It seemed like everyone at 270 Park Avenue was talking about Chirayu Rana.
Chirayu Rana
The 35-year-old banker was about six months off JPMorgan Chase’s payroll when he filed a lawsuit against the bank and his former co-worker, alleging a pattern of sexual assault and harassment. The details were salacious and shocking to his peers, who’d known him as a socially awkward, occasionally gruff finance bro.
JPMorgan hired Rana in 2024 to help build its business in the booming private-credit industry. The banker, who’d cut his teeth at Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley, quickly got to work at the bank’s offices on Park Avenue landing new deals for JPMorgan. He could be critical of his teammates, former colleagues said, but he was effective at bringing in new business.
Now he was bringing wild-sounding allegations against his former co-worker Lorna Hajdini, seen as a rising star at JPMorgan. Through a bank spokesman, Hajdini’s lawyers have categorically denied the allegations and said the two never had sexual relations. JPMorgan is standing by Hajdini. A bank spokesman said it doesn’t “believe there’s any merit” to Rana’s claims following an internal investigation.
Rana had filed a lawsuit on April 27 under the pseudonym “John Doe.” It was later taken off the court docket, fueling questions about its credibility. Online, people quoted the filing’s eye-popping phrases that he alleged Hajdini had said, including “I bet your little Asian, fish head, wife doesn’t have these cannons” and “Never forget, I f—ing own you.”
On Monday, Rana refiled the lawsuit in New York state court, with his lawyer attributing the weeklong takedown to a clerical error. The lawsuit is substantially the same. It includes two sworn affidavits from witnesses whose names are redacted and who say they saw Hajdini inappropriately touch Rana. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that JPMorgan offered Rana a $1 million settlement to make his complaint go away; he chose to go public.
This scandal had the right bits of sex, power and money to turn two midlevel Wall Street workers into objects of internet fascination. The lawsuit’s tawdry and explicit details became a script for AI-generated videos and sexually suggestive memes featuring Pepe the Frog.
Key details that spread weren’t accurate: He was having an affair. (Rana is unmarried.) He retracted his lawsuit. (Not quite. It was refiled.) She was his supervisor. (She wasn’t.)
The social-media circus and competing narratives about the case have made it difficult to tell what’s real and what isn’t.
One thing for certain is that America’s biggest bank has an unlikely public relations crisis on its hands—and Rana is at the heart of it.
“We look forward to the truth and facts coming to light through court proceedings,” said Daniel Kaiser, an attorney for Rana. “Whether my client’s civil rights were violated will be determined in a court of law.”
Rana filed a lawsuit on April 27 under the pseudonym ‘John Doe.’
From a young age, Rana was determined to win.
He spent his teenage years in Vienna, Va., a wealthy suburb of Washington, D.C., the firstborn of Nepalese immigrants. His mother ran a licensed daycare out of their home, a $1.24 million five-bedroom house on a leafy cul-de-sac.
He played soccer and went to Bishop Denis J. O’Connell High School, a Catholic preparatory school in Arlington. After graduation, Rana enrolled in Marymount University in 2008, where he was on the men’s soccer team. He transferred the following year to Rutgers University-Newark, where he continued to play soccer as a midfielder, and graduated in January 2013.
One former Rutgers-Newark teammate remembered Rana as a good, reliable player, but said he could sometimes be aggressive during practice, getting into disagreements with other seniors on the team for excessive tackling or jostling with teammates for control of the ball. Rana’s Rutgers-Newark team roster page shows that he didn’t get a lot of gameplay.
Those who met Rana in college remembered him as driven and ambitious, saying he talked often about hunting for internships and applying for jobs. One former teammate recalled a time where Rana reached out to the father of another teammate who worked at a major law firm, asking if he could secure a summer internship.
Early in his career, Rana cycled through prestigious financial firms, including Credit Suisse, Morgan Stanley, Carlyle Group and an affiliate of Apollo Global Management. In a 2019 corporate sustainability report from Carlyle, Rana was featured as a mentee of a senior Black executive under a subsection called “Leading By Example in ESG Practices.”
He switched jobs frequently in the last five years, after he wasn’t extended a return offer to Carlyle once a two-year program he worked in concluded in 2020, a person familiar with the matter said. He had a stint at a consultancy called CrossBoundary between 2020 and 2022 that wasn’t included in his employment history with U.S. regulators.
When Rana worked at CrossBoundary, he yelled at co-workers after they tried to offer constructive criticism about his performance, people familiar with the matter said. Rana was transitioned out of the company in February 2022 in part because of his demeanor in the workplace, the people said.
Kaiser, Rana’s attorney, said “we categorically reject these claims as false and another attempt to smear my client in the press.”
He went on to work for Morgan Stanley for around a year-and-a-half and then an affiliate of Apollo for six months. A person close to Apollo said he was managed out of the role after managers felt he wasn’t a good fit. Kaiser said this wasn’t true.
Rana arrived at JPMorgan in March 2024, where he was brought on to help build out JPMorgan’s private credit business. The bank has ramped up efforts to edge into this hot corner of Wall Street, where Rana had experience from his stints at Carlyle and Morgan Stanley.
He worked on developing the bank’s lending practices for software companies and helped originate one of the bank’s first private loans based on the borrower’s annual revenue, a type of lending that is often considered high-risk.
Rana arrived at JPMorgan in March 2024.
From the get go, Rana showed a willingness to tell colleagues that they were making mistakes and their work wasn’t up to standard, people familiar with the matter said. He worked regularly with Lorna Hajdini, who was on his team.
Hajdini has been seen as a model employee inside JPMorgan and has been a part of some of the bank’s initiatives to encourage women to pursue long-term careers in finance. She moved from a role inside the commercial bank to a more prestigious one inside the investment bank, bridging a cultural divide inside the company that CEO Jamie Dimon has long been focused on.
Outside of work, Rana, Hajdini and other team members regularly communicated with each other in group texts and would sometimes go out together, according to screenshots of text messages reviewed by the Journal. On occasion, co-workers would joke about Rana’s Nepalese background in the chats or refer to Indian men as “Brown boys,” according to the screenshots.
Rana liked one message where a colleague asked if a “Brown boy” could join a gathering, one screenshot shows. The “Brown boy” in reference was the colleague’s boyfriend whom Rana knew, a person familiar with the matter said.
Rana and Hajdini also exchanged seemingly friendly text messages, with Hajdini sending him SoundCloud links and memes, the screenshots show.
In his lawsuit, Rana alleged that Hajdini first made advances on him beginning around May 2024. He claims that he went to see a senior team leader in Greenwich, Conn., and asked that they not be put on further assignments together. He then claimed that Hajdini assaulted him several times and drugged him. Two witnesses said in sworn affidavits that they saw Hajdini inappropriately interact with Rana, and one of them said Hajdini asked him to join a threesome with her and Rana. The identities of the witnesses have been redacted in the court filings.
Through a JPMorgan spokesman, Hajdini’s lawyers have denied that she ever had sexual relations with Rana and said “his false claims are entirely fabricated.”
Rana stopped coming to the office at the end of 2024 and told the bank that his father had died, even though his biological father had not, according to a person close to JPMorgan. Kaiser, Rana’s lawyer, said that he was referring to a “dad-like figure” who helped raise him and whom Kaiser didn’t identify by name. Hajdini and other JPMorgan teammates sent Rana flowers believing that his biological father had died, the person familiar said.
According to the lawsuit, Rana also began looking for another job but didn’t get any offers.
In May 2025, he filed a formal internal complaint alleging sexual assault and race-based harassment with JPMorgan. His representative requested that JPMorgan settle the claims for approximately $22 million, people familiar with the matter said. Rana was put on paid leave while the bank tried to mediate the claims with him, later offering him $1 million to settle them.
Rana left JPMorgan at the end of 2025 and joined Bregal Sagemount, a private-equity firm. He filed a discrimination complaint against JPMorgan with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at the end of March, the Journal has reported. His employment at Bregal was terminated in the beginning of April of this year, a company spokeswoman said.
Lorna Hajdini has been a part of bank initiatives to encourage women to pursue long-term careers in finance.
In a bygone era, Rana’s lawsuit and the $1 million settlement offer from JPMorgan that preceded the filing might have flown under the radar. But since the filing went public, Rana and his lurid allegations against his former colleague have become the subject of intense public speculation. AI-generated videos and images of Rana and Hajdini on dinner dates and canoodling in an office have circulated on social media.
Joe Rogan, Megyn Kelly and even Martin Shkreli, the businessman who was convicted for securities fraud in 2017 and released from prison in 2022, have opined about what really happened. People claiming to know Rana—from school, work and dating in New York—swapped stories at the online water cooler.
Inside JPMorgan’s headquarters in Manhattan, banking teams swapped memes and traded stories of working with him. Employees were shocked to hear Hajdini, the star employee, accused of sexual assault.
The group chats of Rana’s former Rutgers team also lit up, former teammates said. One longtime friend was surprised by reports characterizing Rana as a gauche underperformer, having known Rana as an outgoing person with a dry, quick sense of humor and an intense work ethic.
This week, prediction markets popped up on Polymarket tracking the odds of various outcomes in Rana’s case. “Chirayu Rana sued?” was sitting with a 77% chance likelihood on Friday morning, with about $147,134 in trading volume. A market betting on whether Rana would apologize for making his allegations had a 3% likelihood and a volume of $242,921 the same day. Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
Both sides are gearing up for the case to go to trial. A judge recently scheduled a preliminary hearing for May 26.
Write to Alexander Saeedy at alexander.saeedy@wsj.com and Ashley Wong at ashley.wong@wsj.com
