Epstein's Private Chef Told the FBI He Saw Teenage Girls Visiting Daily

Every day at the Palm Beach estate, four or five teenage girls walked through the door next to the kitchen. David Mullen knew because he was standing right there. He was Jeffrey Epstein's private chef, and from August 2004 through October 2005, he cooked meals, stocked refrigerators, and watched a steady procession of young women cycle through rooms he was told to stay out of.

On December 13, 2006, FBI agents sat Mullen down for a formal interview as part of their federal investigation into the sexual exploitation of minors. The resulting FD-302 report (EFTA00269572) records his account in clinical detail. Mullen told them about the teenage girls. He told them about the private jets. He told them about the massages. And fourteen years later, when the FBI came back for a second interview in October 2020 (EFTA01247133), he told them again.

From Four-Star Kitchen to Epstein's Orbit

Before he entered Epstein's world, Mullen worked at Daniel, a four-star restaurant on Manhattan's Upper East Side, just down the street from Epstein's 71st Street townhouse. He wanted out of restaurant work. A headhunter connected him with the opportunity. Ghislaine Maxwell conducted the initial screening, meeting Mullen at her Manhattan residence for a tasting. She told him, as he later recalled to the FBI, "We are looking for a chef...traveling cook...cook breakfast, lunch, dinner."

Mullen sat down with Epstein, who offered him the job. The terms included a free apartment as part of his salary, a supplementary American Express card on Maxwell's account, and an expectation of total availability. Maxwell spelled out the rules: how to dress, where to sit on the plane, what to do, what not to do. "Be ready at any time," she told him. "Don't be late or you'll be fired."

He accepted. For the next fourteen months, Mullen lived inside the infrastructure of what prosecutors would later call one of the most extensive sex trafficking operations in American history.

The Properties, the Jets, the Guests

Mullen traveled constantly. He rotated between Epstein's Manhattan townhouse at 9 East 71st Street, the Palm Beach estate, the private island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Zorro Ranch near Santa Fe, New Mexico. He also flew to Paris and Martha's Vineyard. Flight records document him on more than 15 trips aboard Epstein's Gulfstream and Boeing 727 (dc-6404379), the aircraft later known in media reports as the "Lolita Express."

The Boeing 727 had a full kitchen on board. Mullen used it to prepare meals for Epstein and his guests during flights. According to the 2006 FD-302, "the most notable guests to travel on Epstein's aircraft were John Kerry and Aaron Barak." In his 2020 interview, Mullen added that he "made lunch for Al Gore" and "cooked for the former prime minister of Israel," flying with the prime minister and his wife.

These were not minor details. They established that Mullen occupied a position with direct, daily access to the inner workings of Epstein's household. He was not a visitor. He was not an outsider looking in. He was embedded.

"Approximately Four or Five Teenaged Females Would Visit Daily"

The most damning passages in the 2006 FD-302 concern what Mullen observed at the Palm Beach residence. The report states that "one unknown male, 20's in age, frequently brought local teenaged females to Epstein's residence in Palm Beach, Florida." Mullen believed this man drove a red Honda Accord. He estimated that "approximately four or five teenaged females would visit Epstein's Palm Beach residence daily."

Mullen told the FBI that "sometimes the females at the residence would go upstairs with Epstein and sometimes they would gather and talk in the living room area." He said he was "aware that Epstein received massages every day" and that "in addition to massages provided by massage therapists (masseuses), local teenaged females also gave Epstein massages."

He drew a clear distinction between the professional masseuses and the local teenagers: "it was easy to distinguish between the masseuses and the local teenaged females based on their appearance and demeanor." He did not know what happened behind closed doors, but he "opined that Epstein was receiving more than just massages based on the number of teenaged females that were going upstairs with him."

That last line is worth pausing on. A member of the household staff, someone with no legal training or investigative mandate, looked at the volume of teenage girls going upstairs with a middle-aged man and drew the obvious conclusion.

The 2020 Interview: Fourteen Years Later

When the FBI came back in October 2020, a year after Epstein's death in a Manhattan jail cell, they conducted a video conference interview with Mullen (EFTA01247133, EFTA00090348). The 2020 FD-302, filed on January 5, 2021, runs five pages. Present on the call were two Assistant United States Attorneys, a paralegal, a detective, and an FBI special agent.

Mullen's second account filled in new texture. He described working in the downstairs kitchen "where the staff lived," making Epstein "peanut butter and jelly sandwiches" on demand, and being on call around the clock when on the island. At the Palm Beach estate, he described a rigid daily schedule: muffins in the morning, lunch prepared, dinner ready, with snacks at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.

Then came the critical passages about the women. "A lot of people came in through the door next to the kitchen," the report reads. "There were a lot of people who came in for massages." Mullen stated the women "looked like 18-22-year-old women" and that "all of them appeared to have been coming to the house prior to Mullen working for Epstein as they knew their way around the house."

He described the traffic pattern in detail. The women would arrive. A staff member or another woman at the house would "direct them upstairs." They would stay for about an hour. Mullen "would make the females something to eat if they wanted" when they came back downstairs. "Sometimes there were two ladies at the house, with one upstairs while the other one stayed downstairs waiting for the other one."

Mullen admitted to the FBI that he thought some of the women were "working girls," a term he used to mean prostitutes. He said, "I mean who gets that many massages a day." But he hedged on their ages, saying he "did not think they would be under 18 years old because he thought if they were younger they would have been at school." He added that "if he would have been a bouncer he would have let them into the bar."

This stands in tension with his 2006 statement, where he explicitly used the word "teenaged" to describe the daily visitors. The FBI noticed the inconsistencies between his two accounts. Mullen requested counsel.

The Young Women on the Jets

Beyond Palm Beach, Mullen witnessed Epstein traveling with young women on his private aircraft. The 2006 FD-302 states: "Young females frequently traveled on the two private aircraft with Epstein." Mullen told agents he "believed most of the females were from Spain or Russia and were 18 years of age or older, although some of their ages were questionable."

He identified the pipeline. "The majority of the females were aspiring models who met Epstein through Jean Luc and his modeling agency." Jean-Luc Brunel ran MC2 Model Management, which multiple victims and witnesses identified as a conduit for supplying young women to Epstein. Brunel was indicted on sex trafficking charges in France in 2020 and died in his Paris jail cell in February 2022.

Several of these women lived in the apartment building at 301 East 66th Street in New York, a property Epstein controlled. Mullen observed that "Epstein was controlling toward the females and would not allow them to associate with other individuals." He described the women, with a bluntness the FBI transcribed directly, as "not very bright."

Mullen himself had been instructed by Epstein "to refrain from socializing with any guests on the aircraft." The instruction to keep staff separated from guests was a consistent feature of Epstein's operation, one that multiple other household employees have described in their own FBI interviews and depositions.

Person of Interest Number 21

Mullen's proximity to the operation did not go unnoticed by investigators. He was listed as number 21 on the FBI's persons-of-interest list for the Epstein case (EFTA00269569), a roster that included Ghislaine Maxwell at number 3, Jean-Luc Brunel, and Leslie Wexner. The FBI's electronic communication documenting his interview was titled "(U//FOUO) INTERVIEW OF DAVID RICHARD MULLEN" and assigned to Case ID 31E-MM-NEW, the Bureau's main Epstein file.

In a separate legal proceeding connected to the case, a deponent invoked the Fifth Amendment when asked a single question: "Who is David Mullen?" The refusal to answer even that basic identification query under oath suggests that Mullen's role in the household was sensitive territory for people beyond Mullen himself.

Maxwell's own defense disclosures in the Giuffre v. Maxwell civil case (dc-7011245) listed numerous household employees as individuals "likely to have discoverable information relevant to disputed facts." The staff who cooked, cleaned, drove, and flew for Epstein became a critical category of witness, people who could not claim the distance that powerful guests relied on.

The Confidentiality Clause and the Silence

When Mullen left Epstein's employment, he signed a confidentiality clause. This was standard practice for Epstein's staff. The clause was designed to ensure that employees who witnessed the daily operations of the household would not speak about what they saw.

It did not hold up against a federal investigation. But Mullen's 2006 account, while detailed about the presence of teenage girls, also contained moments of careful distance. He "did not have conversations with the teenaged females beyond being polite and asking if they needed anything." He "did not engage in relationships with the females associated with Epstein." He "did not observe or hear any disturbances during his employment." He had heard "stories of girls who attempted to steal items from Epstein's residence" who "were sent home and not allowed to return."

He saw everything. He described the volume, the patterns, the daily arrivals. He named the staff, the properties, the vehicles, the guests. And yet, like other household employees, he framed his observations through a lens of someone who was just doing his job.

Why Staff Testimony Matters

Household employees occupy a unique position in cases like this. They lack the legal exposure of co-conspirators and the trauma of victims, which makes their accounts valuable as relatively disinterested observations of daily patterns. But they also spent months and years inside a system they had financial incentives not to question.

Mullen's two FBI interviews, separated by fourteen years, provide one of the most detailed firsthand accounts of daily life inside Epstein's operation from a non-victim, non-conspirator perspective. He described the infrastructure: the properties, the jets, the staff hierarchy, the scheduling of "massages," the stream of young women who knew their way around the house. He identified key figures, including Maxwell, Brunel, and several staff members whose names remain partially redacted in the released documents.

At the time of his 2020 FBI interview, Mullen was 49 years old and living in Heber City, Utah, a small mountain town about an hour east of Salt Lake City. A long way from the private jets and the Palm Beach kitchen where, as he told the FBI, he would watch teenage girls walk through the door next to his workspace, head upstairs, and come back down an hour later asking for something to eat.

His account is now part of the public record. The question it raises is the same one that runs through so many Epstein-related documents: how many people saw exactly what Mullen saw, and said nothing at all?

David Mullen's profile, flight records, and 331 linked documents are available in the Epstein Exposed database. The 2006 FBI FD-302 (EFTA00269572) and 2020 FD-302 (EFTA01247133) are accessible in our document archive. This article was developed from a community submission. If you have information about individuals connected to the Epstein case, you can submit a tip.