Lesley Groff spent her deposition insisting she never knew what she was scheduling. Then she scheduled the one thing that matters. On Tuesday’s Narativ Live special, Zev Shalev walked the Gates and Groff transcripts with attorney Ann P. Mitchell of Notes from the Front and investigative writer Ellie Leonard of The Panicked Writer — each bringing a different toolkit: Mitchell the legal read, Leonard the deep work inside the files.
The line that never went dead
For a decade, Donald Trump has sold a story: he and Jeffrey Epstein fell out years ago, he threw him out of Mar-a-Lago, they never spoke again. Groff, Epstein’s executive assistant of roughly twenty years, contradicted it under oath. Asked how often she connected the two men by phone, she answered “once a quarter, maybe, or twice” — regular calls the panel read as stretching across roughly ten years and, they believe, to the 2016 election. Groff couldn’t recall when they stopped. For Shalev, this was the night’s headline. “I’ve been trying to prove that for ten years,” he said, “and there she goes just saying they’re still friends all the way to 2016.”
Mitchell supplied the legal mechanics of how Trump keeps his hands clean: he doesn’t put things in writing, so the contact runs assistant-to-assistant, with intermediaries — Steve Bannon among the names she cited — carrying messages between the two men. That structure, she argued, gives Trump the plausible deniability to claim he and Epstein never spoke directly while a communication conduit ran the whole time.
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