Lesley Groff’s name appears more than 160,000 times in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department. For comparison, most people who crossed Epstein’s social orbit show up in tens of thousands of mentions, if at all. Groff shows up everywhere because for 18 years, she was everywhere. She booked the calls, scheduled the massages, and kept the calendar of one of the most prolific sex offenders in modern American history.
On June 9, 2026, that woman sat down for a transcribed interview behind closed doors before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant said she personally arranged multiple phone calls between the disgraced financier and Donald Trump in the years before he became president. According to a transcript released by the House Oversight Committee, Groff told lawmakers she set up phone calls between her boss and President Donald Trump several times a year for at least a decade.
The Epstein Trump secretary connection raised immediate questions on Capitol Hill – and put a specific, calendar-level detail onto a relationship the White House has consistently described as brief and long-dead.
Who is Lesley Groff
Groff, who worked for Epstein in New York for more than 18 years, was previously described by her boss as an “extension of my brain.” She appeared voluntarily for the June 9 interview, which was not under oath and not recorded. It marked the first time she faced questions since speaking to the FBI in New York in 2021, two years after Epstein’s death.
Groff told the committee that she was hired by Epstein in 2001 and was immediately “astonished by the truly impressive people in his circle,” including past presidents, actors, musicians, and scientists. In her prepared opening statement, she said the man who employed her “was a monster,” describing how “for 18 years, I worked for Dr. Jekyll but was never permitted to see the true Mr. Hyde.” She described Epstein as “a master manipulator and deceiver who separated his legitimate life from his secret life as an abuser and made sure that as his secretary, those two worlds did not collide.”
Banking records included in the DOJ’s Epstein files indicate that Groff received three payments of $100,000 and one for $110,000 from Epstein companies between 2016 and 2018, though the records do not indicate the reasons for the payments. The Department of Justice has published over 3.5 million pages of responsive documents in compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the releases that make her name appear more than 160,000 times across the files.
The Epstein Trump Secretary Testimony on Phone Calls
Groff told lawmakers she didn’t remember setting up any in-person meetings between the two men, but said it was possible, adding later that she would describe their relationship as “friendly.” “I don’t know if they had any business going on. That wasn’t something that I asked. That’s not something I discussed with Mr. Epstein or Mr. Trump, so I don’t really know.”
Rep. Stephen Lynch said Groff referred to a period before Trump entered the White House when she set up several calls between the two men, as Politico noted. Rep. Melanie Stansbury told the outlet that Groff said “she arranged calls for them to connect,” but the calls were infrequent. Rep. Yassamin Ansari said Groff “did anything that Jeffrey Epstein directed her to do,” including scheduling “all of his calls with important, high-profile people,” and that she said she set up calls with Trump “about once a quarter before that time period.”
Groff told lawmakers that she routinely scheduled massages for her boss but never booked appointments for anyone she knew to be underage. And when it came to the Trump calls, she was consistent in framing them as a normal, professional scheduling task, nothing she thought twice about at the time.
Groff was named an unindicted co-conspirator in Epstein’s 2008 non-prosecution agreement but was never charged. She told the committee the label remains her “scarlet letter.” Her attorney, Michael Bachner, has maintained publicly that she had no criminal involvement with Epstein and was unaware of his crimes. Groff has never been charged with a crime and, despite working closely with Epstein, her lawyers maintained she was unaware of his illicit activities.
Why Democrats Didn’t Believe Her
Several members of the committee pushed back hard on the overall picture Groff painted of herself as an unknowing bystander. Rep. Stephen Lynch, D-Mass., said: “She arranged young women for massages with a registered sex offender, and, I just question whether she can rightfully and truthfully maintain that she saw nothing improper in that.”
Rep. James Walkinshaw, D-Va., told reporters: “Leslie Groff maintained today that she never once even had a suspicion that perhaps he was abusing women and girls; I find it unbelievable – absolutely unbelievable, not remotely credible.”
Epstein survivor Marina Lacerda, at a press conference in front of the U.S. Capitol in September 2025, specifically called out Groff, alleging that Groff had called her so many times to go to Epstein’s place for a massage that she dropped out of high school before the ninth grade. Lacerda, who was one of the key witnesses that led to Epstein’s 2019 indictment for child sex trafficking, told ABC News that Groff was “the conduit to Epstein.” “Anything that had to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” Lacerda said, “had to go through Lesley Groff.”
The DOJ files also include an account from a witness who was a minor at the time of her alleged abuse by Epstein, who told the FBI that she felt Groff “knew that the massage appointments were sexual” and “felt it was pretty obvious Lesley knew what was going on.” The witness also alleged that she explicitly told Groff she was not 18 years old and needed money for an abortion, according to the FBI report.
Oversight Chair James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, took a different view, describing Groff as “very forthcoming” and saying he hopes to hold a public hearing with Epstein’s victims.
The Timeline Problem and the Vance Contradiction
Vice President JD Vance repeatedly pushed back when the co-hosts of The View pointed out Trump’s past ties to Epstein. He falsely asserted that the two had known each other in the 1980s but stopped being friends after Trump threw Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club and reported him to the police. Evidence, however, shows their relationship lasted into the early 2000s.
In 2002, according to a Washington Post report, Trump told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy.” That 2002 statement, counted backward, places the start of their relationship in the late 1980s. Groff’s account of arranging calls for years before Trump took office in January 2017 extends the documented connection well into the 2000s.
Vance’s framing on The View was that Trump had reported Epstein to police and that the friendship had effectively ended by then. According to a document released by the Department of Justice, Trump called then-Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, “to tell him ‘thank goodness you’ [are] stopping [Epstein], everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter told the FBI in October 2019. That call is real. But the timeline still matters: according to Politifact, Trump barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after Epstein behaved inappropriately toward a club member’s teenage daughter, and the ban came around October 2007. Groff’s testimony places phone calls between the two men continuing well after that falling-out, stretching up to Trump’s entry into the White House.
For more on the range of public figures named in the Epstein document releases, this breakdown of celebrities linked in the Epstein files explains what those name mentions do and don’t mean legally.
The Files That Made This Possible
None of this testimony would be happening without the legislative push that forced the documents into public view. The House voted 427 to 1 to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 18, 2025. Trump signed it into law the following day. The Department of Justice subsequently published over 3.5 million pages of responsive documents in compliance with the law. That release created the foundation for the House Oversight Committee’s current investigation and produced the files in which Groff’s name appears more than 160,000 times.
Based on Groff’s testimony and a subsequent meeting with survivors, committee chair Rep. James Comer said he now wants to interview Alan Dershowitz. The high-profile attorney, who represented both Epstein and President Donald Trump, appears in the files thousands of times.
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What This Means Now
The White House’s response to the Groff testimony was categorical. White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told Politico in a statement that Trump “has been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein,” and that “by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
Phone calls arranged multiple times a year, for a decade, by the woman who ran every aspect of Epstein’s schedule push the documented connection between the two men well past the 1980s framing Vance offered. Trump has said he cut ties with Epstein in the 2000s, and he has not been charged or officially accused in court of crimes related to the Epstein files. That remains true. Being in contact with someone is not, legally, the same thing as being implicated in their crimes.
The specific detail that Groff casually arranged those calls as a routine part of her workday – the same workday in which she was booking massage appointments for a man who was running a sex-trafficking operation – is a concrete, unambiguous piece of the record that stands independent of White House framing. Groff wasn’t claiming the calls were sinister. She was saying they were ordinary. A routine scheduling task remembered with no particular weight is not how someone describes calls to a brief, distant acquaintance. The committee’s investigation is ongoing, and Groff’s transcript is now public. What happens next will depend on whether the committee can get corroborating testimony from other witnesses in Epstein’s orbit, and whether the millions of pages of files still being reviewed contain anything that sharpens the picture further.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.