nothing close to that," US Attorney Rushmi Bhaskaran said on Thursday. "Through these lies, the defendants became multimillionaires."

Bhaskaran added that the duo "made up fake data" to bolster their user base and then tried to cover it up.

Attorneys for Javice and Amar, who were charged separately, painted a different picture.

Jose Baez, one of Javice's attorneys, said JPMorgan didn't do enough due diligence before purchasing Frank, calling it a "business deal that went wrong."

He called Javice an "incredible young woman" who, at age 28, was savvy enough to secure a one-on-one meeting with Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan's CEO.

Baez added that the acquisition was more about acquiring Javice herself than Frank's users.

"They saw something in Charlie, a young female CEO breaking the glass ceiling," Baez said. "That's what JPMorgan negotiated for, and that's what they got."

Meanwhile, Amar's attorney, Jonathan Cogan, referred to his client as an "innocent man" who was dragged into his boss' problems after the prosecution "lumped them together."

Amar, who appeared stoic through much of the proceedings, nodded subtly while Cogan reminded the jury that he's innocent until proven guilty.

"Sometimes, our government gets it wrong," Cogan said. "Sometimes, prosecutors can be overzealous. Sometimes, innocent people get swept up."

Opening statements in the lower Manhattan trial came after nearly two days of jury selection.

Before being selected, jurors were questioned at hushed sidebars about their personal lives, including whether they had ever worked in finance, been a victim of fraud, or had close personal or business relationships with people such as Dimon.

Some prospective jurors were excused after saying that they worked for JPMorgan or other banks. Another was excused after saying she enjoyed watching shows about scams and thinking about the psychology that motivates fraudsters.

"This is not an easy procedure. It was difficult. It took longer than I expected," District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said after the 12 jurors and 4 alternates were selected Thursday.

The jury and its alternates include people who told the judge they worked in sales management or IT, as well as some who worked for the city of New York. Others worked in healthcare or had no job.

Throughout the voir dire process, Javice — dressed in a blouse and pencil skirt — smiled in the direction of jurors and took frequent notes. She appeared personable and chatted with the attorneys on each side of her, playing with her hair while talking.

The trial of Javice and Amar continues Friday.

Correction: February 21, 2025 — Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story misspelled the name of a defendant. Olivier Amar is on trial, not Oliver Amar.

• Charlie Javice is on trial over fraud claims after selling the student aid startup Frank to JPMorgan.
• BI saw an email from Javice's legal team asking colleagues not to discuss the case at work.
• A partner wrote that Javice, "a young woman who looks like one of us," might overhear any remarks.

Lawyers at Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan were urged to keep quiet around the office about Charlie Javice ahead of the startup founder's criminal fraud trial — lest the defendant herself should overhear them.

In an email to the firm's New York office sent Friday, Sara Clark, a Quinn Emanuel partner working on Javice's legal team, reminded colleagues that the trial for Javice, the now-31-year-old who founded the college financial aid startup Frank, would begin in Manhattan on Tuesday and that "the case is somewhat high profile."

"Our client, Charlie Javice, is a young woman who looks like one of us, and will be around the office the next few weeks," Clark wrote. Javice's legal team includes lawyers from the law firms Quinn Emanuel and Mintz, as well as the Harvard law professor Ronald Sullivan Jr. and the criminal defense attorney Jose Baez, who successfully defended Casey Anthony.

Adding that lawyers from Mintz would also probably be in the building, Clark asked employees to "not comment on the Javice case in public spaces or in any capacity in which you could be overheard by the client or our co-counsel," saying: "We appreciate your discretion."

"We strive to maintain a high level of confidentiality and respect when hosting clients," Quinn Emanuel said in a statement. "It's a large law firm, and this client is at our office for an extended period of time, of a similar in age to many of the associates and junior partners in our office, and dressed for court."

Javice, a Wharton grad, was a rising tech superstar who founded Frank in 2017. She received glowing press and a spot on the Forbes "30 Under 30" list. After JPMorgan purchased the startup for $175 million in 2021, partly to gain access to its users, the bank became suspicious that Javice and the Frank executive Olivier Amar had inflated their user base to boost the company's value.

In January 2023, JPMorgan sued Javice and Amar, alleging that they had used "synthetic data" to fabricate millions of customers who didn't exist. A few months later, the Justice Department and securities regulators also filed complaints against Javice, alleging wire fraud and bank fraud, among other charges. Since then, Javice had been out on a $2 million bond in Miami while awaiting the criminal trial in Manhattan. In November, in a letter to the judge, one of Javice's attorneys asked the court to remove the requirement that she wear a GPS ankle monitor because it "impeded her work as a fitness instructor." (The judge agreed.)

The trial is expected to last about four weeks. In a pretrial hearing, US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein denied a request to grant Javice and Amar separate trials. Javice's team made the request upon learning that Amar planned to launch what it called an "antagonistic" defense against its client. The judge also barred prosecutors from mentioning Theranos or its founder, Elizabeth Holmes. In particular, he said prosecutors could not introduce WhatsApp messages between Javice and Amar in which Javice said she hoped for "light sentencing" for Holmes and said Theranos investors should be blamed for "letting a 19 year old go rogue."

The prosecution has also taken issue with Javice's legal team. On Tuesday morning, the acting US attorney in Manhattan asked a judge overseeing the case to clamp down on public commentary from Javice's legal team. The letter came after the Financial Times quoted a spokesperson for Baez, one of the defense lawyers, as saying that claims about Frank inflating its users could be undercut by a Google search.

"Focus on the July 2021 timeframe and I think you'll find about two dozen articles" that refer to Frank having hundreds of thousands of users, not millions, the spokesperson was quoted as saying. "It was out there in public."

Prosecutors said the comment was improper because it invited "potential jurors to conduct their own inquiry into factual matters well beyond the scope of admissible evidence."

Both Javice and Amar could face prison time if convicted, with bank fraud, the most serious of the charges, carrying a sentence of up to 30 years. Both have pleaded not guilty.

• The feds say Javice tricked JPMorgan Chase into paying $175M for her financial aid startup, Frank.
• On Tuesday, a Manhattan judge set parameters for a February 18 criminal trial.
• No one can mention Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, he ruled — unless Javice opens the door.

Charlie Javice — the young tech entrepreneur accused of tricking the nation's largest bank into paying $175 million for her college financial-aid startup — once had a lot to say about Theranos fraudster Elizabeth Holmes.

Javice called Holmes' defrauded investors "sophisticated assholes," and complained that "investors should be blamed," according to a pair of WhatsApp messages that were discussed at a pretrial hearing in Manhattan on Tuesday.

When Javice and her ex-number two at their startup, Frank, go on trial for allegedly defrauding JPMorgan Chase later this month, federal prosecutors will be barred from making any mention of Theranos or Holmes, a judge ruled during the hearing.

And those WhatsApp messages between Javice and codefendant Olivier Amar, in particular, are definitely not coming into evidence, he said, unless either defendant opens the door by mentioning them on the witness stand.

"The potential for prejudice outweighs anything probative," US District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein said in precluding the use of the two messages that prosecutors had optimistically labeled "Government Exhibit 802."

The two WhatsApp messages are from 2022, "in the midst of their own efforts to defraud JPMC," the government alleged in court papers last week, in asking the judge to allow the "highly probative" texts into evidence at a trial scheduled to begin February 18.

Federal prosecutors allege that over months of negotiations, Javice and Amar repeatedly lied to Chase about the success of Frank, a for-profit tech company that Javice launched at age 24 and which featured software to help students apply for college financial aid.

Javice fraudulently claimed that Fank had 4.5 million customers, prosecutors allege, and created fake spreadsheets to trick the bank into believing they existed. She personally stood to gain $45 million in stock and salary from the deal, according to prosecutors.

"The government seeks only to offer the defendants' own statements about the defendants' own contemporaneous views about Holmes' criminal conduct, while in the midst of concealing the defendants' own criminal conspiracy," federal prosecutors wrote in asking last week for the judge's permission to use the WhatsApp messages as trial evidence.

In the messages, Javice and Amar are "calling the conviction 'dangerous,' and repeating many of the defenses they intend in their own case," prosecutors wrote.

That includes what prosecutors call a blame-the-victim defense.

"Investors should be blamed on letting a 19-year-old go rogue," Javice commiserated with Amar in the messages, referring to Holmes, who founded Theranos at age 19.

Perhaps most damagingly, the texts appear to show Javice drawing a distinction between a health-based fraud, like the one Holmes was convicted of, and a fraud based on financial aid.

"I think health is different," Javice tells her number two in the first of the two contested, and now stricken, WhatsApp messages.

"They talk about how she was unfairly treated," Assistant US Attorney Georgia V. Kostopoulos told the judge Tuesday, in her failed argument for admitting the messages.

"They say health is different" the prosecutor told the judge. "They're saying that it's different to lie about patients' health data than it is to lie about student data."

In their own court filings, defense lawyers for Javice and Amar had asked the judge to bar any mention at trial of "well-known, unrelated third parties convicted of fraud, specifically Elizabeth Holmes, Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Martim Skreli, which the government has signaled it intends to introduce in its case-in-chief."

Federal prosecutors say they have no intention of mentioning any of these infamous fradusters at trial.

Javice, who was once on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list, recently lost a bid to be tried separately from Amar. It was revealed at a court hearing last month that Amar plans to go on the offensive against Javice during the trial.

Both Javice and Amar have pleaded not guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit securities, wire, and bank fraud.