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Jeffrey Epstein paid $100mn to Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner in 2008 after the retail billionaire claimed Epstein stole hundreds of millions of dollars from him, according to a report by US prosecutors.
The report said Wexner’s lawyers told prosecutors about the payment from Epstein just days before the sex offender died while awaiting trial on child sex trafficking charges in 2019.
Wexner’s lawyers met prosecutors on July 25 2019, 16 days before the child sex offender’s death, to offer them information, the report said. They told prosecutors that the lingerie billionaire had allowed Epstein to control all of his personal finances with “virtually no oversight”, and have power of attorney to act on his behalf starting in 1991, according to the report. It said Wexner met Epstein in the 1980s through a mutual friend.
“Epstein frequently bought property on behalf of the Wexners and then sold it to himself for a fraction of the cost,” according to a section of the prosecutors’ report that summarised the meeting with Wexner’s lawyers.
The report said Epstein bought “a private plane that previously belonged to Wexner at a deeply discounted price” and also acquired “the New York residence in which he resided until his arrest in 2019”.
The Manhattan townhouse had previously belonged to Wexner, the report said, and was also purchased by Epstein at a discount.
A prosecutor “told Mr Wexner’s legal counsel in 2019 that Mr Wexner was being viewed as source of information about Epstein and was not a target in any respect”, the billionaire’s spokesperson said. “Mr Wexner co-operated fully by providing background information on Epstein and was never contacted again.”
The report has been made public as part of a huge release of documents by the Department of Justice, after Congress passed legislation requiring materials related to Epstein’s prosecution to be published.
Wexner was Epstein’s only known financial services client for decades and has faced scrutiny about his ties to the child sex offender since at least 2019.
His claims of theft by Epstein became public shortly before the disgraced financier’s death, when the former Victoria’s Secret boss made the allegations in a letter to members of the Wexner Foundation. He has since said he was embarrassed to have known Epstein.
The letter did not mention the $100mn repayment, though it said Wexner had recovered some funds.
Wexner, now in his late 80s, stepped down from his leadership roles at L Brands in 2020 when the company agreed a take-private deal for its Victoria’s Secret lingerie unit with private equity firm Sycamore Partners.
Epstein spent 13 months in a Florida jail starting in 2008 for soliciting sex from a minor, after a plea deal that spared him from federal charges. He was rearrested in July 2019 and charged separately in Manhattan federal court with sex trafficking of minors. He died the following month.
Prosecutors said in the 2019 report that money from Wexner “appears to account for virtually all of Epstein’s wealth”, although they did not specify the time period. However, a report from the law firm Dechert in 2021 found Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black had paid Epstein $158mn between 2012 and 2017.
Wexner’s lawyers told prosecutors that the billionaire had cut all ties with Epstein after the $100mn payment. It was described as a private settlement struck because “the Wexners did not want to bring unnecessary public attention to the issue” after Wexner’s wife discovered the misappropriations.
The lawyers had also “indicated that Wexner had no knowledge of any inappropriate or unlawful activity with young women by Epstein”, the report said.