Radar Online
Talk about a dirty job.
Jeffrey Epstein’s embittered Palm Beach handyman testified on Thursday of his humiliating duties cleaning and stowing the billionaire’s two-headed dildo, shuttling underage girls to and from his Palm Beach mansion, and suffering degrading micro-management under the withering gaze of gal pal Ghislaine Maxwell.
The house manager, Juan Patricio Alessi, 72, took the witness stand in the trial of Maxwell, a British publishing heiress, who is accused of grooming underage girls for Epstein to sexually abuse.
Alessi, an Ecuadorian immigrant, joined the wealthy businessman’s domestic staff in 1990 at the recommendation of the mom of fashion mogulLes Wexner, who gave Epstein his start in business.
He would begin at 5 AM and would be at the creepy couple’s beck and call until 9 PM.
“I was in charge of running the house, cleaning, maintenance, shopping, the gardeners, the pool man,” he said. “Too many hours.”
They didn’t even call him by his name, he says they called him “John.” Once Maxwell joined the household, he claims his relationship with Epstein changed.
“She told me, ‘Jeffrey doesn’t like me to look at his eyes, don’t look at his eyes, look at another part of the room,” Alessi recalled.
He was even given a 58-page household manual that detailed everything from how to stock the bathroom to which side of the telephone to place the phone directory.
Staff was sent to a symposium in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to learn the rules of Epstein’s many mansions. “It was very degrading,” he said. “It was degrading to the staff. I wasn’t hired for that type of work.”
There were rules about how to clean, how to dress, and how to shop.
He was told to make sure that there were hundred-dollar bills in all the cars when he cleaned them. They were told to “anticipate the needs of Mr. Epstein, Ms. Maxwell and guests.” They were never to discuss personal problems.
“Remember that you see nothing, you hear nothing and you say nothing, except to answer a question,” the manual instructed. “I was supposed to be blind, deaf and dumb regarding their life,” he told the court.
Alessi recalled seeing “many, many” women coming and going from the estate, often lounging topless by the pool.
On the walls of the Palm Beach mansion hung photos of Epstein with famous men, he said, like former President Donald Trump, the Pope, and Fidel Castro. Maxwell’s desk in the house had photos of topless women that had been taken by the pool.
He chauffeured Epstein’s first alleged teenage victim, now a grown woman who works as an actress on a popular soap opera, from her high school. Her name has been kept confidential by the judge. He also alleged he drove her to the airport as a 14-year-old to jet off with Epstein on his private plane.
Alessi says he remembered driving Virginia Roberts. She accused Epstein of forcing her to sleep with Prince Andrew when she was underage.
When Roberts’ boyfriend drove her to Epstein’s estate, Maxwell would make him sit in his car, the handyman testified.
Among the more thankless tasks that Alessi told of performing was cleaning up the massage room after one of the billionaire’s thrice-daily rubdowns. Several times, strewn among the towels and the oils in the massage room, Alessi said he found Epstein’s sex toys.
“I remember finding a large dildo,” he told the jury. “It looked like a huge, man’s penis with two heads.”
Federal prosecutor Maurene Comey, the daughter of the former U.S. Attorney General James Comey, asked him what he did with the phallus after discovering it. “I put my gloves on, put it in the sink underwater, cleaned it, and put it in Ms. Maxwell’s closet,” Alessi responded.
He said that there was a wicker basket in her bathroom closet with a vinyl costume and pornographic tapes.
Alessi claimed he burned out of the job and after falling ill he left Epstein’s staff in 2000, returning only once more in 2004 when he broke into the mansion and stole $6,300. “I was having a lot of pressure in my marriage, I got involved with another woman and I had a lot of financial problems,” he said.
He snuck in through a sliding glass door and lifted the money from a satchel in Epstein’s desk. A short time later he got a call from the businessman, saying “We need to talk.” When they met Epstein showed Alessi a surveillance photo of him in the house, but he didn’t call the cops.
“The agreement was that it was going to be a loan,” he said. “He would not press charges because of the type of employee I was.”
Alessi said he was good to his word and paid him back.
