The Registry Folder: What Lesley Groff's Own Emails Show She Managed

On Tuesday morning, Lesley Groff sat down behind closed doors with the House Oversight Committee and described eighteen years inside Jeffrey Epstein's office as a kind of optical illusion. "I worked for Dr. Jekyll," she said in her opening statement, "but was never permitted to see the true Mr. Hyde." She told investigators she did not know about Epstein's crimes, and that she believed the appointments she scheduled for him were with massage therapists. Chairman James Comer emerged calling her "very forthcoming."

Her own sent folder tells a more specific story.

On the morning of June 30, 2011, three years after Epstein pleaded guilty in Palm Beach County to procuring a minor for prostitution, Groff wrote to Darren Indyke, Epstein's longtime personal lawyer, under the subject line "JE-registry":

"Jeffrey wants a the PB Sex Registration form filled out today before he goes...Is this something you need to fill out? Shall I call PB Sex Registration desk and ask them to email to you so you can fill out? (or have me fill out?) I know this is very important it be done correctly...just let me know how to proceed. Jeffrey has wheels up tonight to PB." (EFTA00431565)

In a follow-up to Epstein himself, under the one-word subject "Registry," she reported back on her call to the Palm Beach County Sheriff's sex offender registration office:

"I have the PB registry folder here...did you want to have a look? Do you want me to make copies of anything? The Sex Offender Registration office will not fax or email to me a form...she said you must come in to be fingerprinted and have your picture made...FYI-I did not tell them who I was or who I was calling for...i made no reference to you whatsoever. You must take the updated list of all your phone numbers with you tomorrow...Rich gave you (and emailed you) an updated copy today." (EFTA02540562)

There is a lot of administrative competence packed into those few lines. There is a folder, a physical "PB registry folder," kept at her desk. There is a division of labor: "Rich" is Richard Kahn, Epstein's accountant and the future co-executor of his estate, maintaining the list of phone numbers a registered sex offender was required to disclose. There is a lawyer looped in to make sure the form "be done correctly."

And there is this: "I did not tell them who I was or who I was calling for...i made no reference to you whatsoever." Nobody instructs an assistant to call the sex offender registration desk anonymously. That is a sentence written by someone who understood precisely how radioactive the words "I'm calling for Jeffrey Epstein" had become, and who volunteered, unprompted, that she had kept his name out of it.

A recurring calendar event

The registry folder was not a one-time errand. Groff built Epstein's sex-offender compliance into the office calendar. Literally.

In the Justice Department's email release, an annual alert appears in her account every winter, in her own formatting, year after year: "REMINDER: NYS Sex Off Registry requests updated photo be taken between March 26-May 5 in the VI, so be sure to request updated photo be sent to NYS Sex Off. Registry." The database contains versions of this reminder from 2013, 2014, and 2018, among others. One 2014 entry is titled "REmind JE." Another, a Google Calendar invitation with Groff listed as organizer, is titled "Remind Darren, Sarah, etc: NYS Sex Off Reg requests updated photo."

Read that subject line again. New York State required a registered sex offender to submit an updated photograph. The photograph had to be taken in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein spent much of the spring. And the executive assistant's calendar handled it the way it handled dinner reservations and Gulfstream departures: a recurring event, with reminders fanned out to the lawyer and the rest of the staff.

None of this is evidence that Groff knew about ongoing abuse. It is evidence of something narrower and, for her congressional testimony, more awkward: that the conviction was not an abstraction she worked around the edges of. It was a workflow she owned. For at least seven years, from the 2011 registry folder to the 2018 calendar alert, the paperwork of Epstein's status as a sex offender ran through her desk, alongside everything else.

The desk

The scale of "everything else" is hard to overstate. Lesley Groff is linked to more than 203,000 documents in this database, among the largest footprints of any living person in the Epstein files. The jmail archive contains roughly 215,000 emails in which she is a participant; about 136,000 of them were sent by her. Her sent mail includes more than 2,500 messages with "itinerary" in the subject line, nearly 2,500 with "schedule," and almost 1,800 with "confirm."

The traffic does not taper after the 2008 conviction. It explodes. Her email volume runs at 17,000 to 29,000 messages a year from 2011 through 2018, and continues into 2019, up to weeks before Epstein's arrest. The people on the other end of her threads map his inner machinery: Kahn, Indyke, pilot Larry Visoski, Epstein's companion Karyna Shuliak, bookkeeper Bella Klein, and Deutsche Bank private banker Paul Morris, the wealth adviser Bloomberg reported last month had courted Epstein across three banks.

One small window into what the desk handled: in the summer of 2011, Groff and Indyke traded more than two dozen emails about visa-waiver paperwork for international passengers, in threads with subject lines like "Darren Indyke-Visa Waivers" and "no visa waiver info in Air Ghislaine," an apparent reference to Air Ghislaine Inc., the aviation company associated with Ghislaine Maxwell. Moving people across borders, like everything in Epstein's world, was a scheduling problem, and scheduling problems went to Groff.

What the massage emails actually show

Here the record deserves an honest reading, because it cuts in more than one direction.

Groff told the committee she believed she was booking massage therapists. In the years covered by the jmail archive, overwhelmingly 2010 onward, that is largely what her massage-related email looks like. On January 4, 2014, she wrote to a Florida massage therapist: "Hello Dawn and happy new year. Jeffrey is back in PB and asking if you might be available for a massage later this afternoon. Can you let me know as soon as possible?" The therapist offered to move appointments to fit him in (EFTA01752609). In 2016 she organized spa gift sessions for staff and friends at a Manhattan spa. "Jeffrey would like to treat you to an Urban Detox message at his new spa in NY," she wrote, offering to organize appointments (EFTA02057874). In one of those threads, she noted that the "Friends of JE" sessions were designated "a gift for Doctors of Eva Dubin and the Dubin center" (EFTA02059368), a detail that lands differently after CNN's reporting last month that Epstein donated at least $125,000 to Mount Sinai's Dubin Breast Center while receiving VIP treatment from the hospital.

If the story ended there, her testimony would look unremarkable. It does not end there, because the years that matter most are the years the jmail archive barely covers.

The federal government's own documents name Groff as one of four "potential co-conspirators," alongside Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, and Nadia Marcinkova, shielded from prosecution by the 2007 non-prosecution agreement negotiated with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami (read the NPA's co-conspirator clause). An FBI Criminal Investigative Division document in the release designates her by name (FBI CID Co-Conspirator Designation). Victims' civil suits from that era alleged that the appointments scheduled out of the New York office were not with licensed therapists but with teenage girls. And when FBI agents arrived at Groff's home on August 21, 2007 to serve her with a federal grand jury subpoena, according to a government plea proffer in the release, she excused herself, telephoned Epstein while the agents were still in the house, and was reprimanded by him for letting them in; the proffer states Epstein "warned Ms. Groff against turning over documents and electronic evidence responsive to the subpoena and pressured her to delay her appearance" before the grand jury (read the proffer). Groff was never charged and has denied wrongdoing. But the immunity clause is the reason the question of what the scheduler knew was never tested in court, which is precisely why a congressional transcribed interview, eighteen years later, matters.

Four years before her start date

There is one more discrepancy in Tuesday's testimony that the records surface, and it is a clean one.

Groff told the committee she began working for Epstein in February 2001. The passenger manifests in Epstein's publicly released flight logs record "Lesley Groff" aboard his aircraft beginning in March 1997.

The logs place her on a March 8, 1997 flight from Columbus, Ohio to Teterboro, returning from the home city of Leslie Wexner, with Epstein and Wexner aboard. Two weeks later she appears on a Palm Beach-to-Teterboro leg with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. That August she is logged on a Teterboro-to-Palm Beach flight with Epstein, Maxwell, and Alan Dershowitz. In total, the logs record her on 92 flights between 1997 and 2011, 87 of them with Epstein aboard, tracing the familiar Palm Beach-Teterboro-St. Thomas triangle.

There are innocent readings. Pilots' log transcriptions contain errors; "Lesley Groff" could conceivably be a mis-rendering, though the full name recurs across dozens of legs and years. She may have done work for Epstein before 2001 in some other capacity, making her testimony imprecise rather than false. But the gap is four years wide, it spans the period when, according to the government's later indictment, Epstein's trafficking operation was running at full tilt, and it is checkable: the original log pages are public, and the committee has subpoena power over the rest.

What the files do not contain

Fairness requires stating plainly what this archive does not show. There is no email in which Lesley Groff acknowledges that Epstein was abusing anyone. The jmail corpus, for all its volume, skews heavily toward 2010 to 2019, after the conduct charged in the 2019 indictment. The "massage" emails it contains read as mundane. She has never been charged with a crime, she told Congress she saw nothing, and the committee's chairman found her credible enough to call the session productive. Survivors who gathered outside Tuesday's interview, it should be said, did not.

What the files do contain is a precise inventory of what passed through her hands: the registry folder, the fingerprinting appointments, the annual photo deadline fanned out to "Darren, Sarah, etc," the phone-number list from "Rich," the anonymous call to the sheriff's registration desk. Whatever Lesley Groff did not see, she filed a great deal.

What happens next

The committee will release Groff's transcript, likely within two weeks if it follows the pattern set with Pam Bondi and MCC guard Tova Noel, whose May interviews were published on June 4. Bill Gates sits for his own transcribed interview on June 10. Rep. Stephen Lynch has already said Groff told the committee she arranged multiple phone calls between Epstein and Donald Trump before his presidency, a claim her transcript will either flesh out or flatten.

When the transcript arrives, three questions are worth checking it against. Did anyone ask her about the registry folder? Did anyone ask her who else received the annual "Sex Off Reg" reminders she organized? And did anyone ask her what, exactly, she was doing on Jeffrey Epstein's Gulfstream in March of 1997, four years before the date she says she walked into his office?

The documents that would answer the third question already exist. They are page 7 of the flight logs.