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The House Oversight Committee’s Epstein report came out on Tuesday, Nov. 10. It asks the Justice Department to further investigate sexual assault allegations against two men: Philip Levine, the former mayor of Miami Beach, and the French celebrity hairstylist Frédéric Fekkai. Both deny the allegations, and neither faces criminal charges.
The allegations come from Sarah Kellen, Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime assistant. The report describes her as a survivor of his abuse. The committee first asked the department to look into her claims in June.
What is new is that the 137-page report prints parts of her testimony. It also adds an email-based claim about Levine that does not hold up cleanly. The department says the committee’s recommendations “have already been addressed.”
What Sarah Kellen told the committee
Kellen sat for a closed-door interview with committee staff on May 21. The committee’s June 4 letter says she began working for Epstein in about 2000 or 2001. Epstein’s 2007 non-prosecution agreement named her as one of four “potential co-conspirators” and gave her immunity, the report notes on page 45.
Pages 26 and 27 quote her account of a summer in Saint-Tropez, where she says Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell rented a house. She testified that Levine, “really good friends with Ghislaine,” came to stay. Once the couple went to bed, she said, Levine told her she must be lonely, “and he basically forced himself on me.”
Asked whether Epstein facilitated it, she answered: “I don’t know what he knew.”
Page 32 quotes her account of Fekkai. “In Maui, when he asked me to come be in a hair show that didn’t exist,” she began. She said he had her stay in his hotel room. “I didn’t have any money to get my own hotel room or fly back, and he took advantage of me that night.”
She also told the committee that Fekkai introduced her to Epstein as a Victoria’s Secret model scout. These are her allegations, and no court has examined them. She did not report either incident at the time, ABC News reported in June.
Levine and Fekkai deny the allegations
Levine’s side says the encounter was consensual. “Nearly a quarter century ago, our client had a brief intimate encounter with another consenting adult,” his spokesperson told ABC News in June. “Any allegation suggesting otherwise is not true.”
After the report came out, a Levine spokesperson told the Miami Herald that he “categorically denies Ms. Kellen’s allegation.” Chris Vlasto, speaking for Levine, told the paper it was “a consensual relationship between two adults more than 25 years ago.” Levine served as mayor of Miami Beach from 2013 to 2017.
Fekkai’s spokesperson, Mark Herr, said in June that Fekkai “was astonished to read of Ms. Kellen’s testimony.” Herr added: “Mr. Fekkai never abused anyone.” He said Fekkai “knew nothing about Epstein’s repugnant depravity or trafficking,” CBS News reported.
We found no new statement from Fekkai on the report as of Wednesday morning. Agence France-Presse reported that both men deny the allegations.
The email the report relies on, and two slips
On Levine, the report goes beyond Kellen’s testimony. Page 36 says Levine emailed Maxwell “Beauty and the beast…” on Dec. 12, 2002. Maxwell replied, “[T]ell me if you get this attachment.”
The report argues that Epstein used fictional princesses as code names for women. It says the evidence suggests Levine was “complicit in” or “had knowledge of” that scheme.
We read the full report, and the record behind that passage is shaky. Footnote 204 dates the same email Dec. 26, 2002, not Dec. 12.
The Miami Herald reported that the original email shows Maxwell sent the attachment first, and Levine responded. That is the reverse of the report’s account.
The report also calls Levine the former mayor of “Miami, Florida” on page 26. The June letter and the committee’s own press release say Miami Beach. Levine’s spokesperson called the code-name claims “absurd and false,” the Herald reported.
The June letter adds that Levine’s name appears more than 600 times in the Epstein files the department released last year and this year. That count shows contact with Epstein and Maxwell, not wrongdoing. The same letter calls Fekkai “a close friend” of Epstein whose salon served women at Epstein’s instruction, citing Bloomberg.
What else the Oversight report found
Chairman James Comer, a Kentucky Republican, led the inquiry, and the report comes from his majority staff. Its title is “A Review of the Federal Government’s Mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell Criminal Investigations.”
The committee’s press release says the inquiry ran 15 months and took 19 interviews and depositions. “The federal government has failed the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell’s horrific crimes for decades,” Comer said.
The report’s central finding is that federal investigators and prosecutors could have prevented Epstein’s crimes after 2005. It blames the 2007 deal in South Florida, after which Epstein served 13 months with work release. It also asks the department to question Epstein’s executive assistant Lesley Groff further. And it wants Treasury and FinCEN to check whether banks met their duty to report suspicious activity.
On President Trump, the report says every witness the committee examined said he was not involved in the crimes, to their knowledge. That is a separate document from the House Judiciary Democrats’ October report. That one carried Beatrice Keul’s allegation against Trump, which the White House denied.
The Justice Department’s answer, and a new Congress
“With all due respect, the Chairman’s recommendations have already been addressed,” a Justice Department spokesperson told the Miami Herald. The spokesperson noted that the attorney general has called the Epstein case open. “There is no statute of limitations on human trafficking,” the spokesperson added.
The department has not said publicly whether it opened an investigation into either man after the June referral.
Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the committee’s top Democrat, called the findings “incomplete.” He said the department “continues to illegally withhold over 2.5 million pages of documents,” the Herald reported. The department said “all responsive files have been produced.”
Democrats take the House majority in January, one of the things that changes under a Democratic Congress. Garcia is in line to chair the Oversight Committee. Democrats “have vowed to continue investigating Epstein’s network,” AFP reported, and the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3.