The Nine-Year Pipeline: How Epstein Used Language Schools to Move Foreign Women to Zorro Ranch

On the evening of Sunday, March 15, 2015, Lesley Groff typed out a question that had nothing to do with an English exam.

Groff had worked as Jeffrey Epstein's scheduler for more than a decade. Her task that night, per emails released this year by the Department of Justice under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, was to confirm logistics for a young woman scheduled to take the Test of English as a Foreign Language the following Saturday morning. The location of record in the email thread is the Sylvan Learning Center at 4121 Wyoming Boulevard NE in Albuquerque. The flight plan moved the woman from Palm Beach to New York to New Mexico in a two-day hop. The overnight stop was at Epstein's townhouse on the Upper East Side. The next morning's flight, a Gulfstream IV with the tail number N212JE, was scheduled to depart Palm Beach International for Santa Fe Regional Airport at 10:37 a.m.

What Groff wanted clarified in her email was whether someone had remembered to book a car from Santa Fe to Zorro Ranch, the 8,000-acre Epstein compound in Stanley, New Mexico, where the woman would stay for the week leading up to the exam. The email thread includes jmail IDs EFTA02082642, EFTA02082655, EFTA02082669, and EFTA02082693. A fifth message in the chain, EFTA02082461, captures a sentence in the young woman's own voice: "Do you know who will pick up us today's night?"

It is easy, reading the thread, to see what Groff was doing as she saw it. She was arranging a car. She was checking on a test center. She was confirming that groceries had been delivered. If you strip out the context, it reads like the administrative work of any well-run household.

The context is that this particular piece of household administration, repeated across 879 other email chains dating from 2011 through 2019, is what a sustained and compartmentalized trafficking operation looks like when it is run by competent professional staff.

The cast of two

Two names appear more than any others in the English-language exam coordination threads surfaced by a review of the EpsteinExposed case database: Lesley Groff in New York, and Karen Gordon on the ranch.

Groff's role in the broader Epstein operation has been part of the public record at least since 2019. She was named in Virginia Giuffre's civil filings, was questioned by federal investigators after the July 2019 arrest, and her signature appears on paperwork for multiple Epstein-controlled entities. What the full jmail corpus makes visible for the first time is the specific day-to-day texture of her work. She coordinated flights. She arranged car service. She managed the overlap between staff at six residences. And relevant to this story, she handled the logistics of young foreign women arriving in the United States for what the emails consistently describe as language testing.

Karen Gordon is less documented publicly. With her husband Brice, she managed Zorro Ranch from the early 2000s through Epstein's death in August 2019. Both are New Zealand nationals. Both have military service in the New Zealand Army and Navy in their backgrounds, per reporting in the New Zealand Herald. According to that reporting and to court filings that have surfaced in the current Truth Commission review, Brice Gordon was interviewed by the FBI at the Zorro guest house on February 13, 2007. The interview ended when he received a phone call from Epstein's "main office" instructing him to stop speaking with agents. Notes from that interview are not present in the publicly released EFTA archive. Brice received a two million dollar bequest in Epstein's final will. Neither of the Gordons has been accused of any offending.

Karen's name in the March 2015 thread appears in the context of meal planning and car arrangements. She is copied on messages about grocery orders. She is asked whether the guest house will be stocked for Sunday arrivals. She is not, in any message in this thread, described as doing anything more than running a large ranch for its owner. What becomes visible only when her name is traced across nearly nine years of coordination, alongside Groff's, is a pattern. When young foreign women arrive at the ranch, Karen Gordon is the one who meets them.

The flight

The internal flight log assigns the identifier f-1204 to the March 17, 2015 leg of the trip. Aircraft: a Gulfstream IV registered at the time to JEGE LLC. Tail: N212JE. Route: KPBI to KSAF.

The return leg on Saturday March 21, labeled f-1205 in the same log, flew the same airframe from Santa Fe to Phoenix. It departed a few hours after the TOEFL exam would have concluded.

The passenger manifests for the March 2015 tranche of flight logs are blank. This is a gap in the federal release, not a gap in the flights themselves. An earlier document, a March 23, 2014 flight also on N212JE from Oakland to Albuquerque, still carries its manifest intact, and the passenger line reads in full: "Jeffrey Epstein, Woody Allen, Soon Yi Previn, Redacted, 1 Passenger." The "1 Passenger" notation, absent a name, is consistent with how EFTA redactors have handled presumed victims across the broader corpus.

N212JE is, in both our flight records and in publicly available historical aviation databases, the airframe that shows up most consistently on Palm Beach to New Mexico routes. Between 2010 and 2019, at least 35 Epstein-fleet flights appear in the internal logs with either KSAF or KABQ as origin or destination. The tail number appears on enough of those flights to be identifiable in staff communications simply as "the Santa Fe flight."

The 2015 thread does not identify the young woman by name. It does describe her in pieces. A recent arrival to Paris. Still in the process of acquiring English-language certification. Scheduled at a Sylvan center in Albuquerque because the ranch was reachable in a single Gulfstream leg from Palm Beach, and because the testing window fit between other items on the ranch calendar that week.

The test center

We have made inquiries to the Educational Testing Service about whether the Sylvan Learning franchise at 4121 Wyoming Boulevard NE in Albuquerque was an authorized TOEFL test administration site on March 21, 2015. ETS does not publish historical test-center rosters. Sylvan Learning corporate did not respond to a request for comment for this article. The address is, in 2026, an operating Sylvan franchise, visible in current publicly available street-level imagery and confirmed operational by a direct call to the location.

What we are able to say without speculation is that the internal Epstein email of March 15, 2015 specifies that address as the location where the young woman was scheduled to sit her TOEFL exam the following Saturday morning, and that Lesley Groff cross-referenced the address in a follow-up message with a note to confirm the test-center check-in time with Sylvan directly.

If the Sylvan franchise was not itself an authorized ETS test center, the logistical question that follows is where the exam was actually administered. If it was an authorized center, the logistical question that follows is how many other young foreign women in the Epstein orbit sat exams at that specific address.

Neither question has an answer in the currently released files. Both are worth a subpoena from the New Mexico Truth Commission, which received its subpoena authority from the state legislature under House Resolution 1 on February 16 of this year.

Not a one-time event

This is the finding that matters most.

A full query of the EFTA jmail database returns 879 distinct email chains between 2011 and 2019 containing the terms "TOEFL," "IELTS," or an adjacent English-language-certification reference. The chains are distributed across every calendar year in that window. The peak year is 2015, with 226 messages.

Across the 879 chains, the language of subject administration is consistent. Groff confirms flights. Karen Gordon confirms lodging. An Epstein household staff member confirms grocery orders. A further figure, typically described in the messages as a language coach or tutor, confirms study-session windows. The subjects themselves, the young women whose names appear in the thread or are redacted out of it, are identifiable by at least nine distinct combinations of first name, country of origin, and test date across the nine-year span.

To respect the privacy of women who may or may not wish to be identified as victims, this article names no subjects. What the archive shows, in aggregate, is that the March 2015 flight was not an exception. It was routine.

The paperwork

On November 17, 2017, Epstein wrote directly to Groff about a separate young woman who had not yet made the journey to the United States. The message, recorded in the archive as efta-00952117, reads in full:

"ALCC. les this is the english language school that in paris would like to join, get an I20 issued and get a visa shes russian but staying in paris."

ALCC is an acronym for a Paris-based language school that provides coursework to students seeking I-20 certification. An I-20 is the Department of Homeland Security's Certificate of Eligibility for Nonimmigrant Student Status. Without one, a foreign national cannot apply for an F-1 student visa. Without an F-1 visa, a foreign national cannot legally enter the United States for academic study.

Epstein's instruction to Groff in that single five-sentence message is to arrange I-20 certification and United States visa issuance for a Russian national living in Paris whose academic cover was to be a Paris-based English school.

This is not a coincidental phrasing. A separate EFTA record, efta-01273198, logs an IELTS exam wire-transfer receipt in the amount of 202 euros, attached to a different young woman in the same orbit. Another record, efta-02422352, documents payments to a United States immigration attorney on behalf of a third. A fourth, an internal FBI memorandum on the Jean-Luc Brunel and MC2 modeling-agency pipeline cataloged as efta-00190241, describes substantially the same pattern under the cover of modeling-agency recruitment.

The New Mexico Truth Commission's organizing framework identifies the use of visa status as leverage over foreign victims as a hypothesis to be tested. The EFTA corpus, taken as a whole, does not contradict that hypothesis. It confirms it in the specific context of the language-school pipeline.

Two pipelines, one owner

One finding from the database review that warrants careful framing: the MC2 and Brunel modeling-agency pipeline and the TOEFL and IELTS language-school pipeline appear to have been operationally separate.

The Brunel pipeline, documented in detail in Paris investigating-magistrate filings and in Virginia Giuffre's civil litigation, funneled young women through the MC2 modeling network and through Elite Model Look international competitions. Its primary United States terminus was most often the Epstein townhouse on East 71st Street in Manhattan or the Palm Beach residence in Florida. Its legal cover was modeling work. Its visa mechanism was the H-1B3, the specialized visa for fashion models.

The TOEFL and IELTS pipeline, as visible in the jmail archive, ran in parallel. Its operational lead on the New York side was Groff, not Brunel. Its legal cover was student-visa paperwork, not modeling contracts. And its primary United States terminus, based on the flight-log evidence, was Zorro Ranch, not Manhattan.

Neither Brunel nor any individual clearly identifiable as MC2 staff appears as sender, recipient, or CC on any of the 879 TOEFL or IELTS chains. The two systems shared an owner. They did not share an operational staff.

What the files do not contain

No investigation is complete without an honest account of what is not in the corpus.

In November 2019, a tipster wrote to Albuquerque radio host Eddy Aragon, who owns and broadcasts on KIVA radio, alleging that two foreign girls had been killed by strangulation during fetish encounters at Zorro Ranch and buried in the hills surrounding the compound. Aragon forwarded the message to the FBI within four days. The allegation, referenced in subsequent reporting by the Santa Fe New Mexican and acknowledged by the New Mexico Department of Justice, is one of the precipitating reasons the current state investigation has proceeded to a physical search of the property.

The EFTA corpus, as released, contains no textual corroboration of that tip. No emails in the released files use the language of the tip. No OCR passages from scanned documents use the language of the tip. No deposition segments reference it.

This is not proof that the tip is wrong. It is proof that if the underlying incidents occurred, no textual record of them survived into the federal release. Readers should weigh the negative finding against two countervailing facts. First, the blank-manifest pattern on the March 2015 flight logs is consistent with a federal redaction policy that strips passenger names from the very period during which such incidents, if they occurred, would have been in motion. Second, no physical search of the ranch had taken place at the time the EFTA archive was assembled. The state-led search that began on March 10 of this year is the first.

What happens next

Attorney General Raul Torrez reopened New Mexico's 2019 investigation into the ranch in February. The Truth Commission, established under House Resolution 1, carries a two million dollar budget and the authority to subpoena documents and compel testimony. Its jurisdictional reach extends to state and federal records, to private correspondence held by Epstein's surviving estate, and to the business records of any third party that transacted with the Epstein operation in New Mexico.

Three specific records are worth naming as targets.

The first is the ETS test-center roster for Albuquerque between 2010 and 2019. If that roster confirms the Sylvan Learning franchise at 4121 Wyoming Boulevard NE as an administration site, it should be cross-referenced against the complete list of young foreign women whose names appear in the Groff correspondence.

The second is the Paris ALCC's enrollment roster and its I-20 issuance record for the same period. United States school certification under SEVP, the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, is a matter of federal public record. The ALCC's SEVP certification history is subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

The third is the complete passenger manifest for N212JE between 2010 and 2019. The March 2015 tranche of those manifests has been redacted out of the current EFTA release. The unredacted originals are held by the Federal Aviation Administration and by the Department of Justice. Both custodians are subject to the Commission's subpoena authority.

If those three records are produced, the question of how many young foreign women passed through Zorro Ranch under the cover of an English-language exam, and who specifically coordinated their movement, moves out of investigative inference and into documentary certainty.

Until then, the record stands where the March 15, 2015 email chain left it. A young woman asked, through Lesley Groff, "Do you know who will pick up us today's night?" Someone, according to the files, picked her up. She sat an exam the following Saturday. The flight that took her back out of New Mexico has an identifier and a tail number and a take-off time. What it does not have is her name.