Jeffrey Epsteintold a 19-year-old aspiring actress who was visiting his Upper East Side townhouse in 2004 for one of their “massage” sessions that she should visit a hair salon — specifically, the one in midtown Manhattan owned by celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai.
During her first visit there, she excitedly told a stylist employed by Fekkai that she wanted to cut her long hair to shoulder length. But she told CNN in an interview that to her surprise, he refused, saying: “Those aren’t the instructions I got.”
Instead, the stylist used a razor to thin out her hair and gave her curtain bangs, which she didn’t want. She was so upset that she said she refused to see Epstein again for a few weeks. The next time she did, she recalled to CNN, Epstein was effusive about her new look, telling her it was “so close” to what he wanted.
She said she couldn’t remember ever meeting Fekkai himself, and wonders to this day how so many people around Epstein appeared to have turned a blind eye to his abuse. “I tend to give people a lot of grace when I shouldn’t,” she said. “You had to have known this was wrong.”
This individual is one of the seven women suing Fekkai ina lawsuitfiled in New York Supreme Court this week. CNN spoke exclusively with two of the five Jane Doe plaintiffs; the specific details they shared about Fekkai and his salon were not described in the lawsuit.
The plaintiffs — Kersti Ferguson, Audra Christiansen and five Jane Does, all of whom say they were victims of Epstein’s abuse — allege that Fekkai and one of his employees, Patrick Coombs, aided Epstein’ssex traffickingfor years. None of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit accuse Fekkai or Coombs of sexual assault. Five Jane Doe plaintiffs filed a similar lawsuit against Fekkai earlier this year before dropping it in June.
“Fekkai groomed the victims to look as young as possible under Epstein’s direction,” the lawsuit claims. “Epstein would direct Fekkai to bleach victims blond and groom them like dolls into Epstein’s and others’ liking.”
Fekkai spokesperson Mark Herr told CNN in a statement in response to the lawsuit and CNN’s interviews with some of the plaintiffs: “These allegations are false. Mr. Fekkai has done nothing wrong.”
“And he has no idea whether any Epstein victim was among the tens of thousands of people whose hair was cut every year by the hundreds of Fekkai salon employees,” Herr said.
Josh Perry, a lawyer for Fekkai, said in a letter sent to CNN that Fekkai “did nothing wrong,” denying that he “in any way knew about, participated in, enabled, or endorsed Epstein’s illicit and illegal conduct. He did not.”
The second Jane Doe CNN interviewed said that one afternoon in the early 2000s at Nikki Beach, a popular restaurant and beach club in the French Riviera resort town of Saint-Tropez, Epstein walked her over to Fekkai to ask him a question: How could they make her look younger?
The woman, who was around 20 at the time, would soon find out. Once back in New York City, she was sent to see a top stylist at Fekkai’s ritzy hair salon on 57th Street. Her hair at the time, she said, was natural, plain and long; she walked out of the appointment with new layers and bangs. At no point did the hairdresser ask her how she wished to cut her hair.
“He had instructions and that’s all. You went in there and that was it,” the woman recalled in an interview. “It’s not like he was like: ‘So what are we doing with your hair today?’”
Herr, the Fekkai spokesperson, told CNN Fekkai was never in Saint-Tropez with Epstein.
CNN has reached out to Coombs for comment.
