The original and prime source of Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth was the 1991 deal in which Les Wexner, the billionaire owner of the Victoria’s Secret underwear vendor, gave him $1.8 billion of his wealth to manage—along with his power of attorney. Last week, in a U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) challenged U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi over the Justice Department’s redaction of Wexner’s name in a document on Epstein’s potential co-conspirators. On Feb. 18, Wexner was questioned for six hours in a closed-door session of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
More is expected to be released from that deposition, which included a video and a transcript; however, in a written release, Wexner played the innocent dupe, saying that the “conman” (who made Wexner a ton of money on paper over the next 16 years) had fooled him—that he had been “naive, foolish, and gullible to put any trust” in him. Then he invoked the infamous “crystal clear” phrase: “And, let me be crystal clear: I never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity. I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities.”
Here Wexner relies upon the hope that the public, and their representatives in Congress, are sex-crazed enough to believe that Epstein’s illegal activities were confined to his sexual perversions. Yet Epstein was hired by Wexner precisely because of his perceived genius in the 1980s at manipulating the books for financial takeovers, asset stripping, and various activities that used to be, in the best case, at the edge of legality, if not outright illegal. Today, public officials would have to close their eyes to decades of documentation by EIR—including the famous Dope, Inc. book, to let Wexner pretend that Epstein’s illegal activities were only about sex. His partnership with the son of gangster Sam Bronfman, Charles, in founding the Mega Group in 1991 was not a case of being fooled by Epstein.
