The woman who managed every phone call, every appointment, and every detail of Jeffrey Epstein’s daily life for 18 years sat down with Congress on June 9, 2026, and confirmed something the White House had been quietly hoping she wouldn’t. Lesley Groff, Epstein’s longtime executive secretary, told the House Oversight Committee she set up phone calls between Epstein and Donald Trump several times a year, for at least a decade. That’s not a rumor, a leaked document, or an anonymous source. That’s the person who physically placed the calls saying she placed them.
The part that matters most is the timeline. Groff joined Epstein’s office in 2001. She says she routed those calls before Trump became president. Trump has consistently maintained that his friendship with Epstein ended sometime in the early 2000s, cleanly and without much ceremony. A decade of routed phone calls, starting in 2001, doesn’t fit inside “early 2000s and then it was over.” That’s the problem her account creates, not just for the record, but for the specific version of events the administration has been repeating with increasing confidence.
It’s worth stating plainly what the testimony does not do. It doesn’t place Trump at a crime scene. It doesn’t prove he knew anything about Epstein’s abuse. It doesn’t charge him with anything. What it does is contradict the specific claim that this was a brief, distant acquaintance that ended long before anything went wrong. Those are different things, and it’s important to keep them separate.
What Groff Actually Said
Groff, 59, worked for Epstein for roughly 18 years starting in 2001, and made her disclosure during a closed-door interview with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as part of its ongoing Epstein investigation. She told lawmakers she didn’t remember setting up any in-person meetings between the two men, but said it was possible, adding that she would describe their relationship as “friendly.”
Her own account of what those calls were actually about was notably non-committal. “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.” She was careful. But careful is different from contradictory, and what she confirmed about the regularity and duration of the calls is specific enough to matter.
Groff worked for Epstein for nearly 20 years, and her name appears more than 150,000 times in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice. She was a ubiquitous assistant who helped manage every aspect of Epstein’s life, from appointments with women to meetings with powerful individuals, as evidenced in the Justice Department’s millions of Epstein files. If she says she put a call through, it is reasonable to take that seriously.
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 said she “had no criminal involvement with Epstein.”
The Broader Testimony
The Trump-related phone calls were not the only thing Groff addressed that day. Epstein’s longtime executive secretary told the House Oversight Committee that the convicted sex offender was a “master manipulator” and that she was unaware of his crimes, according to her prepared opening remarks and multiple sources familiar with her closed-door testimony.
As a way to try to demonstrate her ignorance about Epstein’s wrongdoing, Groff said she believed the massage appointments she made for Epstein with young women and girls were with massage therapists. She described the booking process in clinical terms: “These calls lasted literally a few seconds. ‘Hi, this is Lesley calling for Mr. Epstein. Are you available for a massage at 4:00?’” Groff told lawmakers. “None of these women or anyone else ever told me they were minors; or that they were sexually abused. Nothing I heard or saw led me to believe otherwise.”
Marina 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.”
Democrats on the committee were openly skeptical. Rep. James Walkinshaw of Virginia said he found Groff’s testimony “absolutely unbelievable, not remotely credible,” while Rep. Stephen Lynch told reporters her characterization of their relationship was “highly inconsistent.” House Oversight Chair James Comer, meanwhile, described Groff as “very forthcoming” and “compelling” in the way she answered questions throughout the closed-door interview.
A Friendship, and Its Official Revision
Trump developed a social and professional relationship with Epstein that began in the late 1980s. During his years as a businessman and media personality, he and Epstein moved in the same circles through the 1990s and into the early 2000s, socializing at parties at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and at Epstein’s residences.
In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said of Epstein, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” In that same piece, Trump noted he’d known Epstein for 15 years. A recent newspaper report has since claimed Trump wrote Epstein a salacious birthday letter back when the two were friends.
When Epstein was convicted of sex crimes against minors in 2008, Trump began creating distance. By 2019, as federal sex trafficking charges landed, he insisted he was not a fan and had not spoken to Epstein in 15 years.
Trump has maintained that he severed ties with Epstein years before the financier’s 2019 death, and he has never been charged with any misconduct. The White House has held to that position consistently.
Vance, The View, and What Doesn’t Add Up
Just days before Groff’s transcript was made public, Vice President JD Vance appeared on The View, hoping to promote his new book, only to find himself explaining Donald Trump’s relationship with the world’s most notorious sex offender.
Vance 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. However, evidence shows their relationship lasted into the early 2000s. “Donald Trump literally reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police,” Vance said on air.
The timeline is more complicated than that. Trump did make a phone call to Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter, but that call came in July 2006, more than a year after the investigation had already been launched in March 2005. So Trump did not initiate the investigation. By that point, their friendship had already collapsed following a bidding war over a Palm Beach mansion.
Rep. Lynch noted that Groff arranged “multiple phone calls” between Trump and Epstein before Trump was president, but didn’t specify when. Given that Groff joined Epstein’s office in 2001 and Trump has claimed the friendship ended sometime in the early 2000s, the implication is that regular phone contact continued well into the period Trump describes as after the break. You can’t tell a story about a clean break and then have the man’s secretary recall routing calls for years after it supposedly happened.
The Files, the Transparency Act, and What Came Next
Groff’s testimony is the latest development in an investigation that has repeatedly created friction between what the Trump administration promised and what it delivered.
Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025. The law requires the U.S. Attorney General to make all files pertaining to the prosecution of Epstein publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format, and to give the Judiciary Committees in both chambers an unredacted list of all government officials and politically exposed persons named in the files.
Following a delayed and heavily criticized rollout, the Department of Justice released additional files in waves, with a fifth release on January 30, 2026. The department then claimed it had fulfilled its legal obligations and released all available files, amounting to over 3.5 million pages. In July 2025, the DOJ released a memo concluding that no “client list” existed and that no credible evidence supported claims Epstein had blackmailed prominent individuals.
Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi in April over displeasure with her handling of the files controversy. The White House has dismissed Democrats’ line of questioning, with deputy press secretary Abigail Jackson saying in a statement that Trump “has been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”
Groff appeared as part of the committee’s ongoing inquiry into the federal government’s handling of investigations into Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators, which to date has included interviews with former Attorney General Pam Bondi, Epstein’s longtime personal assistant Sarah Kellen, and a prison guard who was on duty the night Epstein died in his jail cell. Bill Gates was interviewed by the same committee the day after Groff’s appearance.
Read More: Melania Named in Bombshell New Epstein Claims
The Quiet Part, Said Plainly
The phone calls Lesley Groff described are not, on their own, evidence of wrongdoing. A friendship maintained through regular calls is a friendship, not a conspiracy. Trump has never been charged with any crime related to Epstein, and no credible allegation puts him at the center of Epstein’s abuse operation. That is a fact, and it matters.
What Groff’s account does puncture is the specific claim that the Trump-Epstein association was a brief, passing one that ended cleanly in the early 2000s. She joined Epstein’s office in 2001. She says she set up those calls for at least a decade. That puts the phone contact well into the period Trump insists the friendship was already over.
The shifting timeline, the fired attorney general, the heavily redacted document releases, the administration’s insistence on a version of events that keeps running into firsthand accounts from the people who were actually present: none of that adds up to proof of anything on its own. But it does suggest the full picture is more complicated than the one being presented. Some of that picture may never come fully into view. The portion that already has keeps contradicting the official version.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.