Latest / The Epstein Chronicles / Lesley Groff and the Administrative Backbone of Epstein’s World (Part 1) (5/29/26)

Transcript

Lesley Groff and the Administrative Backbone of Epstein’s World (Part 1) (5/29/26) · The Epstein Chronicles

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
• 0:02
  Epstein Chronicles. When it comes to Jeffrey Epstein, nobody was
• 0:07
  closer to him as far as assistants go than Leslie Groff.
• 0:13
  And she was somebody that Jeffrey Epstein said was indispensable
• 0:17
  to him. He even called her his brain. Now, for
• 0:22
  her part, Leslie Groff says she had no idea what
• 0:25
  Jeffrey Epstein was up to, and that she was only
• 0:28
  somebody that was involved in logistics, answering the phone set
• 0:33
  in the schedule, things like that. And look, she has
• 0:37
  not been accused of any kind of abuse. Leslie Groff
• 0:42
  has not been accused of any of that. But does
• 0:45
  that mean she had nothing to do with what Epstein
• 0:48
  was up to? Does that mean she's innocent? Not in
• 0:51
  my opinion. Now, remember I look at this case through
• 0:55
  Rico Lenz. I'm not looking at it as one person
• 0:58
  doing this or one that It's all connected. So if
• 1:03
  you're part of the criminal enterprise, you're liable for every
• 1:07
  single crime that the enterprise commits, even if you're somebody
• 1:11
  that's just involved in logistics. And in my opinion, the
• 1:15
  whole lot of these people from the pilots on down
• 1:19
  were part of a criminal enterprise. So today we have
• 1:23
  an article from The Guardian which is pretty long, so
• 1:26
  we're going to eat it up in a couple of pieces,
• 1:29
  but it digs deep into leslie Groff and her relationship
• 1:33
  with Jeffrey Epstein. So with that said, let's just dive
• 1:37
  right in. This article was published by The Guardian and
• 1:40
  the headline seriously the best boss Ever Inside the world
• 1:44
  of Jeffrey Epstein's assistant. This article was authored by Sophie Elmhurst.
• 1:49
  Leslie Groff, longtime executive assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, has always
• 1:53
  claimed that she knew nothing of his crimes. Simplicity requires knowledge.
• 1:59
  To be legally implicit in a crime, you have to
• 2:01
  know you're helping to commit it. To be morally complicit,
• 2:04
  the bar is lower. You don't even have to play
• 2:06
  an active part. To have knowledge of the crime and
• 2:09
  do nothing is enough. But how do we know what
• 2:13
  someone knows? And you see right away, miss Elmhurst is
• 2:16
  not looking at it through the right lens. This should
• 2:19
  be a Rico lens. And that's because all these crimes
• 2:22
  were committed at the behest of Jeffrey Epstein. He was
• 2:25
  the head of the organization. No different than Al Chopo,
• 2:28
  no different than John Gotti, same shit, different crimes. I
• 2:34
  think of all the times I've closed my eyes or
• 2:36
  shut down a thought, or turned away from something wrong,
• 2:40
  large or small, a planet level ecological harm, or a
• 2:44
  subfiver theft in the supermarket right in front of me. Surely,
• 2:48
  I say to myself, someone else will do something. It's
• 2:51
  not my fault or my responsibility. I'm too inconsequential to
• 2:54
  make a difference here. Somewhere in the course of those thoughts,
• 2:58
  I decide not to let my knowledge of what I've
• 3:01
  seen or heard or inferred take up residence in my mind.
• 3:04
  In this way, over time, I found that it's much
• 3:07
  easier to live with what I know if I do
• 3:09
  not admit what I know, even to myself. Kind of
• 3:14
  a weird analogy. You know, you're talking about people that
• 3:17
  are stealing things from a store, a corporation and you're
• 3:21
  not getting involved, and comparing that to what was going
• 3:24
  on with Leslie Groff, that seems a bit weird. Leslie
• 3:29
  Groff never planned to be an assistant. After college at
• 3:32
  the University of Texas and Dallas, she moved to New
• 3:35
  Jersey with her first husband, worked for an office supply
• 3:38
  company for nine years. Divorced, worked as a salesperson at
• 3:42
  the department store in Nordstrom met her second husband at
• 3:45
  a triathlon and then decided she wanted to try to
• 3:48
  find work as an events planner on Wall Street. In
• 3:52
  two thousand and one, a headhunter found a resume on Monster,
• 3:55
  a job's listing site, and set up Groff, then in
• 3:58
  her mid thirties, with an interview to be an assistant
• 4:01
  to a wealthy financier. And by two thousand and one
• 4:05
  Epstein was already abusing people. Remember this man was already prolific.
• 4:13
  For the interview, Groff went to Epstein's house on the
• 4:16
  fourth floor of four point fifty seven Madison Avenue, part
• 4:19
  of the Villard Houses, a set of elegant nineteenth century
• 4:23
  brownstone residences built around the courtyard, also home to a
• 4:27
  luxury hotel. These people belong in the Gilded Age, not
• 4:32
  amongst us a bunch of weirdos. She met with Glenn
• 4:38
  Maxwell and Epstein, whose phone kept ringing during the interview.
• 4:42
  He would talk briefly, then hang up, and Graff came
• 4:44
  away with the impression of a vibrant, hectic workplace. And look,
• 4:49
  I'm sure the first interview she didn't know what Epstein was.
• 4:52
  But she was with Epstein for all those years, heard
• 4:55
  all the stories, saw all those girls coming in and out,
• 4:58
  had no idea. Okay, let's give her the benefit of
• 5:01
  the doubt. How does that explain all of the logistics
• 5:04
  that she set up though, for all the girls that
• 5:06
  were traffic I mean, if she was booking rooms, if
• 5:08
  she was setting up flights, doing any of that. Congratulations,
• 5:12
  you're a part of the investigation and you're culpable. Once
• 5:16
  she got the job, Groff was given her own office
• 5:18
  and worked alongside Epstein's team of assistants, lawyers, and a trader,
• 5:22
  who together managed his money and his life. Some years later,
• 5:26
  she moved to work from his home, a seven story
• 5:29
  townhouse on E seventy first Street near Fifth Avenue, where
• 5:32
  a life sized sculpture of a woman in a white
• 5:35
  wedding dress clutching a rope hung in the central hallway. Ah,
• 5:39
  nothing weird there, normal stuff, right, just normal rich people shit.
• 5:44
  Groff was in charge of Epstein's calendar, making his appointments
• 5:47
  and setting up his calls. When she started the job,
• 5:50
  Maxwell told her that Epstein had a massage every day.
• 5:54
  Epstein would call Groff in the morning or to her
• 5:56
  to call X and see if she can do a
• 5:58
  massage at four, and then continue to call her every
• 6:01
  fifteen minutes until it was fixed. If Groff was unable
• 6:05
  to get X, he'd tell her to call why. In
• 6:08
  response to the questions about these appointments, her lawyer Michael
• 6:11
  Backner wrote, during her employment, Leslie never witnessed or was
• 6:15
  told of anything illegal related to those massages. Maybe the
• 6:19
  next mob guy who gets Nell could say the same thing. Yo.
• 6:22
  I had no idea. I was just making phone calls
• 6:25
  and driving the car. Groff worked for Epstein for eighteen years,
• 6:30
  from two thousand and one until his arrest in July
• 6:33
  of twenty nineteen. But she had no idea, huh after
• 6:37
  the first arrest, after all the allegations, after what everybody
• 6:40
  was saying after Virginia came out, Leslie Groff was none
• 6:43
  the wiser, had no idea what Epstein was. If you
• 6:46
  want to believe that, you go right ahead, me. I
• 6:49
  don't believe that for a second. Since Epstein's death in
• 6:55
  August twenty nineteen, Grof has remained almost invisible and spoken
• 7:00
  only through her lawyers. Recent photographs have shown her going
• 7:03
  to plates or walking her dog near her home in Connecticut,
• 7:07
  off duty and low key. Compared to the royals, politicians, billionaires,
• 7:12
  and professors who have featured in the Epstein files, Groff
• 7:16
  is low status, a non celebrity with no public reputation
• 7:20
  to lose. But when you search for her name in
• 7:23
  the files, you received more than one hundred and sixty
• 7:26
  thousand results, more than anyone else. I've read perhaps ten
• 7:30
  thousand of these a fraction. No one was more regularly
• 7:34
  in contact with Epstein day to day, and that's true.
• 7:38
  Epstein was very clear, Groff is his brain. He said
• 7:42
  that how many times throughout the years, Well, he thought
• 7:45
  he was kidding. Dude had to melt down when she
• 7:47
  had to go out for a paternity leave. After the
• 7:52
  release of the Epstein files, the US Congress Committee on
• 7:55
  Oversight and Government Reform decided to review the possible mismanagement
• 8:00
  of the federal government's investigation int Abstein and Maxwell's crimes.
• 8:04
  On March third, twenty twenty six, they sent a letter
• 8:07
  to Grof asking her to attend an interview in Washington.
• 8:10
  On June ninth, the committee believes you have information that
• 8:15
  will assist in its investigation. They believe, in other words,
• 8:18
  that Graff knows more than she has ever said that
• 8:21
  she knows. Well. That's because, in my opinion, she does.
• 8:24
  And I think it's damning that she went back to
• 8:26
  work for the dude even after his first arrest. How
• 8:30
  can you say you have no idea what he was
• 8:32
  or what he was doing when he's already been arrested
• 8:35
  on similar charges. So the whole I had no idea
• 8:37
  thing really just doesn't hit. To be a good executive
• 8:42
  assistant is an act of immersion. The job requires the
• 8:46
  management of minutia, dates, times, appointments, travels, meals, gifts, emails, calls,
• 8:53
  but it also requires the anticipation of these things, to
• 8:57
  know what's desired before it's desired. To do this, the
• 9:00
  assistant must be familiar with the inside of their boss's mind.
• 9:04
  In a healthy arrangement, the relationship is close but boundaried.
• 9:08
  She almost always she can tell her boss what she
• 9:11
  thinks or say no. Victoria Robin, the founder of the
• 9:16
  Executive Assistants Organization, described it as kind of a work marriage,
• 9:20
  no other professional relationship. She told me requires the same
• 9:24
  degree of trust or intimacy. Her old boss used to
• 9:27
  tell her that she knew more about him than his
• 9:29
  wife and can run him in five minutes. And that
• 9:33
  is pretty true and pretty common. These executive assistants, they
• 9:38
  know a lot. They're the ones that are there day
• 9:40
  to day. They see the people coming in, they see
• 9:43
  the people leaving. They know the phone calls, the emails,
• 9:46
  the meetings, they know all of it. While an assistant
• 9:49
  might have the power that comes from knowledge, it's not
• 9:52
  a marriage of equals. If you're committed, you sell your
• 9:55
  soul to that person, said Robin in a less professional dynamic.
• 9:59
  The assistant so crucial to her boss daily existence and
• 10:02
  so completely in his power that she becomes a voiceless functionary.
• 10:07
  Rowena Cheu, briefly an assistant to Harvey Weinstein, compared her
• 10:11
  role to that of a butler in downtown abbey, where
• 10:14
  the chief requirement were it to do as you were
• 10:17
  told and remain invisible. Chu, who says she was sexually
• 10:21
  assaulted by Weinstein, was often told she could be replaced
• 10:25
  in an hour. She would hear Weinstein on the phone
• 10:28
  bawling out an a list director and think if he
• 10:31
  can do that to them, what can he do to me?
• 10:34
  She was, she said, anet on an elephant. And look,
• 10:38
  there's no doubt about that a lot of these people,
• 10:42
  like Harvey Weinstein are abusive. But that wasn't the case
• 10:45
  with Leslie Groff. She wasn't being abused by Jeffrey Epstein.
• 10:50
  There is zero reports of him sexually assaulting her or
• 10:53
  anything close to that. She was there because she was
• 10:56
  getting paid and she was willing to look the other way,
• 10:59
  and my opinion, because she was making a bunch of dough.
• 11:02
  That's what it really boils down to. Over the years,
• 11:06
  Epstein had several assistants, but Groff was the most senior
• 11:10
  and longest serving. As I read her emails, I was
• 11:13
  initially struck by the extent to which he marshaled his
• 11:16
  time and his movements, or acted as his gatekeeper, But
• 11:19
  in reality she was more like a well trained avatar.
• 11:22
  In a two thousand and five New York Times article
• 11:24
  about executive assistants on Wall Street, in which both Groff
• 11:29
  and Epstein were interviewed, Epstein described as assistant as an
• 11:32
  extension of my brain and a social prosthesis, not as
• 11:36
  separate individuals, but as part of his mind and his body,
• 11:40
  and that's how he looked at her. She was indispensable
• 11:43
  to Jeffrey Epstein. Groff's task was to ensure that Epstein's
• 11:46
  life ran according to his precise preference. Jeffrey's requested that
• 11:51
  he pleased not be disturbed while in the gym working out,
• 11:54
  even if a guest is here waiting. She emailed her
• 11:57
  colleagues in twenty twelve, when Jeffrey is waiting for something,
• 12:01
  and you know the urgency with a package, you should
• 12:03
  give it to him right away, if at all possible.
• 12:06
  She wrote about a two hour delay in the delivery
• 12:08
  of some pastries. In twenty fifteen, he called me asking
• 12:12
  where's Canoli's are? On any given day, Groff would move
• 12:16
  from having a towelrell fixed. Can we please get someone
• 12:19
  on top of this? To working out how to respond
• 12:22
  to Epstein's allergic reaction it's apparent that his face is
• 12:25
  not right to ensuring Steve Bannon how to receive Depstein's
• 12:29
  gift of an Apple Watch? Can you confirm Steve has
• 12:33
  his watch? I need to get back to Jeffrey. Sorry
• 12:36
  for being such a pain, and look. A lot of
• 12:38
  her tasks were mundane. There is zero doubt about it,
• 12:41
  and I don't put as much responsibility on her as
• 12:45
  someone like Sarah Kellen Vickers. But just because you answered
• 12:48
  the phone and did logistics doesn't mean that you're not culpable.
• 12:52
  You are. She was good at her job, quick, polite,
• 12:56
  and relentlessly positive, even when her task tended towards the obsurdes,
• 13:00
  as when she had to deal with two monster vacuum
• 13:03
  pack stakes left beyond on Epstein's plane, or when she
• 13:07
  was trying to figure out how to transport three tubs
• 13:10
  of Oreo ice cream, Jaye's favorite, from New York to
• 13:14
  another of his properties without it melting. She wrote emails
• 13:18
  bursting with exclamation marks, emoticons, particularly the smiling wink, and
• 13:23
  expressions of elation, tremendous, super terrific. When Jonathan Farkas, a
• 13:29
  New York businessman, told her that her efficiency was the
• 13:32
  envy of the German army, Groff sent the email to
• 13:36
  her husband like think I should forward to je Ike
• 13:40
  replied that she should save it in her files in
• 13:44
  case she ever needed another job. Epstein knew Groff was competent,
• 13:49
  but his email's rarely recognized her efforts. Beyond an occasional
• 13:52
  Kurt thanks. Instead, he showed his appreciation with money. In
• 13:57
  the New York Times interview, he revealed that when Groff
• 14:00
  announced she was pregnant in two thousand and four, he
• 14:03
  offered to pay for a nanny and bought her a
• 14:05
  car to ease her commute from Connecticut. There's no way
• 14:09
  I could lose Leslie to motherhood, he said. According to
• 14:11
  a payroll document, she also doubled her salary from sixty
• 14:15
  thousand in two thousand and four to one hundred and
• 14:18
  twenty thousand in twenty twenty five. There were perks. In
• 14:22
  twenty fourteen, Epstein email Groth offering a Florida holiday, My Style, please,
• 14:28
  five star hotel. The whole works. Groff's husband, Ike, forwarded
• 14:32
  the email to someone else. Seriously, the best boss ever?
• 14:36
  Oh yeah, asked those girls that were getting abused how
• 14:39
  great he was. On Valentine's Day in twenty eighteen, Epstein
• 14:47
  bought her and some other assistants glam squad appointments, where
• 14:50
  stylists would come to their home to do their hair
• 14:53
  and makeup. Too sweet, wrote Groth. Once in twenty fifteen,
• 14:58
  she got to tour his private plane ride on his
• 15:00
  helicopter and take a boat to his private Caribbean island,
• 15:03
  Little Saint James, before staying at a luxury hotel. The
• 15:07
  helly was one of the best parts, she wrote in
• 15:10
  a group email to her family, who were duly impressed.
• 15:13
  I didn't know he had a helicopter too, wow, said
• 15:16
  one Not a boring job, rote Grob's mother. Yeah, I
• 15:20
  would say so. Now, let me ask you, is all
• 15:24
  of that worth what she's dealing with now? Not my opinion.
• 15:28
  All right, folks, we're gonna wrap this one up right here,
• 15:31
  and in the next episode we're gonna pick up where
• 15:33
  we left off. All the information that goes with this
• 15:36
  episode can be found in the description box.