Feature writing

It’s the legal drama gripping New York, as an ex-employee of JP Morgan sues for millions over lurid allegations. Tim Teeman on Wall Street laid bare.

In the 1994 film Disclosure, in which Demi Moore played a female boss sexually harassing a male subordinate, played by Michael Douglas, his character’s lawyer tells him: “Sexual harassment is not about sex. It is about power. She has it; you don’t.”

Disclosure garnered a mixed critical reception but its stars and subject matter guaranteed something more valuable: the free publicity attendant on a film with its finger pressed hard on a hot-button social issue. Flipping on its head the entrenched historical reality of male bosses harassing junior female colleagues, it portrayed the triumphantly ascendant career woman of the 1990s as just as ruthlessly abusive as her male counterpart — the dark flipside of feminist progress and workplace equality.

Fast forward 30-plus years, add in Wall Street (not the film starring Douglas but the actual place, the banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) and the allegations of sex slavery, enforced drugging and menacing racist threats contained in a bombshell lawsuit, and you have the latest sex scandal roiling
Manhattan’s financial world.

That familiar, and statistically more prevalent, male-on-female harassment narrative has once again been reversed. One of its central characters is a female boss, the 37-year-old JPMC executive director Lorna Hajdini, who is alleged to have viciously sexually harassed a male subordinate. The allegations have become “the talk of Wall Street”, as The New York Times put it.

As the alleged victim — Chirayu Rana, 35, a former vice-president in JPMorgan’s leveraged finance division — experiences having his own past and career placed under the media microscope, it was reported by The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday that JPMC had been prepared to pay him off to the tune of $1 million to settle his complaint. Rana’s lawyer, Daniel J Kaiser, reportedly tried to counter with an $11.75 million proposal.

The two sides “could not come to terms”, two people briefed on the negotiations told The New York Times, and Rana’s lawsuit, the details of which were originally reported in the Daily Mail, was filed in New York State Supreme Court last week, with the complainant – before his true identity was revealed this week — using a pseudonym, John Doe.

In the lawsuit, the lower-ranking and married Rana accused Hajdini of coercing him into “non-consensual and humiliating sex acts” for months. Rana also said Hajdini had drugged him on multiple occasions while subjecting him to racial abuse. (Rana is of Nepalese descent.)

The alleged harassment began in May 2024 when, according to the lawsuit, Hajdini dropped her pen next to Rana and squeezed his calf as she bent to pick it up, allegedly saying, “Oh, you did play basketball in college?… I love basketball players… they get me so wet.” That same month, after Rana allegedly declined Hajdini’s invitation for drinks, he says she told him: “If you don’t f*** me soon, I’m going to ruin you… never forget, I f***ing own you.”

Rana also claimed Hajdini propositioned him for oral sex twice in the office, once saying, “Birthday BJ for the brown boy? My little brown boy.” Hajdini also allegedly told Rana, “You’re gonna need to earn it, my little Arab boy toy.” The lawsuit states she groped his groin under a table, then spat in her hands and ran them over his neck and head.

In the lawsuit, Rana claims Hajdini admitted to drugging him with Rohypnol and Viagra without his knowledge, in order to have sex with him. He said she acquired unauthorised access to his bank account to track his “every move”.

Hajdini also allegedly performed unwanted oral sex on Rana before forcing him to perform it on her. As Hajdini allegedly fondled her own breasts, she said to Rana, “I bet your little Asian, fish head wife doesn’t have these cannons,” according to the lawsuit.

Once, after she forcibly removed his trousers and performed non-consensual sex on him, he began to cry, the lawsuit states.

Hajdini is then alleged to have said, “Stop f***ing crying. You think anyone would ever believe you? You’re a f***ing douche bag who thinks he’s hot shit but you can’t even get your dick hard for me? What the f*** is this?”

Hajdini is also alleged to have told Rana, “Do you want to get promoted at year end or not? Do you want a future at JPMorgan? It’s that simple. I don’t know why you’re fighting this.”
As ordered by Hajdini, Rana performed oral sex on her, the lawsuit states, because he was “afraid that Ms Hajdini would act on her threats to retaliate against him”. The lawsuit says that Rana saw Hajdini’s threats as “tantamount to hate crimes”

The alleged assaults continued for months, with Rana finally reporting Hajdini for race and gender-based discrimination and harassment to JPMorgan bosses in May 2025. Next, he says his family received anonymous, threatening phone calls, with one caller saying, “Just wait till you’re back in New York, brown boy…
You’d better stay away – snitch.”

Rana claimed JPMC then placed him on involuntary leave and later sabotaged his efforts to gain new employment. The New York Post reported on Wednesday that Rana had initially sought a settlement from JPMorgan “north of $20 million” before filing the lawsuit. “He threatened to go public and asked for millions of dollars,” one source described as “close to the situation” told the Post. Another called his lawsuit “a novel”

Rana’s lawyer, Kaiser, told the Mail that his client had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was seeking damages for lost earnings, emotional distress and reputational harm, as well as punitive damages and changes to the bank’s practices.

JPMorgan has said Hajdini, through her lawyers, denied Rana’s allegations. “She never dated this individual, never had a sexual or romantic encounter with him of any kind and never gave him any drugs. She maintains that his false claims are entirely fabricated and tarnishing her reputation.”

JPMorgan also said that it investigated Rana’s allegations and concluded they were without merit, adding, “While numerous employees co-operated with the investigation, the complainant refused to participate and has declined to provide facts that would be central to support his allegations.”

“We did try to reach an agreement to avoid the time and expense of litigation and to support an employee who was being threatened with the very reputational harm now unfolding,” the bank told The New York Times. “We continue to believe these allegations have no merit, and new information raised as a result of the public filing only reinforces that conclusion.”

In response, Kaiser said: ‘In my 30-plus year career as an employment litigator I have never had an employer defendant make such a substantial offer if they truly believed the allegations to ‘have no merit’.”

The Daily Mail reported that while Manhattan prosecutors opened a criminal investigation into Rana’s allegations, they declined to pursue charges against Hajdini due to a lack of evidence.

“We believed from the outset the allegations were fabricated,” a JPMorgan source told the Mail. “I just feel so sorry for Hajdini because she’s so highly thought of here. I hope she can move on from this.

The story continues to generate ever more astonishing headlines, such as the claim that Rana had told his bosses at JPMorgan that his father had died in 2024.

However, the Post tracked his father, Chaitanya Rana, down to the family’s home in Virginia. Rana Sr told the Post: “I don’t know anything about it. He didn’t talk with us or anything. He’s my son. He’s a good guy.”

The Post also reported that Rana never reported to Hajdini while both worked at JPMorgan and that the pair were under two different managing directors.

On Monday, Rana refiled his lawsuit, reportedly with new witness statements, including one anonymous person — reportedly a family friend of Rana’s — who claimed he was invited for a threesome in September 2024. The person was reportedly woken by a “completely naked” Hajdini, who sat on the couch he was sleeping on, lit a cigarette and began begging him to “join them” (meaning herself and Rana) in the bedroom.

“I told her no,” the person recalls. “She said, ‘Come join, come join.’ I again told her no.”

Hajdini then reportedly said, “You know, I own [Rana], so you’d better come join.” The person again refused.

After leaving JPMorgan, Rana became a principal at the investment firm Bregal Sagemount in October 2025, but The Wall Street Journal reported he was let go from that job last month.

The firm told the paper he was no longer an employee and that “during his employment, Bregal Sagemount was not aware of any complaints he filed against any former employers, other entities or individuals”

While the accusations and legal wrangling in the story become more feverish, statistics show that sexual harassment remains something experienced mostly by women: 78.2 per cent of the sexual harassment charges received by the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) between 2018 and 2021 were filed by women.

“With the EEOC, we know that one fifth of men are sexually harassed,” Ann Olivarius, senior partner of the law firm McAllister Olivarius, told the Financial Times. “But of course those are men who are harassed by men generally.”

This cold splash of reality is unlikely to quell interest in the salacious allegations around Rana, Hajdini and JPMorgan. The “sex slave” drama gripping Wall Street looks set to run and run – ever more luridly.