Leslie Wexner

Leslie H. Wexner is the founder and former CEO of L Brands, the parent company of Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and other retail brands. He is one of the wealthiest people in Ohio and built a retail empire that at its peak was valued at tens of billions of dollars. He is also Jeffrey Epstein’s only publicly confirmed money-management client — and the person whose wealth, access, and trust provided the financial foundation on which Epstein built his operation.

The relationship between Wexner and Epstein is one of the least explained and most consequential connections in the entire case. The degree of control Wexner ceded to Epstein — sweeping power of attorney, his Manhattan mansion, access to the Victoria’s Secret brand — has no clear parallel in the documented relationships between Epstein and other wealthy individuals.

How They Connected

Wexner and Epstein became close in the late 1980s. Wexner has said his friend Robert Meister, an insurance executive, recommended he meet Epstein for financial advice around 1987.

By July 1991, the relationship was firmly established. Epstein was managing Wexner’s finances and had been granted power of attorney over Wexner’s affairs — an extraordinary grant of authority that gave Epstein the legal power to sign documents, conduct transactions, and make financial decisions on Wexner’s behalf. That same year, Wexner also made Epstein a trustee of the Wexner Foundation.

Wexner’s associates and L Brands executives have described Epstein’s role in terms that ranged from financial advisor to something closer to a shadow manager of Wexner’s personal affairs. Epstein attended L Brands board-adjacent functions, had access to Wexner’s Columbus estate, and traveled on Wexner’s behalf.

The Power of Attorney

The scope of the power of attorney Wexner granted Epstein is one of the most striking facts in the case. It was not a narrow financial advisory arrangement. According to reporting by the New York Times, Epstein had the authority to hire people, sign checks, manage properties, and execute financial transactions in Wexner’s name.

Wexner has not publicly disclosed when the power of attorney was first granted, when or whether it was revoked, or the full scope of transactions Epstein executed under its authority. Legal experts quoted in reporting about the case described the arrangement as highly unusual — the kind of authority typically reserved for a family member or the most trusted personal representative, not an outside financial advisor.

The power of attorney meant that Epstein had, for a period of years, largely unchecked access to a billionaire’s resources. How he used that access — and whether Wexner was aware of or indifferent to how it was being used — remains a central unresolved question.

The Manhattan Mansion Transfer

In 1989, Wexner purchased the townhouse at 9 East 71st Street (the Herbert N. Straus House) on Manhattan’s Upper East Side for $13.2 million. The roughly 21,000-square-foot mansion, with about 40 rooms, was described by author Vicky Ward as possibly the largest private residence in Manhattan; it was later enlarged. Epstein moved into the house in the mid-1990s and made it his New York base.

The ownership change was structured as a transaction between entities rather than a conventional recorded home sale, which is why public deed records (ACRIS tracks real-estate deeds, not changes in control of a corporation) do not show a Wexner-to-Epstein conveyance price for the 1990s. Bank documents reported in 2026 by NBC4 Investigates and others, and Justice Department records, indicate Epstein acquired the property through a corporation in November 1998 for $20 million — an initial payment of about $10 million followed by the balance paid in installments through March 2000, backed by a $10 million promissory note and a personal guaranty Epstein signed. (A separate 2011 transfer, between entities tied to Epstein, was recorded at zero consideration.)

The townhouse became a primary location for Epstein’s abuse. Victims have described being assaulted at the property. When the FBI raided the mansion in July 2019, agents sawed open a safe and recovered diamonds, more than $70,000 in cash, hard drives, binders of labeled CDs, and an expired Austrian passport bearing Epstein’s photograph under a different name.

In his February 2026 congressional deposition, Wexner addressed the property directly, stating: “Contrary to rumor, I did not give Epstein the New York townhouse; he purchased it from me for what I was told was the appraised value.” He also said most of the alleged crimes at the house occurred after his 1998 sale to Epstein.

The Victoria’s Secret Connection

Multiple accounts — from models, former employees, and reporting by the New York Times and other outlets — describe Epstein leveraging his association with Wexner and Victoria’s Secret to recruit young women.

Epstein told women he could get them auditions or jobs with Victoria’s Secret. Alicia Arden, a model, filed a police report in 1997 (before Epstein’s eventual arrest) describing an encounter with Epstein in a Santa Monica hotel room where he posed as a Victoria’s Secret talent scout before sexually assaulting her.

Other women have described similar approaches. Epstein’s connection to Wexner — and by extension to Victoria’s Secret, one of the most recognized brands in fashion — gave him a powerful recruitment tool. The promise of a modeling career or an introduction to the Victoria’s Secret world was, for young women in the fashion industry, a significant lure.

Wexner has said he was unaware of Epstein using the Victoria’s Secret name in this way. L Brands has stated that Epstein was never formally affiliated with Victoria’s Secret in any official capacity, though his informal access to the brand through Wexner is well documented.

Wexner’s 2019 Letter

In August 2019, days before Epstein’s death, Wexner sent a letter to the Wexner Foundation community. In it, he said Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.” Wexner said he discovered the missing money and cut ties with Epstein in 2007, amid the first federal investigation into Epstein, and that he had no knowledge of Epstein’s sexual crimes before that point.

The letter itself did not put a number on the loss, but Wexner has elsewhere put at least $46 million of misappropriated funds on the record — describing a $46 million payment Epstein made in early 2008 to a charitable trust tied to Wexner’s wife as only “a portion” of what was recovered. Wexner has not detailed the full amount, the mechanics of the misappropriation, or whether he reported it to law enforcement.

The 2007 date for the severance of ties has drawn scrutiny. If Wexner ended the relationship in 2007, it means the friendship and financial arrangement ran for roughly 15 to 18 years — spanning a period during which Epstein was operating his trafficking network.

Financial Questions

The source of Epstein’s apparent wealth has never been satisfactorily explained, and Wexner is at the center of that mystery. Epstein claimed to manage money exclusively for billionaires, but no other client besides Wexner has ever been identified or confirmed.

Multiple financial analyses — by Bloomberg, the New York Times, and others — have noted that Epstein’s lifestyle (multiple residences valued at hundreds of millions of dollars, a fleet of aircraft, household staff) did not appear to be supported by any identifiable business operations or income stream beyond the Wexner relationship.

The question of whether Epstein’s wealth came entirely from Wexner — through authorized compensation, unauthorized misappropriation, or some combination — has not been resolved. No independent audit of the Epstein-Wexner financial relationship has been conducted or made public.

Epstein’s estate, upon his death, was valued at over $577 million by one analysis, though the true scale of his wealth has itself been questioned. Wexner’s account of the misappropriation — at least $46 million by his own telling, possibly more — would represent a meaningful slice of that, but the full amounts, timing, and mechanisms remain undisclosed.

The 2026 Congressional Subpoena and Deposition

In newly unredacted Justice Department documents from 2019, Wexner was named as a “co-conspirator” in materials related to Epstein’s trafficking operation. He has never been charged, and reporting on the underlying FBI emails has noted only “limited evidence” tying him to Epstein’s crimes.

In January 2026, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Wexner. Rep. Robert Garcia, the panel’s ranking Democrat, said the subpoenas were meant to “hear directly from the individuals most closely involved in Epstein’s inner circle.” On February 18, 2026, members of the committee deposed Wexner at his home in New Albany, Ohio, after he had originally been ordered to Washington.

In that deposition, Wexner disputed that he had given Epstein the Manhattan townhouse, said he revoked Epstein’s power of attorney in 2007, and characterized himself as having been deceived — saying he was “naïve, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein” and calling Epstein “a con man.” Democrats on the committee criticized his answers as evasive.

What Is and Is Not Established

Wexner has never been charged with any crime. He has denied knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activities. He characterized himself as a victim of Epstein’s financial misappropriation.

What is established is that Wexner gave Epstein extraordinary control over his finances — more control than in any other publicly known relationship in Epstein’s network. His Manhattan mansion passed to Epstein in 1998 through a structured, entity-level transaction; Wexner says Epstein paid the appraised value, and bank and DOJ records reported in 2026 indicate Epstein paid roughly $20 million through an initial payment and a promissory note. That property became a site of systematic abuse. The Victoria’s Secret brand he built was used as a recruiting tool for trafficking victims. The financial relationship lasted on the order of 15 years, spanning the period when Epstein was operating his trafficking network.

Wexner has claimed he was unaware of the abuse, unaware of the misuse of his brand, and a victim of financial misappropriation. Congress has subpoenaed him to explain how all of that was possible. The question is not whether Wexner was formally involved in the trafficking — there is no evidence of that. The question is how a billionaire who granted another person total control over his finances, his property, and his most valuable brand failed to detect or prevent the abuse that was conducted using those assets.

Evidence

These are documented facts drawn from primary records named in this profile — bank documents and Justice Department records on the mansion transaction, and a 2019 FBI document in the DOJ release; the annotations connect each to what this profile states, including Wexner’s account.

Read the originals: House Oversight — DOJ records release ↗ · Giuffre v. Maxwell unsealed records ↗

Documents

Primary-source records that name or reference Leslie Wexner. Inclusion in these documents is not, by itself, evidence of wrongdoing; Wexner has never been charged with any crime, denies any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse, and says he was himself a victim of Epstein’s financial misappropriation.

• Giuffre v. Maxwell — unsealed court records (Jan. 2024) — Wexner is named throughout records unsealed in this civil case (U.S. District Court, S.D.N.Y., No. 1:15-cv-07433). The references are largely investigative questions — for example, deposition exchanges about whether Maria Farmer was ever at Wexner’s Ohio property, and a note that several of Epstein’s assistants invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned about a list of names that included his. No filing accuses Wexner of abuse.
• House Oversight Committee — records provided by DOJ (2025) — Among the DOJ investigative records in this release, a 2019 FBI document listed Wexner among possible “co-conspirators” in the Epstein investigation; his name was initially redacted and was later read aloud on the House floor. Wexner’s representative says the lead prosecutor stated at the time that Wexner was “not a co-conspirator nor a target,” and he was never charged.