The strangest fact about Jeffrey Epstein’s “money management empire” is how small its client list was. For all the talk of a financier to billionaires, only one billionaire client was ever confirmed: Leslie Wexner, the retail genius behind The Limited, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret.
One client. But that client handed Epstein something almost no billionaire gives anyone: the legal keys to everything.
Key Takeaways
- Epstein had exactly one confirmed billionaire client: Les Wexner, founder of The Limited and the force behind Victoria’s Secret.
- In 1991, Wexner granted Epstein a sweeping power of attorney: legal authority to hire, sign, buy, sell and move assets in Wexner’s name.
- Wexner bought Victoria’s Secret for about $1 million in 1982 and built it into the anchor of a roughly $7 billion retail empire, the fortune Epstein came to operate.
- Wexner says he discovered at least $46 million misappropriated by Epstein as the two severed ties around 2007-2008.
- One asset tells the story: the vast Manhattan townhouse bought for Wexner in 1989 for a reported $13.2 million became Epstein’s residence, and sold for about $51 million in 2021.
- The reckoning arrived in 2020: Wexner stepped down after more than five decades as CEO (among the longest runs in the Fortune 500) and Victoria’s Secret was spun off in 2021.
The Merchant Prince
Before this is an Epstein story, it’s a Wexner story, and Wexner’s is extraordinary. Starting with a single Ohio clothing store in 1963 and a $5,000 loan, he built the most powerful apparel machine in America. At his peak he controlled a retail constellation (The Limited, Express, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant, Bath & Body Works, Victoria’s Secret) and had turned a mail-order lingerie catalog into a cultural monolith.
The Victoria’s Secret purchase alone belongs in retail folklore: Wexner bought the struggling business from its founder in 1982 for about $1 million and grew it into a brand generating billions a year. That was his signature: seeing value where the market saw nothing.
He was also, by accounts from that era, isolated at the top: a workaholic bachelor in his fifties, newly confronting mortality after deaths in his circle, and thinking hard about legacy, estate and meaning. Into exactly that opening walked a former Bear Stearns trader with no famous clients and a gift for making powerful men feel understood.
What Power Did Wexner Actually Give Epstein?
Nearly everything short of the company itself: the 1991 power of attorney let Epstein hire, sign, buy, sell, borrow and move assets in Wexner’s name, a grant that people who later examined the relationship described as extraordinarily broad even by the standards of billionaire wealth management.
Epstein met Wexner in the mid-1980s, introduced through mutual contacts in insurance and finance. Within a few years he had done what no one else had, and what that 1991 grant unlocked is difficult to overstate:
| Asset | What happened |
|---|---|
| The fortune | Epstein gained operational control over the finances of a ~$7B empire’s founder |
| The Manhattan mansion | The vast townhouse on E. 71st St., bought for Wexner, ended up as Epstein’s residence, transferred for reportedly little or no consideration |
| The credibility | ”Manages Les Wexner’s money” became Epstein’s calling card to every room in New York |
| The proximity | Reports later described Epstein inserting himself into Victoria’s Secret affairs, including posing as a talent scout for the brand |
The townhouse deserves a closer look, because it’s the whole arrangement in miniature. One of the largest private homes in Manhattan, it was bought for Wexner in 1989 for a reported $13.2 million and lavishly renovated. By the late 1990s, Epstein was living in it as if it were his own. Records suggest its eventual formal transfer to an Epstein-linked entity involved little or no money changing hands.
That last table row is the darkest: the borrowed empire wasn’t just financial infrastructure. It was camouflage.
How Much Did Epstein Take From Wexner?
At least $46 million, by Wexner’s own account, a figure he disclosed publicly only in 2019, more than a decade after the two men severed ties, and one that may understate the full accounting.
Wexner’s circle reportedly warned him for years: executives found Epstein’s role inexplicable, advisors found his fees and authority alarming. The arrangement survived anyway, for the better part of two decades. It ended only around 2007-2008, as Epstein’s first criminal case in Florida became undeniable; Wexner severed ties and later said he’d discovered Epstein had misappropriated vast sums, with some funds returned through charitable transfers.
The timing tracked Epstein’s legal peril, not any internal audit. Palm Beach police had begun investigating him in 2005, charges followed in 2006, and the notorious 2008 non-prosecution deal was taking shape as Wexner formally cut him loose. The controls didn’t catch Epstein; the police did.
Consider the asymmetry of that sentence: one of the shrewdest businessmen of the 20th century says he didn’t notice, for years, that his personal fiduciary was taking eight figures. Either the controls around the fortune were that weak (which was itself a choice) or the truth is more uncomfortable still. It’s a pattern we see across scandal after scandal: oversight fails hardest exactly where trust is most personal. Even Bill Gates’s entanglement with Epstein, years later, followed the same grammar: access first, questions never.
The dates make the silence measurable:
- 1963: Wexner opens the first Limited store in Columbus, Ohio
- 1982: buys Victoria’s Secret for about $1 million
- Mid-1980s: meets Epstein, reportedly through insurance and finance contacts
- 1991: grants the sweeping power of attorney
- 2007-2008: severs ties as the Florida case surfaces; later cites at least $46 million missing
- July 2019: Epstein is arrested on federal trafficking charges; he dies in custody weeks later
- February 2020: Wexner steps down as CEO of L Brands
- August 2021: Victoria’s Secret is spun off; the townhouse sells for about $51 million
The Critical Choice
The 1991 power of attorney is the critical choice, and it’s worth being precise about why. Rich men hire money managers constantly; that’s not the error. The error was unbounded delegation without verification: fusing money, property, philanthropy and personal affairs into one man’s signature, with no institution around it strong enough to say no.
Every scandal Epstein later built needed startup capital of a specific kind: not just cash, but legitimacy. A Manhattan palace. A billionaire’s proxy. An empire to be photographed against. Wexner’s signature minted all of it. Whatever Wexner knew or didn’t, the grant itself was the decision that made the rest structurally possible.
What Happened Next
Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death turned the arrangement into a permanent question mark over Wexner’s legacy. He stepped down as L Brands CEO in 2020, ending the longest tenure of any Fortune 500 chief, and Victoria’s Secret was carved out of his empire shortly after. An early 2020 plan to sell a majority of the brand to private equity firm Sycamore Partners for $525 million collapsed in the pandemic; instead, Victoria’s Secret was spun off as an independent public company in 2021, and L Brands itself was renamed Bath & Body Works.
Wexner has addressed it publicly only in flashes. In 2019 messages to his foundation community, he described his embarrassment at the association and repeated that Epstein had misappropriated vast sums. Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted on federal trafficking charges in 2021, the only trial that ever put the operation’s inner workings before a jury. Epstein’s estate, valued at more than half a billion dollars at his death, went on to pay out over $100 million to victims through a compensation fund, by most accounts, with the townhouse’s roughly $51 million sale feeding into the settlements. Wexner has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has never been charged with wrongdoing; the full accounting of those sixteen years of signatures, though, remains sealed inside estates, settlements and nondisclosure agreements, the standard architecture of money and power. The empire survived. The question of who was really running it never got an answer under oath.
