Pastor suspended after church learns she once managed Jeffrey Epstein's private island

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A Missouri pastor who briefly managed Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island was suspended from her job after her association was publicly exposed — with the reverend defending her decision to work for him despite knowing his criminal past as a Christly act.

Rev. Stephanie L. Remington, 50, was suspended from Missouri’s United Methodist Church last week when leadership learned her name had appeared more than 1,800 times in the trove of Epstein files recently released by the Department of Justice, UM News reported.

Remington has not been accused of any crimes, and the Epstein files mention appeared to be mostly from communications about overseeing the pedophilic financier’s Little St. James Island in the US Virgin Islands.

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“I never saw anything,” Remington told UM News. “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.”

But Remington was aware of Epstein’s criminal history from ten years earlier — a 2008 guilty plea for to procuring a child for prostitution, which landed him just over a year in jail — and looked to her Christian teachings while apparently wrestling with whether to take the job.

“I felt that if I withheld relationship from this man because of his past, then I would be turning my back on every message of hope I have ever preached, every invitation to God’s unconditional love I have ever extended, and my calling to be a healing presence in the world for all people,” she wrote in a 2019 personal blog post.

“Jesus got into a lot of trouble for the company he kept, but he didn’t let that trouble pressure him into rejecting the people who, by their standards, did not deserve to be human,” she told UM News.

“Social death is just another kind of murder. He opened his heart and his mind to them, and they opened their tables and alabaster jars to him,” she added. “Is Jeffrey not among their kind?”

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