Sarah Kellen

Sarah Kellen is an American former personal assistant to Jeffrey Epstein, employed by him from 2001 for more than a decade to manage his schedule, including the "massage" appointments through which girls were brought to his Palm Beach house. She is the first of the four women named in the co-conspirator clause of Epstein's September 2007 non-prosecution agreement with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida, under which the United States agreed not to charge "any potential co-conspirators of Epstein, including but not limited to Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Lesley Groff, or Nadia Marcinkova." She has never been charged. She later married the racing driver Brian Vickers, took the name Sarah Kensington, and in May 2026 testified to the House Oversight Committee that Epstein had abused her.¹²³⁴

Role in the Epstein Household

Victims described Kellen as the assistant who telephoned them to schedule appointments with Epstein. At Ghislaine Maxwell's 2022 sentencing, Judge Alison J. Nathan applied a four-level leadership enhancement on the finding that Maxwell "supervised" Kellen, relying on testimony from two of Epstein's pilots that Kellen was Maxwell's assistant, corroborated by testimony that Maxwell was Epstein's "number two and the lady of the house" in Palm Beach, "where much of the abuse occurred and where Kellen worked." The Second Circuit upheld the enhancement in 2024.¹²

According to flight-log data compiled by the Daily Beast, Kellen flew with Bill Clinton on at least eleven flights in 2002 and 2003. Her later interior-design firm, SLK Designs, operated for a time from a building in Midtown Manhattan owned by Epstein's brother, the property manager Mark Epstein.²

The Immunity Clause

The clause naming Kellen was negotiated between Epstein's lawyers and the Southern District of Florida under U.S. Attorney R. Alexander Acosta and was signed in September 2007. When Maxwell invoked it in 2021, the Second Circuit held under United States v. Annabi (1985) that it bound only the Florida office, since nothing in its text or negotiation history showed an intent to bind other districts and the Justice Department's own manual required written approval from any other district to be bound. None of the four has been charged by any federal district.¹ The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded in November 2020 that Acosta had "agreed to several unusual and problematic terms in the NPA without the consideration required under the circumstances," and characterized his decision to resolve the case through the agreement as "poor judgment" rather than misconduct.⁵

Kellen was also a named defendant, with Epstein, Maxwell, and Groff, in the federal sex-trafficking suit brought in 2017 by Sarah Ransome, who alleged that the four told her Epstein would use his influence to secure her admission to the Fashion Institute of Technology in exchange for massages. The suit was dismissed with prejudice by stipulation on December 20, 2018.⁶

2019 Investigation

On July 6, 2019, the day Epstein was arrested in New Jersey, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation approached Kellen; when she asked to have lawyers present, she was served with a grand jury subpoena. Her lawyers first met prosecutors and the FBI in November 2019, and the meetings continued into December. In Justice Department records of those meetings, Kellen described Epstein abusing her "pretty often" and, on one occasion, having "aggressively raped" her. Her attorney Kathleen Cassidy stated: "After Sarah was able to disclose her abuse at Epstein's hands, prosecutors recognized her as a victim and declined to prosecute." The Epstein survivor Teresa Helm has said Kellen groomed her for abuse; Kellen's lawyers say Kellen never met Helm.³

Congressional Testimony

Kellen gave a closed-door deposition to the House Oversight Committee on May 21, 2026. Her prepared statement read in part: "I was trapped inside Jeffrey Epstein's world," "I was a literal indentured slave," and "The federal government of the United States branded me a criminal in a secret deal," adding, "I have spent every year since trying to live underneath that piece of paper." She called the description of her as "Ghislaine's lieutenant" a "gross misrepresentation" and said Maxwell had called her a "slave" and a "minion." According to the Miami Herald, citing people in the room, she named three other men who she said had sexually abused her. Committee Chairman James Comer said beforehand, "Out of all the interviews we've done, this is going to be the toughest one," and afterward that the Justice Department did not appear to have regarded her as a co-conspirator but as someone who had aided Epstein's prosecution.⁴