Leslie Wexner

Leslie Herbert Wexner founded the Columbus, Ohio retailer The Limited in 1963 and built it into the holding company later known as L Brands, owner of Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Lane Bryant and Express. From the late 1980s until around 2007 Jeffrey Epstein served as Wexner's personal financial adviser, and in 1991 Wexner granted Epstein a sweeping power of attorney over his finances.¹

Business Career

Wexner opened the first Limited store in 1963 at the Kingsdale Shopping Center in Upper Arlington, near Columbus, using a 5,000 dollar loan from his aunt and 5,000 dollars borrowed from a bank.¹⁰ He named the shop The Limited because he limited its stock to women's sportswear and separates rather than carrying a full line of dresses and coats, and the store recorded first-year sales of about 160,000 dollars.¹⁰ Through the 1970s and 1980s he expanded it into a portfolio of mall retailers including The Limited, Limited Express and Lane Bryant.²

Wexner acquired Victoria's Secret in 1982 from founder Roy Raymond for about one million dollars, taking over five stores, a catalog and roughly six million dollars in annual sales from a company that was approaching bankruptcy.¹¹ He recast the brand from a male-oriented novelty shop into a mass-market lingerie chain, inventing a fictional London address and remaking the catalog and store aesthetics, and by 1995 Victoria's Secret operated several hundred stores with sales in the billions.¹¹ Raymond founded a children's retailer that failed and died by suicide in 1993.¹¹ In 1990 Wexner launched Bath & Body Works, whose first store opened that September in a Cambridge, Massachusetts mall, and the personal-care brand grew into one of the company's largest divisions.¹² The parent firm operated for decades as Limited Brands and was renamed L Brands in 2013.²

Wexner developed the village of New Albany, Ohio outside Columbus from rural land into an upscale planned suburb, building an estate there and steering corporate and residential development.³ Jeffrey Epstein became a general partner in the New Albany real estate holding company and, according to property records, held roles in entities tied to the development.³ In 1991 Wexner co-founded the Mega Group, a private network of wealthy Jewish American philanthropists and businessmen, with Seagram heir Charles Bronfman.⁴ The Wall Street Journal reported in 1998 that the group, which grew from about 20 founding members toward 50 and charged dues of roughly 30,000 dollars a year, met twice annually for seminars on philanthropy and Jewish affairs.¹³

New Albany, Ohio

Beginning in the 1980s Wexner bought up land in New Albany, then a Central Ohio village of a few hundred people about 20 minutes northeast of Columbus, partnering with developer Jack Kessler in an entity that the two men later formalized as the New Albany Company.¹⁴ Locals nicknamed the planned town "Wexley," a portmanteau of Wexner and Bexley, the affluent Columbus suburb where he had previously lived, and the New Albany Company became the area's dominant landowner, holding roughly 80 percent of the municipality at points and shaping development through a public-private partnership with the local government.¹⁴ The village's population grew from about 1,600 in 1990 to more than 10,000, with a median household income several times the Ohio average.¹⁴

Epstein signed incorporation paperwork for the New Albany Company as its president alongside Wexner, according to Ohio state records, and owned a residence on the Wexner estate before the relationship ended in 2007.¹⁴ Wexner built a Georgian-style mansion on a roughly 336-acre estate along Kitzmiller Road that ranks among the largest private residences in Ohio.¹⁴ The New Albany Company later assembled a large business park along Route 161 and sold land to technology firms including Amazon, Facebook and Google, generating proceeds for a company subsidiary.¹⁴

Wexner Foundation and Philanthropy

Wexner established the Wexner Foundation and the related Wexner Heritage Foundation in 1984 to develop Jewish lay and professional leadership in North America and public-sector leaders in Israel.¹⁵ The foundation's programs include the Wexner Heritage Program, a two-year intensive Jewish learning course for young volunteer leaders, along with the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, the Wexner Israel Fellows and other tracks.¹⁵ Wexner also funded institutions at The Ohio State University and the Harvard Kennedy School, where the Wexner-Israel Fellowship trained Israeli officials.¹⁵

Abigail Koppel, who became Abigail Wexner on her marriage to Wexner on January 23, 1993, practiced law at Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York and London from 1987 to 1992 before her philanthropic work in Columbus.¹⁶ Epstein drafted the prenuptial agreement for the marriage.⁵ In 2008 Epstein directed a portion of recovered funds toward a foundation associated with Abigail Wexner.⁸

Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein

Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein were introduced in the mid-1980s; later reporting placed the meeting around 1986 through insurance executive Robert Meister, who had met Epstein on a flight to Palm Beach.⁵ Epstein became Wexner's financial adviser by 1987, and in July 1991 Wexner gave him a power of attorney that authorized Epstein to sign checks, borrow money, buy and sell property, and hire and fire on Wexner's behalf.¹ A close Wexner adviser, Harold Levin, reportedly warned that he did not trust Epstein, telling Wexner he "smell[ed] a rat," and at least one board member commissioned a background investigation, but Wexner continued the relationship.⁵ According to the New York Times account, Epstein later engineered Levin's firing by accusing him of stealing from Wexner, an accusation that would subsequently be leveled at Epstein himself.¹⁷

A New York Times Magazine investigation published December 16, 2025 traced Epstein's accumulation of wealth back to his hiring at Bear Stearns and his early targeting of wealthy businessmen, and detailed how his control over Wexner's accounts gave him unregulated access to fund real estate purchases, including property near Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, the 9 East 71st Street townhouse in Manhattan, and the New Albany mansion.⁵ Epstein also drafted the prenuptial agreement for Wexner's marriage to Abigail Koppel and obtained tax breaks for Epstein's Little St. James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands.⁵ The Times wrote that the central unanswered question was what Wexner gained from the relationship, and Wexner declined to participate in the investigation.¹⁷

In a February 2026 deposition before members of the House Oversight Committee, Wexner described himself as "naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust in Jeffrey Epstein," calling him "a con man."⁶ He said he had revoked the power of attorney, removed Epstein from his accounts and terminated him in 2007, and that he was "neither a co-conspirator nor target" of investigators.¹⁸ JPMorgan Chase records cited in the released files placed the formal end of the financial relationship in February 2008, several months later than the 2007 date Wexner had publicly given.¹⁸

The 9 East 71st Street Townhouse

Wexner purchased the seven-story townhouse at 9 East 71st Street on Manhattan's Upper East Side in 1989 for about 13.2 million dollars.⁷ The roughly 21,000-square-foot limestone mansion, one of the largest single-family residences in the city, had been built early in the twentieth century, and control of the property moved through a chain of corporate entities during the 1990s, with Jeffrey Epstein listed in various officer or trustee roles.⁷ The residence became Epstein's primary New York base and the site of much of the conduct later detailed in the federal sex-trafficking case against him.⁷

In 2011 the mansion was conveyed to Maple Inc., an Epstein-linked U.S. Virgin Islands entity, for zero dollars in recorded consideration; Epstein signed the transaction for both the seller and the buyer.⁷ Reporting at the time valued the property in the tens of millions of dollars, and the terms of the transfer were never fully explained publicly.⁷ A 1998 purchase and sale agreement underlying the transfer involved a 10 million dollar promissory note and personal guaranty signed by Epstein.⁵

An FBI internal memo among the files released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act stated that "Epstein controlled all of Wexner's personal finances with virtually no oversight" and described how Epstein sold himself a New York home and a private plane that had belonged to Wexner at a "deeply discounted price."¹⁹ The transfers of the townhouse and aircraft to Epstein-controlled entities for nominal or discounted sums became central to later accounts of how Epstein converted his control of Wexner's affairs into personal assets.¹⁹

Statements After Epstein's Arrest

After Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in July 2019, Wexner said he had severed ties around 2007 and that "in that process, we discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family."⁸ In a letter to his foundation, Wexner disclosed that Epstein had returned funds, and reporting indicated the recovered sum exceeded 46 million dollars, a portion of which Epstein directed in 2008 to a foundation associated with Abigail Wexner.⁸ A spokesperson declined to specify the total amount allegedly taken or whether it had been reported to authorities.⁹

Documents in the 2026 Epstein files described a larger figure than the 46 million dollars cited in 2019. An investigative memo recorded that Wexner's attorneys told investigators in 2008 that Epstein had repaid him about 100 million dollars, described as only a portion of what he had taken, and that Abigail Wexner had taken over the family's finances and found Epstein had misappropriated "several hundred million dollars."¹⁸ Wexner provided documents to investigators that he said showed Epstein's alleged theft, but he did not publicly detail the full scope.⁹

The released files showed that Wexner and Epstein remained in contact after 2007. Following the announcement of Epstein's 2008 Florida plea deal, Wexner wrote a note saying he felt sorry and reminding Epstein to "always be careful," to which Epstein replied "no excuse."¹⁸ An FBI email from August 2019 labeled Wexner a "secondary co-conspirator" while noting "limited evidence regarding his involvement," and a Fox News account reported that an internal FBI memo had characterized him as an Epstein co-conspirator.¹⁹ In January 2026 the House Oversight Committee moved to subpoena Wexner over his ties to Epstein, and he was deposed at his Ohio home in February 2026.⁶