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In 2005, Lesley Groff’s life looked incredible. The executive assistant to a Wall Street star, she was earning $300,000 (about $500,000 in today’s money), had unlimited use of a charge account at Frédéric Fekkai, the New York society hair dresser, and food was delivered from ultra exclusive restaurant Le Cirque. When Groff became pregnant, her boss bought her a Mercedes-Benz E320 to make the commute easier and paid for her full-time nanny. Of her employer, Groff raved to the New York Times that year: “It comes down to the bond. I know what he is thinking and I know when I need to be fast. It’s a nice roll we are on.” That “roll” would end when the man with whom she shared this “bond” was found dead in a New York jail cell. Groff didn’t just work for 20 years for any financier – but for Jeffrey Epstein. After Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend turned procurer of underage girls, his most ‘inner circle’ consisted of four women alleged to have not only “helped Mr. Epstein lure girls into his orbit” but who also “managed the logistics of his encounters with them” as the New York Times has reported. If you think about it, moving the hundreds of victims of Epstein between his Manhattan home, private Caribbean island, New Mexico ranch and Paris apartment would have required flights booked, cars arranged, scheduling handled and payments made. (The Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program received approximately 225 applications from alleged victims.) It was the “women employed as ‘assistants’ [who] kept the wheels of the sex-trafficking enterprise turning,” Politico has reported. In 2008, when Florida authorities brought their case against Epstein, four women — Sarah Kellen, Nadia Marcinkova, Adriana Ross, and Lesley Groff — “were apparently so instrumental to Mr. Epstein’s operation that they were named as possible ‘co-conspirators’ and were granted immunity from prosecution”, according to the New York Times. (None of these women has been charged with wrongdoing.) “Jeffrey is no longer here, and the women that helped him are,” Teresa Helm, an Epstein victim, said in 2019. “They definitely need to be held accountable for helping him, helping themselves, helping one another carry on this huge — almost like — system.” In 2018, the Miami Herald ran a bombshell investigation into Epstein, which would lead to prosecutors reopening the case into him and his 2019 arrest. After the Herald’s report, Epstein is reported to have wired the “possible co-conspirators” between $380,000 and $150,000 to buy their silence, according to prosecutors. Sarah Kellen In December 2010, Prince Andrew was filmed at Epstein’s New York home during his infamous stay with the, by then, convicted child sex offender, waving goodbye to Australian Katherine Keating, the daughter of former Prime Minister Paul Keating. Also in footage recorded that day is a woman who appears to be Kellen. (Kellen has also gone by the names Sarah Kensington and Sarah Vickers.) In 2022 during Maxwell’s sentencing hearing, US District Judge Alison Nathan found that Kellen was “a knowing participant in the criminal conspiracy” and said she was “a criminally responsible participant.” Kellen is reported to have begun working for Epstein in 2002 however a pilot who worked for the pedophile said that she was also Maxwell’s assistant too. Kellen was reportedly “just below Ms. Maxwell in the chain of command,” the Times has reported and she was named as the “lieutenant” in a civil lawsuit. “She saw herself as the boss,” Spencer T. Kuvin, a Florida lawyer who has represented several Epstein accusers, has said. “Sarah was really running that organisation, bringing girls and getting them in and out of the Palm Beach home.” Many years later a spokeswoman for Kellen would make the case for her vulnerability at that time, saying she was a 22-year-old who had just been divorced by the man she had married aged 17 and had been “cast out of the Jehovah’s Witness community in which she had been born and raised.” “When Sarah was targeted by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, she, like many of their victims, was struggling financially and emotionally,” her spokesperson said in a statement to Politico. “Soon after Sarah was brought into Epstein’s world, he began to sexually and psychologically abuse her – abuse that endured for years.” That same year, 2002, Courtney Wild, then in middle school and with braces, alleges she met Kellen when she entered Epstein’s Palm Beach home. “You’re 14 years old and you go to a mansion, and then Sarah Kellen – I mean, she’s a beautiful woman, too, she’s very nice, you know – escorts me upstairs,” Wild said in a 2021 interview. “Kellen’s friendliness made the situation seem normal,” Politico reported. “Multiple girls,” according to the Times, “told Palm Beach detectives that when they arrived at Mr. Epstein’s mansion, Ms. Kellen would escort them upstairs to Mr. Epstein’s bedroom and lay out the massage table with the various oils and lotions that they were to use on him, according to police reports.” Details about Kellen’s alleged role have come out via police documents and during Maxwell’s sex 2021 sex trafficking trial. Witnesses said that Kellen “scheduled flights on Epstein’s private jets and arranged for his victims to be on them,” Business Insider has reported. “Kellen also arranged ‘massages’ — up to three a day — where Epstein would rape his victims, witnesses testified.” Palm Beach police documents and a deposition allege that, as the Times reported, Kellen “kept the names and numbers of all the girls who gave Mr. Epstein erotic massages … She would call them whenever Mr. Epstein was in town, asking the girls if they were ready to ‘work’”. In 2006, 22-year-old South African Sarah Ransome met Epstein after arriving in New York to study fashion. Invited to his private island, “I was called into his bedroom and then raped. There was no way of escaping off the island,” Ransome told a Netflix documentary. In 2019, Ransome told the Times: “It was Ghislaine and Sarah Kellen that showed me how to please Jeffrey”. Ransome told the Netflix doco: “You know when Jeffrey wanted me, you know, Sarah Kellen or Ghislaine would call me into his bedroom, and I had no choice but to go. Ghislaine was always on the phone, and Sarah Kellen was always on her laptop organising things.” “Sarah Kellen knew for every girl that she organised to go on that island or to be picked up by a car to go to the New York mansion, she knew that these girls were there to be raped repeatedly. … She’s going to rot in hell, definitely.” Flight logs published by the now defunct Gawker reportedly showed Kellen on Epstein’s private plane on at least 11 flights between 2002 and 2003 with former President Bill Clinton. “Several” of the possible underage victims of Epstein interviewed by Palm Beach police in the lead up to his 2006 charging have said they “felt intimidated and frightened by Epstein and Sarah Kellen … who warned them not to talk to police,” the Miami Herald has reported. When Epstein was jailed in 2019, Kellen visited him multiple times. In 2012 Kellen was photographed walking with Epstein in New York and in 2015 the Guardian reported that she was running an interior design business called SLK Designs out of a property owned by Epstein’s brother Mark and ‘under a new identity’. A Facebook page, no longer accessible, said that Kellen was “working with a number of clients on various projects including renovating several corporate apartments in New York, the Caribbean, and Paris.” Epstein owned homes in all three locations. Around 2012, Kellen is reported to have begun dating NASCAR driver Brian Vickers and they wed in 2015. In 2019, the Mail reported that she and Vickers split their time between homes in New York, Miami and North Carolina. She had reportedly been pictured travelling to Singapore, New York, Miami, Tokyo and Capri. Earlier this year Vickers announced he and Kellen were divorcing. “Very soon after Sarah was brought into Epstein’s world, he began to sexually abuse her,” a spokeswoman for her told CNN in 2019, “and this abuse went on for years. Sarah continues to struggle with the trauma of her experiences and has chosen not to speak publicly at this time.” During Maxwell’s 2021 trial, Kellen was “mentioned repeatedly” by the British-born sex tracker’s lawyers. One accuser said that “Kellen had paid her to pose for nude photographs and helped schedule sexualised massages she took part in”. Politico has reported that Courtney Wild found it “upsetting for her to hear that Kellen calls herself a victim.” “How could you do this?” she tearily told the publication. “She was over the age of 21 … so I feel like she was in a state of mind to make good and bad decisions, and she repeatedly made the wrong decision.” Lesley Groff Groff would clock up nearly two decades working for Epstein as his executive assistant. Getting the job was “not easy,” that 2005 Times story said. Epstein made his assistants “submit to a test that he likens to a graduate exam. Some candidates being considered by him also write a 20-page research report in which they demonstrate their communication and critical thinking skills.” “There is no way that I could lose Lesley to motherhood,” Epstein said. His then assistants were his “social prosthesis,” he told the paper, which reported that their “intuitive knowledge of his manifold needs and a 24-hour presence that make them virtually indispensable”. “They are an extension of my brain,” Epstein said. In 2019, Epstein victim Sarah Ransome alleged in a lawsuit that Groff “arranged travel and lodging for the seemingly endless stream of adolescent girls and young women”. In the suit, she reportedly alleged she was “instructed by Mr. Epstein’s associates to go on a diet and to lose” about 5kg. Ransome emailed Groff in 2007 saying, “Please could you also let him know that I am now 57kg and that everything is going well”. After Epstein’s death a woman identified as Victim-1 filed a lawsuit which alleged that “During scheduling phone calls Kellen and Groff often asked Doe to bring other girls with her to Epstein’s home. At times, Kellen and Groff directed Doe to bring with her specific girls who Epstein had assaulted before, requesting them by name.” Victim-1, per the suit, “said that Ms. Kellen or Ms. Groff would pay her whenever she brought other girls to Mr. Epstein.” A lawyer for Groff said in 2019: “At no time during Lesley’s employment with Epstein did she ever engage in any misconduct and never knowingly made travel arrangements for anyone under 18”. In 2021, lawyers for Groff were told, Business Insider reported, that no charges would be brought against Groff. Her lawyers told Insider that Groff had “never witnessed anything improper or illegal.” Nadia Marcinkova In 2015 when the Guardian found Kellen working out of Mark Epstein’s property, there was another business being run out of there – Aviloop, a website selling discounted flying lessons; its chief executive, a woman called Nadia Marcinkova. Like Kellen, Marcinkova’s story, who is also known as Nadia Marcinko, is not a simple one. According to CNN, “multiple victims said Marcinkova played a role in their abuse”. Marcinkova, one lawsuit has claimed, is alleged to have aided Epstein by “directly participating in sexual abuse and prostitution of the minor girls”. A 16-year-old victim reportedly told police that on multiple occasions she was, the Times has reported, “coerced into having with both Ms. Marcinkova and Mr. Epstein”. When Palm Beach were investigating Epstein in Marcinkova, she “appeared to be living at Epstein’s house, receiving packages from Armani Exchange and showing up on footage from a hidden video camera seized during a search of his home”, CNN has reported. However, Epstein, according to one victim, said he had “purchased” Marcinkova at age 15 from her family and brought her to America to be his “Yugoslavian sex slave.” During the 18 months he spent in prison in 2008 and 2009, she visited him at least 54 times, In a statement in 2019 her lawyers said: “Like other victims, Nadia Marcinko is and has been severely traumatised. She needs time to process and make sense of what she has been through before she is able to speak out.” Adriana Ross Out of all of Epstein’s alleged “possible co-conspirators”, the least is known about Ross, who also has gone by Adriana Mucinska. The details are scant: She was a model from Poland and, New York magazine has reported, she “helped with the calendar”. She is not known to have commented on her ties to Epstein and, per Politico, refused to answer questions in a 2010 deposition. ‘Not the end?’ The only person to have been convicted has been Ghislaine Maxwell who, after being interviewed by Deputy Attorney-General Todd Blanche earlier this year, was moved to a minimum security facility in Texas. After she was found guilty in 2021, standing outside the court in Manhattan, Virginia Giuffre spoke to the media. “I hope that today is not the end but rather another step in justice being served,” she said. “Maxwell did not act alone. Others must be held accountable. I have faith that they will be.” In April this year Ms Giuffre died by suicide. The question of justice remains unanswered. Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
