This woman ran Epstein’s diary for 18 years. How much did she know?

Those gripped by the Epstein saga will hope the appearance of his executive assistant before a US House committee can illuminate a case that still refuses to yield all its secrets.

London: Apart from Jeffrey Epstein himself, the name that appears most often in the Epstein files is not Donald Trump, Ghislaine Maxwell or Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, but that of the convicted sex offender’s long-time assistant Lesley Groff.

Among the millions of documents detailing Epstein’s correspondence which have been released by the US Department of Justice, Groff’s name appears more than 160,000 times. By comparison, the name of Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, appears 53,000 times, while Donald and Melania Trump trail on 38,000 mentions.

Groff, 58, has always maintained she was kept deliberately in the dark about her boss’s crimes, but others have queried how someone so close to Epstein could have remained blind to his misdeeds. In interviews, Epstein said his assistants were “an extension of [his] brain”, while Groff, who worked for the financier for nearly two decades, said she knew what he was thinking. She booked his massages: Did she not know what was going on?

On Tuesday, her role in Epstein’s world will come under intense scrutiny when she appears before the US House of Representatives’ oversight committee in Washington, DC. Epstein’s victims, law enforcement officials and the millions gripped by the saga will hope Groff’s testimony can illuminate a case that, despite years of intense global scrutiny, still refuses to yield all its secrets.

“It wouldn’t take very long to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein to know what he was involved in, and she was with him for years,” says Nick Bryant, an investigative journalist who published Epstein’s little black book of contacts in 2015.

“She was just facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s machine and getting paid well for it. Epstein was essentially a cult. And it can be easy for people to be sucked into a cult, where the cult of Epstein becomes your life, and you facilitate whatever he wants you to facilitate.”

The volume of documentation bearing Groff’s name is a testament to her central role in Epstein’s life. From 2001 until 2019, when he was found dead in prison while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, Groff ran his day-to-day existence as his most senior and longest-serving assistant. She presided over Epstein’s diary, attending to his travel, meetings, calls, meals and social events, not to mention his frequent massages.

Whenever Epstein was dealing with Trump, former UK ambassador to the US Peter Mandelson,