How Leslie Wexner gave a college dropout total control over his billions
Leslie Wexner was worth billions. He had built The Limited, Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works into a retail empire that dominated American malls. By 1991, he was one of the richest men in America, surrounded by lawyers, accountants, and investment professionals whose entire job was to protect his fortune.
So in July of that year, he handed complete control of it to a college dropout with a five-year gap on his resume and no other known billionaire clients.
To understand how strange this is, you have to understand who Jeffrey Epstein actually was in 1991. He had no degree. He’d briefly attended Cooper Union and NYU but finished neither. His first notable job was teaching math and physics at the Dalton School in Manhattan, one of the most elite private schools in the country. Former students later described inappropriate behavior toward teenage girls even then – showing up at parties, being “overattentive” to female students. The school fired him in 1976 for poor performance.
From Dalton, Epstein somehow landed at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank. The connection came through a parent at the school – Alan Greenberg, Bear’s CEO, whose daughter was a student. Greenberg was famous for hiring “PSDs” – poor, smart, and desperate to be rich. Epstein fit the profile. He started as a junior assistant on the trading floor and worked his way up to limited partner by 1980.
Then in 1981, he left under murky circumstances. There was disciplinary action from the executive committee, a fine for a securities violation, an SEC investigation into insider trading happening at the same time. Epstein always claimed his departure was unrelated to the investigation, but the timing was suspicious enough that journalists are still trying to piece together what actually happened forty years later.
After Bear Stearns, Epstein spent several years working with Steven Hoffenberg at Towers Financial Corporation. Hoffenberg would later go to prison for eighteen years for running one of the largest Ponzi schemes in history before Bernie Madoff. He called Epstein his “co-conspirator” and said he fired him because “he was stealing too much.” Epstein was never charged, but Hoffenberg’s assessment of him was blunt: “At his core, Epstein has no moral compass.”
This is the man Leslie Wexner chose to hand his fortune to.
The introduction came in 1986, on a commercial flight from New York to Palm Beach. Robert Meister, vice chairman of the insurance giant Aon and the broker for Wexner’s retail empire, met Epstein on that flight. Meister later told Vanity Fair that Epstein was “a great bullshit artist” and that he now believes Epstein aggressively cultivated him specifically to gain access to his billionaire clients.
Epstein invited Meister to play racquetball and started showing up in the gym’s steam room while Meister was using it. Eventually Meister had enough. “I told him, ‘Get the fuck out and I never want to see you again,'” he recalled. But by then, the introduction to Wexner had already been made.
And something clicked. Within a year, Epstein was Wexner’s financial advisor. Robert Morosky, who had been vice chairman of The Limited, watched this happen with bewilderment. “Everyone was mystified as to what his appeal was,” he told the New York Times. “I checked around and found out he was a private high school math teacher, and that was all I could find out. There was just nothing there.”
Within four years, Epstein had total control.
The power of attorney document Wexner signed in July 1991 gave Epstein extraordinary authority. He could sign Wexner’s tax returns. He could borrow money in Wexner’s name. He could hire and fire people. He could buy and sell properties. He could execute any legally binding transaction as if he were Wexner himself.
The Washington Post described it as “unmitigated control over all of Wexner’s assets.” A reporter for ABC News noted that Epstein’s signature started appearing on “real estate documents, tax filings, and corporation records for Wexner’s personal holdings” throughout the next decade.
The same year Wexner signed that document, he also made Epstein a trustee of the Wexner Foundation, his primary philanthropic vehicle. Epstein supervised the drafting of Wexner’s prenuptial agreement before his 1993 marriage to Abigail Koppel. He became president of Wexner’s property development company in Ohio. He managed the construction of Wexner’s yacht, the Limitless. He moved into a mansion adjacent to Wexner’s estate in New Albany. Their business entities and personal lives became so intertwined that it’s still difficult to untangle which properties belonged to whom.
Wexner’s own explanation for all this was simple. He told his foundation he gave Epstein this authority so he could “focus on building my company and undertaking philanthropic efforts.” That’s a remarkable statement. One of the shrewdest businessmen of his generation decided to completely outsource the management of his personal wealth to someone with no track record, no credentials, and – as far as anyone can determine – no other billionaire clients. Epstein claimed he only worked with people worth a billion dollars or more, but Wexner appears to have been his only such client. Ever.
The consequences of that power of attorney were staggering.
Between 1991 and 2006, Epstein oversaw the sale of more than $1.3 billion in stock held by trusts connected to Wexner.
Researchers who examined the pattern noticed something: shortly after Epstein liquidated large amounts of stock on behalf of these trusts, he would make extravagant personal purchases – homes, planes, eventually a private island. One academic who studied the transactions concluded that “with power of attorney, I believe that Epstein probably converted some of Mr. Wexner’s assets into his own uses.”
Forbes traced the majority of Epstein’s income between 1999 and 2018 to fees from just two men – Wexner at $200 million and Leon Black at $170 million. That’s 75% of Epstein’s fee income from two clients. The power of attorney gave Epstein access to wealth that wasn’t his, relationships that weren’t his, and legitimacy that wasn’t his. He leveraged it all into an empire that included the largest private residence in Manhattan, a ranch in New Mexico, properties in Paris and the Virgin Islands, and a social network that stretched from Wall Street to Washington to Buckingham Palace.
Leaked emails from Epstein’s inbox, published in 2025, show that inside Wexner’s family financial office, staff treated Epstein as the de facto chief financial officer. Major decisions about taxes, lines of credit, eight-figure fund transfers, and politically sensitive grants were routed through Epstein’s lawyer and required Epstein’s approval.
When Wexner was asked a question during a board meeting at Ohio State University about whether he had holdings in a particular bank, he didn’t know the answer. His staff emailed Epstein to find out. The man who owned the fortune couldn’t answer basic questions about it without consulting the man who controlled it.
Wexner claims he severed ties with Epstein in early fall 2007, following the initial Florida investigation into Epstein’s sexual crimes. The timing is convenient. But even that claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. In June 2008, four days before Epstein submitted his guilty plea to state charges of soliciting a minor for prostitution, Wexner sent him an email: “Abigail told me the result…all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number 1 rule… Always be careful.” That’s not the email you send someone you’ve “severed ties” with a year earlier.
When Epstein was arrested again in 2019, Wexner told L Brands employees that Epstein “took advantage of me” and called him “so sick, so cunning, so depraved.” He said Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums” from him. He disclosed that a $46 million payment in 2008 represented only “a portion” of what he recovered from Epstein, but he has never revealed the full amount allegedly stolen.
His legal team spent years blocking efforts by victims’ attorneys to subpoena him. When L Brands shareholders filed suit alleging the company’s leadership had created “an entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying, and harassment,” the case settled for $90 million without anyone admitting wrongdoing. Wexner stepped down from the board.
The power of attorney document still sits in public records. It’s real. It happened. And no amount of after-the-fact denunciation changes the basic question that hangs over this entire relationship: Why would the richest person in Ohio hand over complete control of his fortune to a guy who couldn’t even finish college, who’d been fired from a teaching job, who’d left Wall Street under a cloud, and who had no track record managing money for anyone else?
Nobody has ever adequately explained how this happened. What we know is that it did happen, and that single document became the foundation for everything Jeffrey Epstein built over the next two decades.
It makes you wonder – what exactly did Epstein have on Wexler, and if Wexler had not allowed Epstein all that power – would he have been able to pull off any of his other crimes?
This is part of my Epstein essay series leading up to the release of the Epstein files.
Go Deeper: If you want to understand how wealth and proximity to power created impunity for Epstein, watch “Victoria’s Secret: Angels and Demons” on Hulu – it traces the Wexner connection through court documents and on-the-record testimony from people who were there.
SOURCES
https://abcnews.go.com/US/billionaire-businessman-leslie-wexner-refuses-reveal-full-scope/story?id=68461262
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Wexner
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
https://time.com/6197975/victorias-secret-angels-and-demons-hulu-true-story/
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/08/12/les-wexner-gives-feds-documents-showing-alleged-jeffrey-epstein-theft.html
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-leslie-abigail-wexner-pro-israel-philanthropic-foundation
https://www.foxbusiness.com/features/jeffrey-epstein-wall-street-connections-child-sex-trafficking
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-jeffrey-epstein-emails-wall-street/
https://www.wpbf.com/article/911-calls-80-year-old-palm-beach-shoot-jeffrey-epstein-gun/41356961
https://fairpress.net/epsteins-hypnotic-hold-on-victorias-secret-billionaire-les-wexner/