A personal assistant to Jeffrey Epstein has testified that she was “violently raped” by the notorious pedophile — and that he even managed to abuse her via Skype while he was serving time for sex crimes.
Sarah Kellen – who was known as Epstein’s “lieutenant” and even named as a potential co-conspirator in his 2007 sweetheart federal non-prosecution deal – now says she was actually a victim “trapped inside Jeffrey Epstein’s world” for more than 20 years.
“He groomed me, sexually and psychologically abused me, controlled me, manipulated me, dominated me, and gaslit me until I could no longer tell which thoughts were mine and which were his,” Kellen, now 46, told the House Oversight Committee last month, according to a transcript released Friday.
“It was like living with a permanent virtual-reality headset on.”
Kellen, who said she was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness where women “were required to submit to and obey men,” testified that she first stripped for Epstein when he tricked her into thinking she was being considered for a potential breakthrough gig as an underwear model.
“I had just got into my bra and underwear, and that seemed logical since it was a Victoria’s Secret casting, and I remember just like doing a little turn, turning around so he could see my body,” she recalled.
She eventually started working, initially unpaid, as an assistant for Epstein and his madam, Ghislaine Maxwell, who was “mean and belittling” — but equally scared of the terrifying “Jekyll and Hyde” pedophile, Kellen claimed.
“I would witness him bring Ghislaine to tears, who I thought was the strongest, coldest woman I had met,” she said.
Kellen claimed that “after months of unpaid labor, Epstein instructed me to draw him a bath on [his private] island, then ordered me to undress and get in with him. And he said, ‘The job is yours.’”
“Only after Jeffrey confirmed that I would submit to his sexual abuse did he begin paying me,” she said of starting as his assistant in 2001 — claiming she was paid just “$25,000 a year for working non-stop, on-call 24/7, months at a time with no days off,” with Maxwell allegedly calling her their “slave and minion.”
“I understood the math exactly. I was being paid, in part, to be raped,” she told the committee.
The abuse continued for years, including on Epstein’s notorious so-called Lolita Express private jet, and his private island, Little Saint James.
“This was not a vacation destination; it was isolation,” she said.
Kellen alleged one particularly disturbing attack in a Palm Beach gym where Epstein “blasted the music so loud so no one could hear, choked me and violently raped me.”
Shockingly, she claimed that Epstein’s abuse continued even while he was serving his 18-month sentence in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor.
“He even Skyped me from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade and ordered me to undress for him on camera,” she said of the call that came “out of the blue” while Epstein was in a room with “plain, white walls.”
She suggested that the pedophile — who was allowed to serve much of his sentence inside an office — “would’ve been given special treatment while behind bars.”
Kellen claimed Epstein “decimated any source of autonomy” she had as he acted like a dictator.
“He dictated my haircut, my hair color… He was extremely, extremely, demanding and had no sense of reality in what it took to get things done,” she said, saying her years with him left her suffering post-traumatic stress disorder.
“As a result of the years of abuse, constant sleep deprivation, and coercive control inflicted by Jeffrey and Ghislaine, psychological conditions hampered my ability to identify my own emotions, differentiate reality from Jeffrey’s manipulated reality, and crippled me from making decisions or asserting agency when it mattered most,” she said.
The graphic testimony was the first time Kellen claimed she had been sexually assaulted.
Previously, she was named as the “lieutenant” and is claimed to have “served as both his [Epstein’s] scheduler and a recruiter/procurer of the girls,” according to a 2010 docket since released by the Department of Justice.
Epstein was found dead in a lower Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, and the death was ruled a suicide.