The House Oversight Committee said Thursday it was asking the Justice Department to investigate sexual misconduct allegations made by Jeffrey Epstein’s former assistant, Sarah Kellen, against two of his associates.
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Kellen was interviewed behind closed doors on May 21 by the committee as part of its investigation into Epstein.
“During the transcribed interview, the Committee received testimony about alleged instances of criminal misconduct committed by Philip Levine, the former Mayor of Miami Beach from 2013 to 2017, and Frédéric Fekkai, a French celebrity hairstylist,” Chair James Comer wrote in the letter to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Kellen also accused a third man with ties to Epstein, late fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, of pulling down his pants in front of her.
In a statement, Comer, R-Ky., said the committee “is not a law enforcement entity, and our role is not to determine guilt or innocence. We are referring these allegations to the Department of Justice, which has the tools to investigate criminal misconduct. We will continue to follow the facts and ensure accountability for survivors.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Kellen worked for Epstein for over a decade and was at one point identified as one of his co-conspirators. In the May 21 interview, a transcript of which was released Thursday, Kellen said Fekkai was the person who introduced her to Epstein, the convicted sex offender financier who died in 2019 by suicide while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
She said the alleged sexual abuse by Fekkai happened before she met Epstein, and the alleged incident with Levine happened one or two years after she started working for Epstein. She said both of the alleged incidents occurred when she was in her 20s.
A spokesperson for Levine said in a statement, “Nearly a quarter century ago, our client had a brief intimate encounter with another consenting adult. Any allegation suggesting otherwise is not true.”
Mark Herr, a spokesperson for Fekkai, said in a statement that “Mr. Fekkai was astonished to read of Ms. Kellen’s testimony. Mr. Fekkai never abused anyone. He never participated in any illegal behavior. He knew nothing about Epstein’s repugnant depravity or trafficking. He did nothing wrong.”
Demarchelier died in 2022.
All three names made repeated appearances in the Justice Department’s publicly released investigative files into Epstein and his convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Kellen, a North Carolina native who married a man five years her senior when she was 17, told the panel her former husband divorced and abandoned her in Hawaii when she was 20.
It was after that that she said an unidentified makeup artist introduced her to Fekkai, who said he wanted to use her as a model at a hair show in Maui. When she arrived, she found out there was no show. “He sexually assaulted me that night,” she told the panel.
She said he told her he wanted to introduce her to his friend Jeffrey, whom he referred to as “a scout for Victoria’s Secret.” Epstein, she said, flew her to Los Angeles for a “casting” call.
He “made me think he was a model scout and told me to undress for him, which I did,” she said.
Fekkai also introduced her to Demarchelier, for whom she said she had posed before he walked up to her with his pants down.
Kellen said she was hired as an “assistant” to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, which was when she said she found out he was a money manager, and not a model scout.
Epstein, she said, “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 said Epstein reminded her “every day how powerful he was, how influential he was and that to turn on him or disobey him would mean losing everything: my job, my home, everyone I knew in the world, even my life.”
“He knew everyone in the highest echelons of society and everyone catered to him. He knew everyone in the fashion industry, academics, finance, government, powerful world leaders, dictators and everyone in between. From the beginning, he showed me that he was more powerful than basically anyone in the world,” she said.
She said Levine assaulted her in either 2002 or 2003, when she was working for Epstein and Maxwell at a house they rented in St. Tropez and he came to visit. She said Epstein and Maxwell were in the house but not present when the assault happened.
Kellen said Levine, whom she described as a good friend of Maxwell, came into her bedroom one night “and basically forced himself on me.” There was also a later incident when they were on the beach, she told the committee.
Kellen said she did not leave Epstein’s employ because she had nowhere else to go. “I had no money, no family, no education and no sense that I deserved any better,” she said.
Kellen said Epstein abused her even while he was serving a Florida jail sentence, which began in 2008 — at one point allegedly forcing her to undress in a Skype call from the Palm Beach County Stockade.
She said she later discovered that she had been identified as a co-conspirator in the controversial nonprosecution agreement Epstein signed as part of a guilty plea to state charges of soliciting a minor.
“I was not told this was happening,” she said. “No one from law enforcement ever spoke with me.”
“I did not even know my name was in that agreement until after it had been signed and released to the public,” she said.
Kellen said she “finally extricated myself from Jeffrey Epstein’s grasp in 2013, when I became engaged to a man who gave me, for the first time in my life, a piece of footing outside of someone else’s control.”
Fekkai, Levine and Demarchelier all make appearances in the investigative files that have been released by the Justice Department as a result of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
The law was passed months after the Justice Department and FBI released a joint memo last year saying they had conducted an “exhaustive” review of the Epstein case, and found that while the politically connected moneyman had preyed on over 1,000 women, there was not enough evidence to investigate anyone else.
If the DOJ were to act on Comer’s recommendation, it would be the first known active investigation into the case since the prosecution of Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Levine’s name appears over 1,000 times in the files, mainly in various mass campaign emails to Epstein and sometimes in flirty email exchanges with Maxwell.
While the two men did not exchange many personal emails, Levine did email him well wishes in 2010 — after Epstein finished his sentence on solicitation charges.
“Just want you to know that I am happy that everything has come to a positive ending for you during these tough times…You are a great guy and I know all good things will come to you going forward. In Europe for a while and hope we can catch up soon. Your friend, Philip,” the email read.
In an unusual interview last year with Blanche, Maxwell said Levine was “a good friend of mine” who at one point introduced her to former President Bill Clinton. Clinton, who appears in many photographs released as part of the DOJ’s Epstein records, has never been accused of any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. He told the House Oversight Committee in a closed-door deposition this year that he “saw nothing” and “did nothing wrong” related to Epstein.
Levine said in a statement to WLRN earlier this year that “my only connection to Jeffrey Epstein arose solely through my former friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell. I met Epstein only a few times. I never conducted business with him, never visited his island and never flew on his aircraft. I regret ever meeting him.”
An attorney for Maxwell didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Fekkai’s name appears over 3,000 times in the Epstein files, including for numerous appointments with unidentified women at his Manhattan salon. One 2018 email exchange discussing Fekkai’s bills noted one person had a haircut “compliments of Jeffrey.”
Another email to Epstein’s bookkeeper from the salon in 2016 said it was a “big day” there. “5 cuts in all today,” the email said.
Demarchelier’s name is mentioned nearly three dozen times, including in several duplicates of an email exchange in 2012 between late modeling agency head Jean Luc Brunel and Epstein. In the exchange, Brunel tells Epstein he is going to be traveling with the photographer to St. Petersburg for a shoot for Russian Vogue. “What dates?” Epstein asked.
Brunel was found dead of an apparent suicide in his prison cell in 2022 while awaiting trial on charges of sexual harassment and rape.
Demarchelier, who worked closely with the late Princess Diana, was accused of sexually harassing and abusing seven models in a 2018 Boston Globe story.
He told the Globe at the time that the allegations against him were “ridiculous.”
“People lie and they tell stories,” he told the paper, adding he “never, never, never” touched a model inappropriately.
During the Kellen interview, Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., asked Kellen about Epstein’s relationship with President Donald Trump. Kellen said that Epstein had been a frequent visitor to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early on in her tenure, and “would use the gym a lot there.”
She said she knew he and Trump had a “friendly” relationship, but she only met the future president once, and only for a few minutes. Kellen said she’d heard Trump banned Epstein from the resort because “he had like, hit on a member’s daughter or something along those lines.”
Trump and Epstein were friends for years, but the president has said they had a falling out after Epstein “took people that worked for me.” Trump, who also appears numerous times in the Epstein files, has not been accused of misconduct by law enforcement and has denied any wrongdoing.





