Wexner Foundation

The Wexner Foundation is an Ohio private charitable foundation formed in 1973 by the family of the retailer Leslie Wexner to develop Jewish communal leadership in North America and public-sector leadership in Israel. Jeffrey Epstein, Wexner's money manager, was a trustee from December 15, 1992 until September 4, 2007, and was president of the Wexner family office, N.A. Property, Inc., which kept the foundation's books. Between 2004 and 2006 the foundation paid the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak 2.3 million dollars for two commissioned studies, a contract that Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke wrote in 2005 he had negotiated. A February 2020 review commissioned by the foundation found no evidence that Epstein used it to commit any crime; the review does not mention Barak.¹²³

Formation and Programs

The foundation's own review dates its formation to 1973, with Leslie Wexner as president until 1985; its later public history gives 1984. Wexner formed a separate Leslie H. Wexner Foundation on July 16, 1985, which merged into the Wexner Foundation in 1993, and founded the Wexner Heritage Foundation in 1985 with Rabbi Herbert A. Friedman; the Heritage Foundation merged into the Wexner Foundation in 2005. Rabbi Maurice Corson was president from 1985 to 1998, Larry Moses from 1998 to 2011 and Rabbi Elka Abrahamson from 2011. The foundation's offices are at 8000 Walton Parkway, New Albany, Ohio.¹⁴

Its programs include the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, active since 1988, and the Wexner-Israel Fellowship, established in 1989 "to enable up to ten outstanding Israeli government officials each year" to study for a master's degree at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, "to provide Israel's next generation of leaders with advanced public management training"; the Wexner Heritage Program for Jewish lay leaders; and, from 2014, Wexner Senior Leaders for senior officials in the Israeli public sector. According to its 990-PF filings the foundation spent more than 321 million dollars from 1991 to 2018, about 90 percent of its funding coming from the Wexner family.¹

Epstein as Trustee

Vanity Fair reported in 2003 that in 1992 Epstein persuaded Wexner to put him on the board in place of Wexner's ailing mother, Bella Wexner, who recovered and demanded reinstatement; Epstein said the matter was settled by splitting the foundation in two. A source close to Wexner told the magazine that Wexner had given Epstein "the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations."⁵

The foundation's corporate records show Epstein elected a trustee on December 15, 1992. He signed the annual grants from the foundation to the Wexner Heritage Foundation from 1993 to 2004, signed board actions appointing officers and trustees, and signed the joint action approving the 1993 merger of the Leslie H. Wexner Foundation into it. He was named on the foundation's 990-PF filings as the person in whose care its books were kept, as president of N.A. Property, the family office whose accounting department handled the foundation's payroll, ledger, banking and tax filings, and was a co-trustee of the foundation's retirement plan. The 2001 filing recorded a contribution of 9,588,560 dollars from "Arts Interests Trust c/o Jeffrey Epstein," a charitable remainder trust created by Wexner on July 30, 1991 with Epstein as trustee. Epstein resigned from the board, from N.A. Property and "from all Wexner-related roles" in September 2007.¹

Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke was listed as secretary of the foundation in SEC filings from 1998 to 2001 and on its tax forms through 2006, according to The Daily Beast.⁶

The Barak Payments

The foundation paid Barak 2.3 million dollars between 2004 and 2006, when he held no public office, for two studies. He completed a 267-page study on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; for the second, on leadership, the foundation "received an abstract, but did not receive a full paper," and said in 2019 that its management at the time "decided that the work done and material received was enough to end the project and justify the payment."²⁷ After the 2019 Israeli election campaign raised the payments, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit declined to investigate, and the High Court of Justice rejected a Likud petition in 2020 after the foundation told the court that Epstein was not involved in the decision to make the payments.³

Among the documents released by the Justice Department on January 30, 2026 was a December 2005 chain in which Barak's wife, Nili Priel, asked Moses about a payment due "according to the contract." The family office's Peg Ugland asked Indyke, "Are you or Jeffrey handling the terms of the contract?" Indyke wrote to Epstein: "I was involved in the negotiation and execution of the document, but have not been involved in overseeing performance," and asked, "Please advise what you want Peg to tell Larry Moses." Epstein replied on December 8, 2005: "Get a copy of what he sent." In a 2026 statement the foundation said Barak was "paid in full over the years 2004-06" and that the payments "were properly reported in the foundation's 990s." On March 1, 2026 a Likud member of the Knesset, Avihai Boaron, and the organization LAVI filed a criminal complaint asking the Israel Police to investigate Barak and the foundation, alleging that the emails "completely contradict the report that the Wexner Foundation submitted to the High Court."³

The 2020 Review

The foundation commissioned Charles J. Kegler and Loriann E. Fuhrer of the Columbus law firm Kegler Brown Hill + Ritter to review Epstein's involvement. Their report, dated February 24, 2020, examined the foundation's records and 990-PF filings for 1991 to 2018, more than 3,600 pages of documents on related entities, and interviews with Leslie and Abigail Wexner, all four presidents, trustees and the treasurer; the foundation's email archive did not reach back to Epstein's tenure. It found that Epstein "was absent from the organizational life" of the foundation, in Moses's words, "played no meaningful role in the Foundation's budget, finances or accounting," made no contribution to it, and had no contact with it after his resignation, and concluded: "we found no evidence that Epstein ever used his ties to the Foundation to commit any assault or sexual misconduct, or to otherwise perpetrate any crime." The report does not mention Barak, the 2004 to 2006 payments, or Indyke.¹

The review addressed the 46 million dollars that media reports had described as transferred by Epstein to "a foundation related to the Wexners." It stated that "Epstein did not transfer any assets to the Wexner Foundation." On January 1, 2008 Epstein's C.O.U.Q. Foundation transferred 12,377,844 dollars, and Financial Trust Company 201,939 shares of Apple stock worth 34,280,154 dollars, to the YLK Charitable Fund, formed by Abigail Wexner on December 20, 2007. The reviewers found that C.O.U.Q.'s endowment had been funded almost entirely by transfers of Wexner family money, more than 11 million dollars from the Wexner Children's Trust in 2001 and 10 million from the Leslie H. Wexner Charitable Fund in 2003, which the Wexners said they "never knew about or authorized." YLK dissolved on December 27, 2010 and passed about 35 million dollars to the Wexner Family Charitable Fund.¹ Wexner wrote to the foundation's community in August 2019 that Epstein "had misappropriated vast sums of money" from his family and that the payments "represented a portion of the returned monies. All of that money, every dollar of it, was originally Wexner family money."⁸⁹

The Interlochen Gift

The review examined contributions to the foundation, not grants made by it. A donor record of the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Michigan, printed on February 12, 2020 and found in the Epstein files, lists "Wexner Foundation $185000.00 Single Donation 07/25/1994," recorded as an organization gift with the Wexner Foundation as donor, credited to the fund "Epstein Lodge ($185.000.00)" and attached to the constituent record of "Mr. Jeffrey Epstein."¹⁰