Trump's U.S. ambassador to Turkey is accused of helping Jeffrey Epstein find a personal assistant who became both a recruiter and a victim in his sex trafficking network, Raw Story has learned.
Sarah Kellen told members of the House Oversight Committee last month that she was working as a host at the W Hotel in Honolulu in 2001 when she was recruited to work for Epstein and his partner Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman working as an intern at the hotel’s front desk befriended her and told her about the opportunity.
Kellen told the committee that Epstein had helped get the woman, whose name is redacted from an interview transcript, an internship at the W “because he was friends with Tom Barrack," who owned the hotel.
Kellen said she didn’t realize at the time that Epstein and Maxwell were her prospective employers.
“She never told me his name,” Kellen told members of the committee, chaired by Rep. James Comer (R-KY), during her May 21 interview. “She just told me there was a wealthy couple in New York that was looking for a new traveling assistant and if I would be interested. She had taken some risqué photos of me earlier, and I learned that she had sent them to Jeffrey, and then she started telling me about the job opportunity.”
Barrack, a key diplomatic player for the Trump administration in the Middle East as ambassador to Turkey and special presidential envoy for Syria and Iraq, has not commented publicly about his well-documented, decades-long relationship with Epstein.
His role in potentially connecting Kellen with Epstein has not been previously reported.
The start of Kellen’s employment with Epstein and Maxwell overlaps with a period when the couple was friendly with the future president and first lady. Donald Trump told New York magazine in October 2002 that he had known Epstein for 15 years and that he was “a lot of fun to be with,” adding, “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The friendship between Epstein and Trump, along with Barrack, is detailed in the book Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, which describes the three as “a 1980s and ’90s set of nightlife Musketeers.”
A billionaire real estate investor, Barrack reportedly introduced Trump to Paul Manafort, his first campaign chairman during the 2016 campaign. Manafort was later convicted of crimes related to his political consulting work for a pro-Russia party in Ukraine.
A prolific fundraisier for the Trump campaign, Barrack spoke at the 2016 Republican National Convention, and following Trump’s election, chaired the 2017 inauguration committee.
Before that, Barrack reportedly leveraged his business connections in the Middle East to smooth over distrust among Gulf Arab leaders following Trump’s call early in the campaign for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering” the United States. The effort appeared to pay dividends when Trump made the first international trip of his first term, a visit to a summit in Saudi Arabia. The close relationship between Trump and the Gulf states has continued into the second administration, with the government of Qatar giving a plane to the president.
Tom Barrack described Donald Trump as "one of my closest friends for forty years" during his speech at the 2016 Republican National Convention.Courtesy C-Span
In 2022, Barrack was acquitted of charges that he acted as an unregistered foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates during the 2016 campaign. Now, as a U.S. diplomat stationed in Ankara, he praises the partnership between the two countries as being "of critical importance to the Middle East," and recently claimed credit for processing visas for the Iranian team so they could travel to the United States to compete in the World Cup.
Epstein, who would be indicted for sex trafficking in July 2019, appeared to view himself as the odd-man-out during Trump’s ascent to power, while Barrack quietly assisted.
Summarizing Wolff’s Fire and Fury in a January 2018 email, Landon Thomas Jr. — author of the 2002 New York profile — reported to Epstein: “There are a few paragraphs on you, TB, DJT partying around NYC in 90s etc. — and then MW says you are airbrushed out of DJT history while Barrack sticks around.”
“I know,” Epstein replied.
Raw Story was unable to reach Barrack for comment through the State Department or the U.S. Embassy in Ankara.
In 2012, Epstein credited Barrack with connecting him to Kellen in an email to another employee to arrange for a visit by Barrack and Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani, then the ruling emir of Qatar who was interested in buying Epstein’s New York townhouse.
Epstein had planned to be in Paris at the time of the visit. In an email, he instructed an unidentified employee to be ready to receive the guests “well dressed” and in “heels.”
“It’s Tom Barrack coming, so you can tell him I thank him every day for Sarah,” Epstein added. “He is how I found her.”
Kellen was listed as an unindicted potential co-conspirator in a 2007 non-prosecution agreement in which the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida agreed to drop federal charges in exchange for Epstein pleading to a single state charge of solicitation of prostitution. Kellen was accused in a 2017 lawsuit brought by an unidentified survivor of recruiting “young females for Epstein for sexual purposes,” including buying gifts for them, scheduling their visits, and handling their travel arrangements.
But in her statement to the House Oversight Committee last month, Kellen insisted that she was a victim of Epstein and Maxwell’s sexual and psychological abuse. On her first day on the job at Epstein’s private island, Little Saint James, Kellen said he sexually assaulted her.
She described herself to the committee as “a literal indentured slave,” saying that only after she submitted to Epstein’s sexual abuse did she begin receiving a salary of $25,000 per year while working around the clock.
Kellen appeared before the committee for a voluntary interview, and her lawyer, Kimberly Hamm, told the committee that she would not discuss “other persons’ victimization,” for reasons that included “her own mental trauma,” “her ability to withstand sustained questioning on these points,” and “the protection of her constitutional rights.”
Aside from objecting to media characterizations of her “as Ghislaine’s lieutenant” as a “gross misrepresentation,” Kellen’s statements to the committee did not address allegations about her alleged complicity in Epstein’s sex trafficking enterprise. She also said she did not know that federal prosecutors put her name on the non-prosecution agreement as a co-conspirator, and that she was not interviewed by law enforcement beforehand.
Kellen could not be reached for comment for this story through her lawyers.
