← The Epstein Chronicles
The Epstein Chronicles
Lesley Groff and the Administrative Backbone of Epstein’s World (Part 1) (5/29/26)
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Lesley Groff was Jeffrey Epstein’s longest-serving and most senior assistant, working for him from 2001 until his 2019 arrest, and the newly examined records place her closer to his daily life than almost anyone else in the Epstein files. Her name...
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What's up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein Chronicles. When it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, nobody was closer to him, as far as assistants go, than Leslie Groff. And she was somebody that Jeffrey Epstein said was indispensable to him. He even called her his brain. Now, for her part, Leslie Groff says she had no idea what Jeffrey Epstein was up to and that she was only somebody that was involved in logistics, answering the phone, setting the schedule, things like that. And look, she has not been accused of any kind of abuse. Leslie Groff has not been accused of any of that. But does that mean she had nothing to do with what Epstein was up to? Does that mean she's innocent? Not in my opinion. Now, remember, I look at this case through a RICO lens. I'm not looking at it as one person doing this or one person doing that. It's all connected. So if you're part of the criminal enterprise, you're liable for every single crime that the enterprise commits, even if you're somebody that's just involved in logistics. And in my opinion, the whole lot of these people, from the pilots on down, were part of a criminal enterprise. So today we have an article from the Guardian which is pretty long, so we're gonna eat it up in a couple of pieces. But it digs deep into Leslie Groff and her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. So with that said, let's just dive right in. This article was published by the Guardian, and the headline, Seriously the Best Boss Ever Inside the World of Jeffrey Epstein's Assistant. This article was authored by Sophie Elmhurst. Leslie Groff, longtime executive assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, has always claimed the that she knew nothing of his crimes. Complicity requires knowledge. To be legally complicit in a crime, you have to know you're 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? And you see right away, Ms. Elmhurst is not looking at it through the right lens. This should be a RICO lens. And that's because all these crimes were committed at the behest of Jeffrey Epstein. He was the head of the organization, no different than El Chapo, no different than John Gotti. Same shit, different crimes. 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'm too inconsequential to make a difference here. Somewhere in the course of those thoughts, I decide not to let my knowledge of what I've seen or heard or inferred take up residence in my mind. In this way, over time, I found that it's much easier to live with what I know if I do not admit what I know, even to myself. Kind of a weird analogy, you know. You're talking about people that are stealing things from a store, a corporation, and you not getting involved. And comparing that to what was going on with Leslie Groff, that seems a bit weird. Leslie Grof 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 Supply Co. For nine years, divorced, worked as a salesperson at the department store in 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 resume on Monster, a jobs listing site, and set up Groth, then in her mid-30s, with an interview to be an assistant to a wealthy financier. And by 2001, Epstein was already abusing people. Remember, this man was already prolific. For the interview, Groff went to Epstein's house on the four on the fourth floor of 457 Madison Avenue, part of the Villard Houses, a set of elegant 19th century brownstone residences built around the courtyard, also home to a luxury hotel. These people belong in the Gilded Age, not amongst us. Bunch of weirdos. She met with Glenn 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. And look, I'm sure the first interview she didn't Know what Epstein was. But she was with Epstein for all those years. Heard all the stories, saw all those girls coming in and out, had no idea. Okay, let's give her the benefit of the doubt. How does that explain all of the logistics that she set up though, for all the girls that were traffic? I mean, if she was booking rooms, if she was setting up flights, doing any of that. Congratulations, you're a part of the investigation and you're culpable. 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 his life. Some years later, she moved to work from his home, a seven story townhouse on East 71st street near Fifth Avenue, where a life size sculpture of a woman in a white wedding dress clutching a rope hung in the central hallway. Ah, nothing weird there. Normal stuff, right? Just normal rich people. Groff was in charge of Epstein's calendar, making his appointments and setting up his calls. When she started the job, the Maxwell had told her that Epstein had a massage every day. Epstein would call Grof 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 Grof was unable to get X, he'd tell her to call Y. In response to the questions about these appointments, her lawyer Michael Bauchner wrote, during her employment, Leslie never witnessed or was told of anything illegal related to those massages. Maybe the next mob guy who gets nailed could say the same thing. Yo, I had no idea. I was just making phone calls and driving the car. Grof worked for Epstein for 18 years, from 2001 until his arrest in July of 2019. But she had no idea, huh? After the first arrest, after all the allegations, after what everybody was saying after Virginia came out, Leslie Groff was none the wiser. Had no idea what Epstein was. If you want to believe that, you go right ahead. Me, I don't believe that for a second. Since Epstein's death in August 2019, Gro has remained almost invisible and spoken only through her lawyers. Recent photographs have shown her going to Pilates or walking her dog near her home in Connecticut. Off duty and low key. Compared to the royals, politicians, billionaires and professors who have featured in the Epstein files, Grof 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've read perhaps 10,000 of these a fraction. No one was more regularly in contact with Epstein than day to day. And that's true. Epstein was very clear. Grof is his brain. He said that how many times throughout the years? Well, you thought he was kidding. Dude had a meltdown when she had to go out for paternity leave. After the release of the Epstein files, the U.S. congress 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 March 3, 2026, they sent a letter to Groff asking her to attend an interview in Washington on June 9th. The committee believes you have information that will assist in its investigation. They believe, in other words, that Grof knows more than she has ever said that she knows. Well, that's because in my opinion, she does. And I think it's damning that she went back to work for the dude even after his first arrest. How can you say you have no idea what he was or what he was doing when he's already been arrested on similar charges? So the whole I had no idea thing really just doesn't hit I drive
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to be a good executive assistant is an act of immersion. The job requires the management of minutia, dates, times, appointments, travels, meals, gifts, emails, calls. But it also requires the anticipation of these things to know what's desired before it's desired. To do this, the assistant must be familiar with the inside of their boss's mind. In a healthy arrangement, the relationship is close but boundaried. She almost always she can tell her boss what she thinks or say no. Victoria Robin, the founder of the executive assistance organization, described it as kind of a work marriage. No other professional relationship, she told me, requires the same degree of trust or intimacy. Her old boss used to tell her that she knew more about him than his wife and could ruin him in five minutes. And that is pretty true and pretty common. These executive assistants, they know a lot. They're the ones that are there day to day. They see the people coming in, they see the people leaving. They see, they know the phone calls, the emails, the meetings, they know all of it. While an assistant might have the power that comes from knowledge, it's not a marriage of equals. If you're committed, you sell your soul to that person, said Riben. In a less professional dynamic, the assistant is so crucial to her boss daily existence and so completely in his power that she becomes a voiceless functionary. Rowena Chu, briefly an assistant to Harvey Weinstein, compared a role to that of a butler in Downtown Abbey, where the chief requirement were to do as you were told and remain invisible. Chu, who says she was sexually assaulted by Weinstein, was often told she could be replaced in an hour. She would hear Weinstein on the phone bawling out an A list director and think, if he can do that to them, what can he do to me? She was, she said, a nat on an elephant. And look, there's no doubt about that. A lot of these people, like Harvey Weinstein, are abusive. But that wasn't the case with Leslie Groff. She wasn't being abused by Jeffrey Epstein. There is zero reports of him sexually assaulting her or anything close to that. She was there because she was getting paid and she was willing to look the other way, in my opinion, because she was making a bunch of dough. That's what it really boils down to. Over the years, Epstein had several assistants, but Grof was the most senior and longest serving. As I read her emails, I was initially struck by the extent to which she marshaled his time and his movements or acted as his gatekeeper. But in reality, she was more like a well trained avatar. In a 2005 New York Times article about executive assistance on Wall Street Executive, in which both Grof and Epstein were interviewed, Epstein described his assistant as an extension of my brain and a social prosthesis. Not as separate individuals, but as part of his mind and his body. And that's how he looked at her. She was indispensable to Jeffrey Epstein. Groff's task was to ensure that Epstein's life ran according to his precise preference. Jeffries requested that he please not be disturbed while in the gym working out, even if a guest is here waiting. She emailed her colleagues in 2012, when Jeffrey is waiting for something and you know the urgency with a package, you should give it to him right away if at all possible. She wrote about a two hour delay in the delivery of some pastries in 2015, he called me asking where his cannolis are. On any given day, Grof would move from having a towel rail fixed. Can we please get someone on top of this? To working out how to respond to Epstein's allergic reaction. It's apparent that his face is not right to ensuring Steve Bannon had received Epstein's gif of an Apple watch. Can you confirm Steve has his watch? I need to get back to Jeffrey. Sorry for being such a pain and look, a lot of her tasks were mundane. There is zero doubt about it and I don't put as much responsibility on her as someone like Sarah Kellen Vickers. But just because you answered the phone and did logistics doesn't mean that you're not culpable. You are. She was good at her job, quick, polite and relentlessly positive, even when her tasks tended towards the absurd, as when she had to deal with two monster vacuum packed steaks left behind on Epstein's plane or when she was trying to figure out how to transport three tubs of Oreo ice cream, JE's favorite, from New York to another of his properties without it melting. She wrote emails bursting with exclamation marks, emoticons, particularly the smiling, wink and expressions of elation. Tremendous. Super. Terrific. When Jonathan Farkas, a New York businessman, told her that her efficiency was the envy of the German army, Grof sent the email to her husband like think I should forward to Jeff. Ike replied that she should save it in her files in case she ever needed another job. Epstein knew Grof was competent, but his emails rarely recognized her efforts beyond an occasional curt thanks. Instead, he showed his appreciation with money. In the New York Times interview, he revealed that when Grof announced she was pregnant in 2004, he offered to pay for a nanny and bought her a car. 3 Ease her commute from Connecticut. There's no way I could lose Leslie to motherhood, he said, according to a payroll document. She also doubled her salary from 60,000 in 2004 to 120,000 in 2025. There were perks. In 2014, Epstein emailed Groff offering a Florida holiday my style please. Five star hotel. The whole works. Groff's husband, Ike, forwarded the email to someone else. Seriously, the best boss ever. Oh yeah, ask those girls that were getting abused how great he was. On Valentine's Day in 2018, Epstein bought her and some other assistants glam squad appointments where stylists would come to their home to do their hair and makeup. Too sweet, wrote Groff. Once. In 2015, she got to tour his private plane, ride on his helicopter and take a boat to his private Caribbean Island, Little St. James, before staying at a luxury hotel. The heli was one of the best parts, she wrote in a group email to her family, who were duly impressed. I didn't know he had a helicopter, too. Wow, said one. Not a boring job, wrote Grof's mother. Yeah, I would say so. Now, let me ask you, is all of that worth what she's dealing with now? Not my opinion. All right, folks, we're going to wrap this one up right here, and in the next episode, we're going to pick up where we left off. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.