Totaling 59 pages, the “Household Manual” for Jeffrey Epstein’s Palm Beach residence dictated every detail about how employees should shop, groom themselves, clean the house, and address their bosses and visitors.
In the words of Juan Alessi, the man tasked with Epstein property’s upkeep between 1990 and 2002, the document was “very degrading.”
“Most of the pages, they were just unbelievable to me,” groused Alessi, the ex-house manager for Epstein. “They were written for the employees. And it was—I wasn’t hire[d] to do that type of work.”
During his cross-examination, Alessi compared some of his work to “slavery,” saying he was on call 24 hours a day when the top boss, Epstein, was in town. He also described Ghislaine Maxwell, on trial for charges of sex trafficking and alleged violations of the Mann Act, as the “lady of the house” and an exacting taskmaster in her own right.
Over the course of two days, Alessi described cleaning Epstein’s sex toys, including a “large dildo” that he found in Epstein’s massage room.
“It looked like a huge man’s penis, with two heads,” Alessi testified on Thursday.
On Friday, Maxwell’s defense attorney Jeffrey Pagliuca grilled Alessi in a cross-examination focusing on his admitted theft of $6,300 from Epstein, which Alessi said he paid back. The defense team suggested that there were other incidents Alessi did not disclose during direct examination.
“Proper Language”
Alessi described his resentment toward the manual on the witness stand and...
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