A United Methodist pastor in Missouri has been suspended after her church conference discovered she spent nearly a year working for Jeffrey Epstein, managing his private island while claiming on official paperwork that she was performing seminary-affiliated ministry work.

Bishop Robert Farr of the Missouri Conference of The United Methodist Church placed Rev. Stephanie L. Remington on leave on Thursday, pending a review by the episcopal office. According to The Hill, the suspension is temporary, set at 90 days.

Remington reportedly worked as Epstein's administrative assistant and temporary property manager of his private island, Little Saint James, from August 2018 to May 2019. Epstein was arrested just two months after her departure, in July 2019, for sex trafficking crimes. He died in his cell by alleged suicide in August.

What the church didn't know

The Missouri Conference says it was blindsided. In a statement, the conference made clear that Remington's connection to the disgraced financier never appeared on any radar within the denomination:

"The Missouri Conference had no knowledge of the individual's association with Mr. Epstein. Clergy serving in extension ministry operate outside a local church appointment and report their ministry setting through annual paperwork submitted to the Conference."

The conference added that no information indicating any Epstein association was disclosed in those reports, and that neither the bishop nor the district superintendent was contacted about Remington's interest in or acceptance of the position.

That's a significant gap in oversight. Remington served as a pastor or associate pastor at several churches across Missouri from 2001 to about 2018. Then she took a job managing a sex offender's Caribbean island and, according to early review findings, told her denomination she was somewhere else entirely.

The paperwork problem

This is where the story shifts from troubling to something harder to explain away. Remington claimed in her annual paperwork that she had performed extension ministry through the Lewis Center for Church Leadership at Wesley Theological Seminary during the time she worked for Epstein. She reportedly made this claim as recently as 2025.

An early review found she had been appointed as a part-time contractor at the seminary in only 2017 and 2018. Not during the period she was on Epstein's island. Not in the years that followed.

So for the better part of a decade, a credentialed member of the clergy appears to have filed paperwork describing ministry work she wasn't performing, at an institution where she no longer held an appointment, while her actual employer was one of the most notorious sex offenders in modern American history.

1,800 documents

It was later discovered that Remington's name appears in approximately 1,800 documents among the Epstein files on the Department of Justice website. That is not a peripheral association. That is a paper trail deep enough to suggest sustained, substantive involvement in Epstein's operations during her time on the island.

Remington, for her part, told UM News that she never witnessed any abuse. She said she never saw Epstein or anyone commit abuse on the island. Her statement was brief:

"I knew him for the last nine months of his life, well after he served time for the things that he was accused of doing."

She did admit that when she accepted the job, she knew Epstein was a registered sex offender who had served 18 months for his conviction. She took the job anyway. She managed his property anyway. And she told her church she was doing something else.

A denomination left holding the bag

The Missouri Conference issued a statement that tried to thread the needle between institutional accountability and institutional ignorance:

"Clergy are called to uphold the highest standards of spiritual and moral leadership. Concerns of this nature are taken seriously and require careful review."

The conference also acknowledged the gravity of the underlying crimes, stating that it recognizes "the deep harm connected to Mr. Epstein's crimes" and remains "in prayer for survivors who deserve healing and justice."

Those are appropriate words. But the structure that allowed this to go undetected for years deserves scrutiny that extends well beyond one pastor. Extension ministry, by the conference's own description, operates outside a local church appointment. Clergy in those roles self-report their ministry setting through annual paperwork. The system runs on trust. That trust was apparently misplaced for the better part of seven years.

The deeper question

Remington has not been accused of any crime. That's worth noting. But "not criminal" is a remarkably low bar for someone entrusted with spiritual authority over a congregation. The questions that matter here are not primarily legal. They are moral and institutional:

• Why would a credentialed pastor voluntarily go to work for a registered sex offender?
• Why would she then obscure that employment on official church documents for years?
• How does a denominational oversight system fail to catch fabricated reporting for nearly a decade?
• What does it say about institutional accountability when clergy can operate in the dark this long?

The Epstein saga continues to produce revelations that implicate people and institutions far removed from his inner circle of co-conspirators. Every new name that surfaces reinforces the same unsettling reality: the infrastructure around Epstein was vast, staffed by people who moved through respectable institutions, and shielded by systems that didn't ask hard questions.

A 90-day suspension and a review process may satisfy denominational procedure. It will not satisfy the congregants in Missouri who trusted a pastor who was, by her own admission, knowingly working for a convicted sex offender while telling her church she was somewhere else entirely.

Trust, once broken this thoroughly, doesn't reset in 90 days.