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Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump shared a lot of things, especially chasing women through New York City high society of the 1990s and early 2000s. But this detail caught my eye in the Epstein files. They also shared, in two different cities and times, the name for their respective command centers: the “Oval Office.”
One is the very real seat of American presidential power currently occupied by Trump. The other was the nickname for Epstein World’s operations hub—the study in his infamous Upper East Side townhouse, through which his every bidding was executed by longtime assistant Lesley Groff.
Like a lot of journalists, I’ve found myself scouring the Epstein files—3.5 million poorly organized pages cataloging cloying elites and the misdeeds of the deceased financier. The disclosures have already claimed a Rolodex of executives and politicians, and led to the first arrest of a British Royal since Charles I in 1647. They’ve also become a near-hourly drumbeat of scandal encircling the real Oval Office, the one with the president who is named “more than a million times” times (according to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who’s seen more of them than most.)
As I built timelines and pried open money trails for a separate investigation I’m working on, this phrase kept reappearing: “Oval Office.” At first, I was stunned that Epstein was talking about carpets in the real Oval with such familiarity. Then it clicked: Was this a nickname for something else? I used the AI tool Claude to sweep the trove for the term and its variants, narrowing findings down to 5,162 pages worthy of deeper analysis. Plenty referenced the actual Oval Office. But mixed in—plain as day—was Epstein’s own pet name for the beating heart of his global operation.
Once I realized this detail, it was a key to unlock a newly intimate, and oftentimes banal, view of everyday life at the gargantuan French neoclassical townhouse at 9 East 71st Street. Track the phrase through the documents and it begins to map the contours of Epstein’s influence network: how it worked, what it procured, and which men came through his “Oval.” Daily reports, scheduling, and household management all routed through the “Oval.” It’s where Epstein kept his passport in an unmarked hanging folder and his credit card details, and once stashed the key to the office of Martin Nowak, a professor whom Harvard sanctioned for his Epstein ties. (Nowak didn’t comment on the arrangement.) The Oval was also where Epstein’s “girls” slung purses and prepped for trips to Little St. James, a.k.a. Epstein Island, and where the bold-faced names of Epstein’s circle lounged underneath standup comic Bobby Slayton’s mounted guitar. (Slayton said he gifted Epstein a guitar decorated to honor his birthplace, Coney Island, as thanks for the use of an apartment between gigs. “I’m only guilty of being friends with that idiot,” he told me, calling Epstein “repulsive.”)
Much is already known about what could be found inside Epstein’s mansion: the sculpture of a bride clinging to a rope above the grand stairway; the life-sized stuffed tiger on a rug in what Vanity Fair described in 2003 as “an enormous gallery spanning the width of the house”—Epstein’s opulent personal office stuffed with rococo collectibles. A sideboard displayed a first edition of Lolita and a framed photograph with Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. But this exploration of the files placed me deep inside the Oval, the lesser-known but perhaps most functionally critical of all the mansion’s 40 rooms.
Epstein and his staff referred to this study variously as the “Oval Office,” the “Oval Room,” and simply “the Oval,” so much so that the name appears to have been adopted in redesign proposals for the townhouse (“Oval Study Room”)—according to a 2014 rendering included in the trove as part of a proposal by AC Atelier, a Chicago-based interior design firm. (When called, the firm declined to comment on confidential client work.) Was it, in fact, ovoid? Yes, an FBI warrant in July 2019 described it as so.
A floor plan of Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, found as part of a redesign proposal in the Epstein Files, shows the oval study room, bottom right, where visitors waited, bags were stored, and assorted Epstein World business was conducted.Department of Justice
The nickname appears in some of the earliest documents in the trove: a Skype call was arranged for Lord Peter Mandelson to take from the “Oval Office” in June 2009, when he was Britain’s First Secretary of State to Prime Minister Gordon Brown. In September 2025, Mandelson was dismissed as Britain’s ambassador to the US. He is accused, among other things, of sharing government secrets with Epstein, and was arrested on Monday by British police “on suspicion of misconduct in public office.”
But the Oval Office was also the heart of the humdrum home office needs. Take this request from one aide, familiar to office-goers everywhere: “Do you know if we have any toner anywhere for the printer in oval office?”
By 2010, the term was completely routine: Epstein discussed wallpaper choices “for the oval office” and pressed the staff about the whereabouts of his new oval office lamp (“The tall, thin, clear acrylic thing??” an apparently freaked-out assistant asked Groff). In Epstein’s personal digital address book, his own contact entry included a dedicated line labeled “Oval.” An Office Depot invoice—for a dozen Sharpies, a duster, and a box of bubble wrap, among other stationery—was shipped directly to “OVAL OFFICE” at the mansion’s street address. In a separate email, Epstein instructed staff that “phones need to be programmed to call oval office,” as part of a punch list of home renovation tasks that also included changing the carpet in the elevator.
“There is a package in the oval office on the coffee table marked for Ehud Barak.”
The Oval was the operations center for Epstein’s wide network of granting favors—and gifts—to the rich and powerful. An email dated May 13, 2012, instructed household staff that “There is a package in the oval office on the coffee table marked for Ehud Barak,” the former Israeli Prime Minister. Someone was to “put it in a shopping bag and label the bag for ‘Judith Tiomkin’ and drop the bag off at 880 Fifth Ave.” In other correspondence, Barak’s wife, Nili Priel, organized to pick it up from the intermediary. (This mysterious Tiomkin could not be reached for comment.)
In October 2016, staff were dispatched by Groff to the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue to pick up a Hermès-branded Apple Watch (2016 starting retail price, $1,149) for Soon-Yi Previn, Woody Allen’s wife. Emails note that the watch was to be gift-wrapped with a watch band found in the Oval’s desk drawer and delivered to Previn for her birthday. Two years earlier, Groff told Karyna Shuliak, Epstein’s last known girlfriend, to pick up “2 bags in the Oval Office both labeled for Soon Yi,” insisting they “need to go on the helicopter tomorrow!” In follow-up logistics, Groff outlined an East Side helipad departure to “Woody’s house,” noting that “Woody’s shoot is at Salve Regina College”—a Newport, Rhode Island, location Allen used for Irrational Man (2015), starring Emma Stone and Joaquin Phoenix. (I asked Previn if she’d received the watch but I didn’t hear back.)
I was surprised to learn there was a regifting operation, too. To thank a photographer, staff were instructed to strip any indication that a case of wine came from a Rothschild family member and to create a new “from” card, this time from Epstein, using Oval Office stationery.
The Oval Office, Jeffrey’s Version: Visible on the wall is a collage guitar, a gift from comedian Bobby Slayton. The room, photographed as part of a 2019 FBI raid, was the domain of Lesley Groff, explaining the more subdued design choices compared to Epstein’s office upstairs./Department of Justice
As is the case for its namesake, security for the Epstein version of the Oval Office was top of mind. Instructions went out in January 2014 to lock the Oval Office door every night, along with other heightened security procedures. The household memo said those measures were meant to keep out Steven Hoffenberg, Epstein’s former business mentor and an imprisoned fraudster, who was found dead in Hoffenberg’s apartment eight years later. “He is crazy and is NOT to be let into the house under any circumstance,” Groff wrote.
“It has been brought to my attention we need to be careful how we keep the Oval Office.”
It wouldn’t be an office of any shape without a passive aggressive note being sent around about general tidiness. “Hi girls,” wrote Groff in 2014. “It has been brought to my attention we need to be careful how we keep the Oval Office.” She goes on to instruct the recipients to “keep purses, computers, clothes, extra shoes, bags, etc off of the furniture in the Oval Office. We need to keep the sofa and chair available for guests to sit on…”
“Please pick up after yourselves when it comes to coffee cups, plates, etc,” the memo went on. “Take them to the kitchen and put them in the dishwasher.”
“Jeffrey is also requesting to please keep the noise down in the kitchen… conversations, laughter, etc can get very loud and distracting…” she added.
The Oval was also a site for meetings with Epstein’s business partner, the French modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who, like Epstein, took his own life while awaiting trial for sex crimes in France in 2022. Four years after Epstein was released after serving 13 months of an 18-month sentence in a county jail in Florida for soliciting a minor, Brunel being in the Oval was treated by staff as an urgent notification. On September 27, 2013, a staff member emailed Epstein with the subject line “Jean Luc is in the house!! in oval office.” A contemporaneous email to another staffer, Mark Tollison, bore the subject: “i told JE that Jean Luc is in the Oval Office!”
Calendars were also littered with references to the Oval Office. Epstein was scheduled to be the interviewer of a candidate for investor Leon Black’s family office in April 2014, and the woman’s résumé was waiting for Epstein in the Oval. Black was scheduled for lunch with Epstein hours later. His spokesman, Whit Clay, told me Black had no record or recollection of these events. “It’s well acknowledged that Epstein played a role in providing tax and estate planning to Mr. Black’s family office,” Clay said. “He would also embellish his roles and responsibilities and be disruptive, and that, along with his requests for more and more money, is the reason why Mr. Black ultimately fired him.”
Epstein also used the “Oval” to dangle his abilities to arrange visas; Groff invited one person to bring her “documents” so she could see “whether the work authorization would be possible.” The entire trove contains similar references to Epstein’s circle arranging visas for young women, including models linked to Brunel’s Epstein-backed agency, MC2.
The now-infamous hanging bride sculpture, above the mansion’s main stairwell, suspended in her trompe l’oeil cloudscape.Department of Justice
During the 2019 FBI raid of the mansion, the Oval was an obvious target—and agents weren’t there for any gift-wrapping operation. They seized three Seagate external hard drives from a compartment inside a bookshelf cabinet. Their broader haul included erotic sculptures, sex toys, a massage table, and more than 1 million images and videos extracted from Epstein’s devices.
Was the “Oval Office” moniker just an in-joke? Elsewhere in the Epstein Files, documents suggest the real Oval Office was never far from Epstein’s mind—or his reach. Epstein personally emailed Soon-Yi Previn offering tours of the actual White House: “do you want the east wing state rooms or west wing.. oval office cabiet room situraion room?” (Spellings, his.) Earlier that year, Epstein had leveraged his friendship with Kathryn Ruemmler, who served as White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, to arrange a DC trip. (Allen and Previn ultimately visited the White House in December. Ruemmler had earlier deemed Epstein too “politically sensitive” for his own tour, according to emails cited by CBS.)
Previn replied to Epstein’s question playfully: “I guess we should see the Oval Office to make sure that it’s really oval.”
