No one’s name appears in the Epstein files more than that of Lesley Groff, his assistant. Reading through the thousands of emails, a troubling question arises: what did she know?
Jonathan Whitcomb,attorneyforLesley Groff, 5 June 2020
“She did not know.”
Lesley Groff, longtime executive assistant toJeffrey Epstein, has always claimed she knew nothing of his crimes. Complicity requires knowledge. To be legally complicit in a crime, you have to know you are helping to commit it. To be morally complicit, the bar is lower. You don’t even have to play an active part. To have knowledge of the crime and do nothing is enough.
But how do we know what someone knows?
I think of all the times I’ve closed my eyes or shut down a thought or turned away from something wrong, large or small, a planet-level ecological harm or a sub-fiver theft in the supermarket right in front of me. Surely, I say to myself, someone else will do something. It’s not my fault or my responsibility; I am too inconsequential to make a difference here. Somewhere in the course of those thoughts, I decide not to let the knowledge of what I’ve seen or heard or inferred take up residence in my mind. In this way, over time, I’ve found that it is much easier to live with what I know if I do not admit what I know even to myself.
FBI interviewwith Lesley Groff, 24 September 2021
Groff met with a headhunter, and he told her that “there was a job to organize one man’s life. This man was EPSTEIN, a Manhattan socialite. GROFF had never heard of EPSTEIN before this.”
Lesley Groff never planned to be an assistant. After college at the University of Texas in Dallas, she moved to New Jersey with her first husband, worked for an office supplies company for nine years, divorced, worked as a salesperson at the department store Nordstrom, met her second husband at a triathlon and then decided she wanted to try to find work as an events planner on Wall Street. In 2001, a headhunter found her resumé on Monster, a jobs listing site, and set up Groff, then in her mid-30s, with an interview to be an assistant to a wealthy financier.
For the interview, Groff went to Epstein’s offices on the 4th floor of 457 Madison Ave, part of the Villard Houses, a set of elegant 19th-century brownstone residences built around a courtyard, also home to a luxury hotel. She met with Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein, whose phone kept ringing during the interview. He would talk briefly, then hang up, and Groff came away with the impression of a vibrant, hectic workplace.
Once she got the job, Groff was given her own office and worked alongside Epstein’s team of assistants, lawyers and a trader who together managed his money and life. Some years later, she moved to work from his home, a seven-storey townhouse on East 71st Street near 5th Avenue where alifesize sculpture of a womanin a white wedding dress clutching a rope hung in the central hallway.
Groff was in charge of Epstein’s calendar, making his appointments and setting up his calls. When she started the job, Maxwell had told her that Epstein had a massage every day. Epstein would call Groff in the morning, order her to “Call X and see if she can do a massage at 4” and then continue to call her every 15 minutes until it was fixed. If Groff was unable to get X, he’d tell her to call Y. (In response to questions about these appointments, her lawyer, Michael Bachner wrote: “During her employment, Lesley never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to these massages.”)
Groff worked for Epstein for 18 years, from 2001 until his arrest in July 2019. No criminal charges have ever been brought against her (or anyone else connected to Epstein, apart from Maxwell). Since Epstein’s death, in August 2019, Groff has remained almost invisible and spoken only through her lawyers. Recent photographs have shown hergoing to pilatesorwalking her dognear her home in Connecticut, off-duty and low-key. Compared to the royals, politicians, billionaires and professors who have featured in the Epstein files, Groff is low status – a non-celebrity with no public reputation to lose. But when you search for her name in the files, you receive more than 160,000 results, more than anyone else. (I have read perhaps 10,000 of these, a fraction.) No one was more regularly in contact with Epstein, day-to-day.
After the release of the Epstein files, the US Congress’s committee on oversight and government reform decided to review the possible mismanagement of the federal government’s investigation into Epstein and Maxwell’s crimes. On 3 March 2026, theysent a letterto Groff asking her to attend an interview in Washington on 9 June: “The Committee believes you have information that will assist in its investigation.” They believe, in other words, that Groff knows more than she has ever said she knows.
Interview with Lesley Groff inthe New York Times, 5 February 2005
