“Being taken advantage of by someone who was so sick, so cunning, so depraved is something that I’m embarrassed that I was even close to,” Wexner said during a speech in September 2019.
In Wexner’s telling, he was another Epstein victim preyed upon by a devious mastermind. It was only after Epstein died that Wexner described their relationship-and even then in opaque terms. They condemned Epstein’s actions, the spokesman said. In 2019, a Wexner spokesman told The Washington Post that the Wexners had severed all ties with Epstein in 2007. When Epstein pleaded guilty to two counts, including soliciting a minor for prostitution, in Palm Beach in June 2008 and registered as a Level 3 sex offender in New York, Wexner refused to discuss him. Leslie Wexner with his wife Abigail Wexner and son Harry Wexner during the Royal Shakespeare Company performance of "Romeo and Juliet" at the Park Avenue Armory in New York, July 12, 2011. In other words, Epstein became Epstein during his long association with Wexner. The building was formerly owned by Wexner.) Prosecutors say that Epstein built his vast sex-trafficking ring throughout the ’90s and early aughts. (Epstein’s brother’s real estate company also had majority ownership of a Manhattan condo building on East 66th Street where Epstein allegedly housed girls. His estate included a 51,000-square-foot Manhattan town house (bought from Wexner) a private jet (formerly owned by The Limited) and a helicopter a Caribbean island a Paris apartment a Palm Beach mansion and a 10,000-acre New Mexico ranch. Epstein, a former high school math teacher from Coney Island, Brooklyn, was worth a reported $559 million. Wexner paid Epstein’s predecessor about $600,000 a year in today’s dollars. “When I asked Jeffrey who else he worked with, he’d say, ‘I can’t talk about it,’ ” an Epstein friend recalled. But until recently, Epstein’s only publicly named client was Wexner. “There’s no question that Epstein could not have done what he did without the support of people that provided him money,” said attorney David Boies, whose firm represents numerous Epstein accusers, including Virginia Roberts Giuffre.Įpstein burnished his own myth, telling people, preposterously, that he only accepted clients with assets of $1 billion or more. In a search for answers, I spent the past six months investigating the Epstein mystery that could unlock others: How did he get his money? For it was Epstein’s half-billion-dollar fortune that enabled him to sexually abuse and traffic hundreds of girls on multiple continents. Was Epstein an intelligence agent? A debased financial genius? A sociopathic con man who fleeced billionaires and politicians with sexual blackmail? Two years after guards discovered Epstein unconscious in his Manhattan prison cell, the pedophile’s life and mysterious death remain a subject of fevered speculation and conspiracy theorizing. He applied for jobs using computers at the library and showered at state parks. I was living out of my car for a while,” Levin said. His wife filed for divorce, Levin said, and their three children stopped speaking to him. Friends told him Epstein was spreading rumors around Columbus and on Wall Street that Wexner had fired him for misappropriating funds. “Les sent me to Richmond, Virginia, to look at architecture he wanted to copy,” Levin said. Starting in the mid-1980s, Levin purchased thousands of acres of farmland in New Albany (population 414) on the outskirts of Columbus, where Wexner planned to build his very own town modeled on an 18th-century Georgian village. Wexner entrusted Levin with increasingly ambitious projects. “The kitchen was so clean, you could eat off the floor,” Levin remembered. Once, the manager of the Regency Hotel arranged a private tour of Le Bernardin.
“In New York, I had bankers constantly taking me out to dinner,” Levin told me. By 1986, Wexner ranked sixth on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, with a net worth estimated at $1.4 billion. He wasn’t making Masters of the Universe money-Wexner paid a salary of $250,000 a year-but it was enough for Levin to move his family into a 6,000-square-foot house across the street from Wexner in Bexley, Columbus’s most exclusive suburb. Levin landed the job after six months of grueling interviews. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.