How a $25 million mansion became Jeffrey Epstein’s crime scene
The Herbert N. Straus House sits on one of the most fashionable blocks in Manhattan, a half-block from Central Park on the Upper East Side. Seven stories of French neoclassical limestone, fifty feet wide, with fifteen-foot oak doors and arched windows that make it look less like a home than an embassy. Vanity Fair called it “the crown jewel of the city’s residential town houses.” It’s believed to be the largest private residence in Manhattan.
It’s also where FBI agents found hundreds - maybe thousands - of photographs of nude and semi-nude young women when they raided Jeffrey Epstein’s home on July 6, 2019. In a locked safe they had to open with a saw, they found CDs labeled “Young [Name] + [Name],” “Misc nudes 1,” and “Girl pics nude.” Binders filled with more photos. Hard drives. Loose diamonds, $70,000 in cash, and a passport from a foreign country with Epstein’s photo under a different name.
The question of how Epstein came to own this $77 million crime scene tells you everything about the nature of his relationship with Leslie Wexner.
The house has a strange history, even before Epstein. Herbert Straus - an heir to the Macy’s department store fortune whose father had died on the Titanic - bought the property in 1928 and commissioned the house. Straus hired Horace Trumbauer, the architect of choice for anyone who wanted to live like royalty. No expense was spared - imported French limestone, sculpture figures, ornamental ironwork, entire eighteenth-century rooms shipped from Europe. Then the stock market crashed. Work stopped. Straus died of a heart attack in 1933 without ever living there.
For decades the mansion belonged to institutions - first a convalescent hospital annex for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese, then the Birch Wathen School. In 1989, Leslie Wexner bought it for $13.2 million, then a record for Manhattan townhouse sales.
The renovation Wexner commissioned was extraordinary. He hired architect Thierry Despont and interior designer John Stefanidis to transform the building into the ultimate private residence. He filled it with Picassos and Russian antiques. He installed rosewood doors with custom hardware. He put in an elaborate security system, including a lead-lined safe room with closed-circuit TV screens. He had the sidewalk heated so it would always be snow-free. By most accounts, he put tens of millions more into renovations, art and furnishings - so figure $25 million minimum for a property that had never been occupied as a private home in sixty years.
And then Wexner never moved in.
Epstein himself - then one of Wexner’s financial advisers - told the New York Times in 1996 that “Les never spent more than two months there.” Wexner married Abigail Koppel in 1993, and the couple decided to raise their family in Ohio. So this magnificent residence sat essentially empty while Wexner focused on his retail empire from Columbus.
In 1995 or 1996, Jeffrey Epstein moved in. And at some point - the timeline remains fuzzy - Wexner transferred the deed to Epstein for $0.
Not a dollar. Not a token payment. Nothing. A property purchased for $13.2 million, renovated for tens of millions more, transferred for zero consideration to Wexner’s financial advisor. Epstein told people he owned it. For years, the legal reality was murkier. The property sat in a trust connected to both Wexner and Epstein, with title not formally changed until 2011 - four years after Wexner claims to have “severed ties” with Epstein following his first arrest for sex crimes.
Wexner has never adequately explained this transfer. In 2019, through a spokeswoman, he said only that he had “severed ties” with Epstein about a decade earlier. His attorneys have claimed Epstein “misappropriated vast sums,” but the mansion transfer doesn’t fit neatly into a theft narrative. You don’t accidentally give someone the deed to the largest private residence in Manhattan. You don’t fail to notice that your $25 million property is now occupied by your financial advisor who claims to own it.
The more plausible explanation - that Wexner knowingly gave Epstein the house - raises its own questions. Why would a billionaire hand over such an asset to an employee? What did Epstein have on Wexner, or what did Epstein do for Wexner, that would justify such a gift?
What we know is what Epstein did with the house once he had it.
Vicky Ward visited in 2003 for her Vanity Fair profile and described walking into “someone’s private Xanadu” - a “high-walled, eclectic, imperious fantasy that seems to have no boundaries.” There was a Steinway grand piano topped with a stuffed black poodle. Epstein told Ward he displayed it because “no decorator would ever tell you to do that” and because he wanted “people to think what it means to stuff a dog.”
On his desk sat a copy of the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, a novel about a sexually abused twelve-year-old.
Maria Farmer, who worked for Epstein as an artist in 1996, later described being shown a hidden media room accessed through a concealed door. Inside were men monitoring video feeds from pinhole cameras throughout the house. “I looked on the cameras,” she told CBS News in 2019, “and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed.”
After Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, he had a mural painted on his terrace depicting a prison yard with guard towers and barbed wire. Inmates were exercising in the yard. Epstein pointed to one figure and told a visitor, “That’s me. That’s to remind myself that I could go back there.”
On July 6, 2019, FBI agents pried open those fifteen-foot oak doors and found what prosecutors would describe as “devastating evidence” - the massage table with sex toys and lubricant that matched victim descriptions, the trove of photographs, the safe full of hard drives and CDs, and, elsewhere in the house, boxes of CDs and a bin of hard drives that someone had already sealed with “evidence” tape as if cataloguing the contents. When agents returned days later with a second warrant to actually seize the materials, some items had been moved. An Epstein attorney eventually returned them.
Epstein died in his jail cell a month later. The mansion sold in 2021 for $51 million - down from an $88 million asking price - with proceeds going to the Epstein Victims’ Compensation Program. A former Goldman Sachs executive bought it.
The house that Wexner built and gave away for nothing became the staging ground for decades of crimes. And somehow, despite spending $25 million to create “the crown jewel” of Manhattan residences, despite visiting often enough to know the renovation was complete, Wexner claims he had no idea what was happening inside.
Go Deeper: For a detailed look at the Wexner-Epstein relationship through court records and firsthand accounts, watch “Filthy Rich” on Netflix - it includes depositions and victim testimony that map how Epstein operated from his various properties.
SOURCES
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_N._Straus_House
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/a28340797/jeffrey-epstein-townhouse-upper-east-side/
A Look Inside 9 East 71st Street
https://abcnews.go.com/US/jeffrey-epsteins-manhattan-townhouse-sells-approximately-51-million/story?id=76371810
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epstein-sex-case-heres-what-the-feds-found-in-his-manhattan-mansion/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/ghislaine-maxwell-trial-epstein-nude-photos-evidence-tape.amp
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fbi-agents-used-saw-open-004401080.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Epstein
Correction, September 28th, 2026: This essay first said the FBI found hard drives in Epstein’s safe that someone had wrapped in yellow evidence tape - the taped items were boxes of CDs and a bin of hard drives found elsewhere in the house. It said Herbert Straus commissioned the house in 1930 - he bought the property in 1928, and the house was going up before the 1929 crash. It said the Archdiocese used the mansion as a convent - it was a convalescent hospital annex. It put quote marks around the wrong words in Wexner’s 2019 statement - the quoted part was “severed ties.” It said Maria Farmer testified about the cameras - she said it in a CBS News interview. And it said Wexner added a seventh floor - a 1943 photo already shows a seventh-floor laundry, so I’ve cut that line.
Update, September 28th, 2026: A few lines now say who says so and add detail - the adviser who told the Times in 1996 that Wexner spent no more than two months there was Epstein himself, the documented security included a lead-lined safe room with closed-circuit TV, the tens of millions went to art and furnishings as well as renovations, and the 2021 buyer was a former Goldman Sachs executive - and in February 2026, after this posted, Wexner said in a statement for his deposition to Congress that Epstein “purchased it from me for what I was told was the appraised value.”