WASHINGTON — Marina Lacerda remembers the cash: hundreds of dollars in a long white envelope, handed to her directly by Lesley Groff. She remembers Groff asking about new girls sent to Epstein – what they looked like, where they were from, how old they were. She says she met Groff in person more than once. On June 9, Groff told the House Oversight Committee under oath that she had never met any of the young women who visited Jeffrey Epstein. Six survivors are now telling Congress that is not true.
CNN reported Thursday on accounts from six Epstein survivors – four of whom spoke on the record – who say Groff’s sworn testimony contradicted three specific aspects of what they experienced: personal meetings, direct cash payments, and handling of their identification documents. The House Oversight Committee has confirmed it is “currently reviewing Ms. Groff’s transcript against the available evidence,” the kind of language congressional investigators deploy when a perjury referral is under consideration, though no referral has been formally made.
Groff spent 18 years as Epstein’s personal assistant and was named in his 2008 federal non-prosecution agreement alongside Ghislaine Maxwell and others – a deal that extended immunity to co-conspirators and has been the subject of sustained criticism from victims and legal advocates ever since. She has never been charged. When she testified before the House Oversight Committee last month, she described Epstein as a man who concealed his crimes from his own staff. “For 18 years, I worked for Dr. Jekyll but was never permitted to see the true Mr. Hyde,” she told lawmakers.
The survivors describe a fundamentally different picture of her role. Sharlene Rochard said she met Groff multiple times at different Epstein properties. Lara Blume McGee told CNN she encountered her at least twice inside Epstein’s New York City townhouse – a location Groff told the committee she had been barred from entering between 2001 and 2013.
On identification documents, Groff drew a careful line in her testimony. She told lawmakers she may have seen “a picture of a passport” but had nothing to do with the documents themselves. Multiple survivors told CNN they provided passport information directly to Groff for travel booking purposes. One anonymous victim said Groff helped complete her passport application entirely.
The cash payments produced the sharpest gap between Groff’s account and what the survivors describe. Groff testified she “arranged for money to be picked up or delivered” – characterizing her role at arm’s length. Lacerda, who says she first entered Epstein’s network at 14 years old in 2002, described something more direct. “Hundreds,” she told CNN of the denominations. “Never in twenties, never in fives, never in tens.” An anonymous survivor added: “We would go pick up money from Lesley every other day.”
Rep. Suhas Subramanyam questioned Groff directly on passport handling during the June deposition. The committee has not disclosed what she said in response to those specific questions – the full transcript has not been made public, though the committee released summary material from the session last month.
Groff’s attorney has maintained throughout that her client performed standard executive assistant duties – scheduling, logistics, message-passing – without criminal involvement in Epstein’s conduct. That framing rests on the premise that a person can manage the physical logistics of an operation for nearly two decades without knowledge of what that operation was for. Six survivors are now on record saying that premise does not hold.
The Epstein investigation has placed sustained pressure on the Justice Department over access to unredacted files and cooperation with congressional investigators, with both parties pressing Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche over materials that remain withheld. What the survivor accounts add to that landscape is specific and operational: a named person who, they say, sat at the center of the network’s day-to-day transactions and whose congressional account of that role the committee is now measuring against what six women say they lived.
Whether the gap constitutes perjury is a determination the committee has not made. No referral has been announced, no timeline offered, and Groff’s attorneys have not publicly addressed the specific contradictions raised in the CNN report. The investigation continues.
