Sarah Kellen, the woman once labeled Jeffrey Epstein's "lieutenant" by the Department of Justice, told the House Oversight Committee that the convicted sex offender "violently raped" her, controlled nearly every detail of her life for more than two decades, and even forced her to undress on camera via Skype while he was serving time in a Florida jail.
A transcript of Kellen's testimony was released Friday. The 46-year-old's account, reported by the New York Post, lays out years of alleged grooming, sexual assault, and psychological domination, a story that raises hard questions not just about Epstein, but about every institution that looked the other way while he operated in plain sight.
Kellen said she started working as Epstein's assistant in 2001. She described being lured in through what she believed was a Victoria's Secret casting opportunity. In her testimony, she recalled the moment she thought she was simply auditioning:
"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."
What followed, she told Congress, was not a modeling career. It was a trap.
Kellen testified that after months of unpaid work, Epstein brought her to his private island, Little Saint James, and made the terms of her employment explicit. She told the committee that 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.'"
In her words to Congress:
"Only after Jeffrey confirmed that I would submit to his sexual abuse did he begin paying me."
That pay, she said, amounted to "$25,000 a year for working non-stop, on call 24/7, months at a time with no days off." Kellen did not mince words about the arrangement: "I understood the math exactly. I was being paid, in part, to be raped."
Kellen described Epstein's island not as the luxury retreat it appeared to outsiders, but as a place of isolation and control. "This was not a vacation destination; it was isolation," she told lawmakers. The abuse, she said, continued across multiple locations, Palm Beach, the island, and aboard Epstein's private jet.
The push for greater transparency around Epstein's network has intensified in recent months, with growing calls for public hearings where victims could tell their stories directly to Congress.
One of the most disturbing allegations in the transcript involves a physical assault Kellen described at a Palm Beach gym. She told the committee that Epstein "blasted the music so loud so no one could hear, choked me and violently raped me."
Kellen also described years of psychological control that went far beyond the sexual abuse. She told lawmakers that Epstein "decimated any source of autonomy" and dictated the smallest details of her appearance and daily existence.
"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 described Epstein as a volatile figure, capable of reducing even those closest to him to tears. "I would witness him bring Ghislaine to tears, who I thought was the strongest, coldest woman I had met," Kellen testified, referring to Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein's longtime associate. Kellen said Maxwell was "mean and belittling" and allegedly called Kellen their "slave and minion."
The broader question of who else participated in or enabled Epstein's operation continues to generate congressional interest. Recent House Oversight interviews have yielded new names of individuals accused of involvement.
Perhaps the most striking claim in the transcript concerns what Kellen says happened after Epstein was behind bars. In 2008, Epstein was serving an 18-month sentence at the Palm Beach County Stockade for soliciting prostitution from a minor. Even from inside the facility, Kellen alleged, the abuse did not stop.
"He even Skyped me from a computer inside the Palm Beach County Stockade and ordered me to undress for him on camera."
Kellen told the committee this contact came "out of the blue." She recalled seeing "plain, white walls" behind Epstein on the video call and said he "would've been given special treatment while behind bars." The allegation raises obvious questions about what kind of supervision, or lack of it, Epstein received during his sentence, and how he had access to a computer capable of video calls from inside a county jail.
That 2008 sentence itself was the product of what has long been criticized as a lenient federal non-prosecution deal struck in 2007. That deal named Kellen as a potential co-conspirator. A 2010 docket later released by the Department of Justice described Kellen differently, as someone who "served as both his [Epstein's] scheduler and a recruiter/procurer of the girls."
Kellen's testimony reframes that characterization. She told Congress she was not a willing accomplice but a victim herself, groomed from a young age within a religious community, the Jehovah's Witnesses, where women "were required to submit to and obey men," and then drawn into Epstein's orbit before she had the tools to resist.
Congressional Republicans have continued pressing the DOJ to investigate individuals named in connection with Epstein's network. House Republicans have specifically urged the department to pursue new leads that have emerged from these victim interviews.
Kellen told the committee she was trapped in Epstein's world for more than 20 years. In sweeping testimony, she described the cumulative toll:
"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."
She compared the experience to "living with a permanent virtual-reality headset on." The years of abuse, she said, left her suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and unable to function normally.
"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."
Epstein was found dead in a Lower Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide. Maxwell was later convicted on related charges. But the full scope of Epstein's network, who participated, who knew, who enabled it, remains a subject of active congressional inquiry.
The political fight over full disclosure of Epstein-related files has itself become contentious, with some lawmakers refusing to back down on demands for transparency despite political pressure.
Kellen's testimony is a single witness account, and it should be weighed as such. But the institutional backdrop she describes is not in dispute. A federal non-prosecution deal that shielded potential co-conspirators. An 18-month sentence for crimes against a minor. A county jail that apparently allowed a convicted sex offender access to video-calling technology. A Department of Justice that labeled a woman a "recruiter" without, it now appears, fully investigating whether she was also a victim.
Every layer of the Epstein case points in the same direction: powerful people received extraordinary deference from the very institutions charged with protecting the vulnerable. The question Congress should be asking is not just what Epstein did, but why so many systems designed to stop him failed so completely, and whether anyone in a position of authority will ever be held to account for those failures.
Meanwhile, calls for dedicated congressional hearings focused on Epstein's victims continue to grow louder. The victims have waited long enough. The institutions that failed them owe the public more than silence.
Jeffrey Epstein is dead. The system that protected him is not. And until that system answers for what it allowed, no one should pretend justice has been served.
