Former NKC pastor who worked for Jeffrey Epstein suspended by Missouri church
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Missouri United Methodist leaders suspended Rev. Stephanie Remington for 90 days.
- Justice Department files show Remington worked for Epstein in 2018 and Jan–May 2019.
- Church cited review process and clergy standards and declined further comment.
A Missouri pastor with North Kansas City ties was suspended last week after a tranche of Justice Department documents revealed she worked for the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
United Methodist Church leaders in Missouri announced the suspension of the ordained pastor on Thursday. A church spokesperson confirmed to The Star on Monday that person was Rev. Stephanie Remington, a former North Kansas City pastor appointed to do remote work for the Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C. from 2018 to 2025.
Remington’s name appears in more than 1,800 pages of documents related to Epstein released by the Justice Department. The documents, reviewed by The Star, show a series of communications between Epstein and Remington, including the booking of a flight to Kansas City to visit her father, who was ill.
Remington was an administrative assistant for Epstein in 2018 and then worked as a temporary property manager for his private island from January 2019 to May 2019, according to United Methodist News.
That time period suggests Remington worked with Epstein after he was already a convicted sex offender, but before his highly-publicized sex trafficking arrest in 2019. In August 2019, Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in what was ruled a suicide.
The Missouri Conference of The United Methodist Church, in a statement on Thursday, said church leaders were previously unaware of Remington’s ties to Epstein. The statement, which did not name Remington, said Bishop Robert Farr suspended her for 90 days while the church “reviews the matter.”
“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 statement said.
“We recognize the deep harm connected to Mr. Epstein’s crimes and remain in prayer for survivors who deserve healing and justice,” the church said. “Because this is an active matter, the Missouri Conference will not comment further while the supervisory response process is underway.”
Attempts to reach Remington by phone were unsuccessful on Monday. But Remington told UM News that she never saw evidence of abuse by Epstein.
“I never saw anything,” Remington said, according to the outlet. “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.”
Remington also told the outlet that, early in her clergy career, she helped write an online curriculum for sexual boundaries training to be used in churches.
Rev. Kim Jenne, the church’s director of connectional ministries, said in a phone call that Remington was appointed to an extension ministry — or work outside a Missouri-based church — with the Wesley Theological Seminary during the period that she lived in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Prior to that, Remington was a pastor at First United Methodist Church of North Kansas City from 2011 to 2016. That church closed in 2018, Jenne said.
The revelations about Remington come after U.S. lawmakers forced the highly anticipated release of investigative files connected to Epstein. Controversy over the Epstein files has long dominated U.S. politics due to the financier’s connections to the wealthy and elite.
