Lesley Groff told Congress that Jeffrey Epstein was a “monster” and a “master manipulator,” but insisted she did not know he was running a sex-trafficking operation while she worked as his longtime executive secretary. In her closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee, Groff said she believes Epstein’s victims, but argued that Epstein hid his crimes from her because he had every reason to keep her in the dark and no leverage over her that would have made her stay silent. She maintained that if she had known girls and young women were being abused through the massage appointments and travel logistics she helped arrange, she would not have ignored it. Groff also said she has faced harassment and death threats since Epstein’s 2019 arrest, presenting herself as someone who has been publicly blamed for crimes she claims she neither knew about nor participated in.
The problem for Groff is that her denial sits against the scale of her role in Epstein’s daily operation. She worked for him for more than 18 years, was described by Epstein as an “extension of my brain,” scheduled his meetings, booked his frequent massages, arranged travel for women connected to him, and was listed as a potential co-conspirator in the 2007 non-prosecution agreement. Federal prosecutors previously said numerous victims identified her as responsible for scheduling massages during which they were abused, and survivor Marina Lacerda has described Groff as a conduit to Epstein, saying anything involving Epstein had to go through her. Groff’s testimony, then, amounted to a direct attempt to separate administrative involvement from criminal knowledge: she admitted she helped run the machinery around Epstein, but denied knowing what that machinery was being used for.
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