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 thin 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 said he paid inappropriate attention to female students even then, and once showed up at a student party - though none said he touched them. The school fired him in 1976 for poor performance.
From Dalton, Epstein somehow landed at Bear Stearns, the Wall Street investment bank. The connection ran through Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who became Bear’s CEO two years later - Fox Business says his daughter was one of Epstein’s students, and Vanity Fair says Epstein tutored his son. 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.
It started around 1986, on a commercial flight 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 Vanity Fair in 2003. Years later, he told the New York Times, “I tried to find out how did he get from a high school math teacher to a private investment adviser. 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.
Washington Post reporter Sarah Ellison, speaking in the Hulu docuseries, 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 next year, Wexner 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 that Epstein “had wide latitude to act on my behalf with respect to my personal finances while I focused 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 a thin resume, no degree, 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 Forbes found he leaned above all on two of them - Wexner and, starting in 2012, Leon Black.
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.
Two researchers who went through the filings for ABC News saw what they called a potential pattern: 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 estimates Wexner paid Epstein more than $200 million through 2007, and Leon Black paid him $170 million between 2012 and 2017. By Forbes’ count, those two men supplied upwards of 75% of Epstein’s fee income from 1999 to 2018. 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 by Drop Site News 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. Epstein’s own lawyer, Darren Indyke, 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.
After Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death, Wexner said in a September 2019 speech that “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.” 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.
In the fall of 2025, his lawyers pushed back on a subpoena from survivors of Ohio State doctor Richard Strauss, who wanted to question him about what he knew. When L Brands shareholders filed suit alleging the company’s leadership had created “an entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying, and harassment,” the case settled with a $90 million commitment to workplace and governance reforms. 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 Wexner, and if Wexner 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/
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2003/03/jeffrey-epstein-200303
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/06/inside-jeffrey-epsteins-decades-long-relationship-with-his-biggest-client
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/25/business/jeffrey-epstein-wexner-victorias-secret.html
Letter from Les
https://www.wexnerfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/Wexner-Foundation-Report-Following-Independent-Review4.pdf
https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2025/07/25/how-jeffrey-epstein-got-so-rich/
https://www.wosu.org/politics-government/2025-12-04/les-wexners-connections-to-strauss-and-epstein-raised-at-ohio-state-board-of-trustees-meeting
https://scott-scott.com/l-brands-inks-90m-global-deal-for-toxic-workplace-suits/
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first misquoted Robert Morosky and credited his “mystified” line to the New York Times - he said it to Vanity Fair in 2003, and his Times quote is now fixed. It also misquoted Wexner’s letter to his foundation; said he called Epstein “so sick, so cunning, so depraved” in a note to L Brands employees after the arrest - it was in a September 2019 speech; and said his lawyers spent years blocking subpoenas from Epstein’s victims - the fight on record started in the fall of 2025, over a subpoena from survivors of Ohio State doctor Richard Strauss. It also said Wexner was Epstein’s only billionaire client - Forbes says Epstein leaned on two, Wexner and Leon Black - and misstated Forbes’ figures; credited the Washington Post with a line from Post reporter Sarah Ellison in the Hulu series; put Epstein’s foundation trustee seat in 1991 instead of December 1992; said Wexner’s staff emailed Epstein when it was Epstein’s own lawyer; said Epstein was introduced to Wexner on a flight from New York, when the Palm Beach flight is where he met Robert Meister; and said Epstein had a five-year gap on his resume, when he ran his own consulting firm from 1981.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so or add a caveat - Drop Site News on the leaked emails, the two ABC News researchers on the stock-sale pattern, what Epstein’s Dalton students said, the different accounts of how he got to Bear Stearns, what his resume looked like, and what the $90 million L Brands settlement paid for.