Epstein's alleged 'number two' accuses celebrity hairdresser and ex-Miami mayor of abuse

Sarah Kellen sat before a House Oversight Committee in late May and told them something that upended years of assumptions about her role in Jeffrey Epstein's operation. For nearly two decades, she had been cast as the enforcer—the lieutenant, the number two, the woman who scheduled the massages and made the calls and knew which girls were available. Victims described her as Epstein's right hand, a willing participant in a machine of abuse. But in her testimony, made public only in early June, Kellen reframed her entire history. She was not the architect. She was the trapped.

Kellen alleged that she suffered sexual and psychological abuse at Epstein's hands and those of Ghislaine Maxwell on a weekly basis, sometimes violently, from the early 2000s until Epstein's arrest in 2019. She was paid twenty-five thousand dollars a year—roughly twenty-one thousand euros—to work around the clock, seven days a week. Maxwell, she said, called her a slave and a servant. But the testimony also introduced two names previously untouched by criminal accusation in the Epstein scandal: Frédéric Fekkai, the French celebrity hairdresser who has styled Hillary Clinton, Meryl Streep, and Charlize Theron, and Philip Levine, who served as mayor of Miami Beach from 2013 to 2017.

Kellen's account of Fekkai reaches back before she ever met Epstein. She was working at a makeup counter in a Neiman Marcus in Honolulu when she mentioned to an employee that she wanted to model. The employee introduced her to Fekkai, who promised her a spot in a fashion show in Maui the following week. When she arrived on the island, there was no show. She had no money for another hotel or a flight home. Fekkai, she testified, took advantage of that. Years later, after Epstein had introduced himself to her by phone—a connection Fekkai made—she would become entangled in his world. The hairdresser's representative denied the allegations to CNN, stating that Fekkai never exploited Kellen, never introduced her to Epstein, and never abused anyone.

The incident with Levine occurred during her first or second year working for Epstein, during a trip to Saint Tropez. Levine was a close friend of Ghislaine Maxwell and was staying in the same house. After Epstein and Maxwell had gone to bed, Levine approached Kellen and spoke to her about the loneliness of her situation—always with them, never having her own life. Then, she testified, he assaulted her. No one witnessed it. She told no one at the time, though she believed Epstein knew at least about Fekkai's abuse. Levine's spokesman responded with a statement saying that nearly twenty-five years ago, his client had a brief, consensual intimate encounter with another adult, and that any allegation to the contrary was false.

The Congressional committee chair, James Comer, has already asked the Department of Justice to investigate both men. Neither has faced sexual crime charges in connection with the Epstein case until now. Kellen's testimony also pulled back a curtain on her access to elite spaces. She revealed that she attended a dinner at Prince Andrew's private apartment at Buckingham Palace, and that she was present at Princess Beatrice's eighteenth birthday party at Windsor Castle in 2006. When asked if she had witnessed Andrew committing sexual abuse, she said no. She also denied seeing Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or Woody Allen engage in sexually inappropriate behavior with women, despite being in proximity to Epstein's circle.

Andrew's presence at that Windsor party was already known—he and his then-wife organized a cocktail reception at Royal Lodge before the masked ball that drew over four hundred members of the British aristocracy, politicians, and celebrities. But the detail of Kellen's attendance adds another layer to the documented connections between the royal and Epstein's operation. The Thames Valley Police announced recently that Andrew is under investigation for sexual misconduct in at least three cases: the widely known Virginia Giuffre allegation from 2000, a woman who says she was abused in Ascot in 2002, and another who claims she was taken to a Windsor property for sexual purposes.

Kellen's own history complicates the narrative. She began as a teenage model and became Epstein's assistant in her early twenties. In emails and flight records released earlier this year, she appears arranging travel and ordering interior design pieces for his homes, sometimes flying on his jet alongside Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew. Some victims identified her as the woman who prepared the massage table, who taught younger girls how to satisfy Epstein, who maintained the schedule of available girls. A 2007 settlement agreement listed her as a potential co-conspirator, yet she faced no criminal charges. A judge in Ghislaine Maxwell's 2022 sentencing hearing called her a known participant in a criminal conspiracy and criminally responsible. Yet Kellen has insisted, in interviews and now under oath, that she was a victim—raped and abused weekly. She received a settlement from Epstein's estate. By 2020, she was living in a mansion worth over four million dollars in New York. She married NASCAR driver Brian Vickers in 2015; they divorced in 2025. The question of who she was—perpetrator or victim or both—remains unresolved.