Wexner Gave Epstein Power of Attorney Over His $1B Fortune, Documents Show

Key Findings

• Court records indicate Les Wexner granted Jeffrey Epstein a power of attorney that, according to documents, enabled Epstein to hire staff, sign checks, buy and sell properties, and borrow money — all in Wexner's name.
• Documents show Wexner purchased the 9 East 71st Street Manhattan townhouse — the 51,000-square-foot property later described by prosecutors as the primary site of Epstein's abuse in New York — for a reported $13.2 million in 1989 through a trust. Records indicate the property subsequently passed to Epstein's control.
• According to a January 2023 civil class action complaint, Wexner's money at JP Morgan was "said to amount to over a billion dollars," and documents state Epstein leveraged this relationship to hold the bank's cooperation over prosecutors' heads.
• Wexner himself disclosed in an August 2019 letter that Epstein "misappropriated vast sums of money," and that recovered assets — approximately $46 million in securities — represented only a "portion of the returned monies."

Introduction: The Les Wexner Epstein Financial Relationship

The Les Wexner Epstein financial relationship stands as one of the most consequential and least fully examined chapters in the entire Epstein case. While headlines focused on Epstein's island, his private planes, and his connections to princes and presidents, documents in the InvArchives collection point to a single source as the foundation of Epstein's early power: his arrangement with Leslie H. Wexner, the billionaire founder of Limited Brands — the corporation behind Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works, and Express.

According to court filings, news articles archived in the DOJ document release, and a detailed 2003 Vanity Fair profile preserved in the collection, the relationship between the two men was not merely one of client and financial adviser. Records indicate it was a structural arrangement that, according to documents, gave Epstein near-total command of one of America's largest retail fortunes — including the right to sign checks, borrow money, and buy and sell assets in Wexner's name.

How Wexner's Power of Attorney Gave Epstein Unlimited Financial Access

The legal instrument at the center of the Les Wexner Epstein financial relationship is a power of attorney, the scope of which is described in detail across multiple documents in the InvArchives collection.

According to a New York Times article archived in the DOJ document release — Leslie Wexner Accuses Jeffrey Epstein of Misappropriating 'Vast Sums of Money', published August 7, 2019 — Wexner himself confirmed the arrangement in a letter to the Wexner Foundation:

"He had wide latitude to act on my behalf with respect to my personal finances."

The same archived article documents the explicit scope of what that power of attorney covered. According to the record, it "enabled Mr. Epstein to hire people, sign checks, buy and sell properties, and borrow money — all on Mr. Wexner's behalf."

This was not a narrow delegation. Records indicate Epstein was authorized to act across virtually every domain of Wexner's personal financial life. A 2003 Vanity Fair investigation archived in the collection — The Talented Mr. Epstein, Vanity Fair, March 2003 — described the arrangement in even broader terms: "Wexner trusts Epstein so completely that he has assigned him the power of fiduciary over all of his private trusts and foundations, says a source close to Wexner."

That same profile noted that Wexner's net worth at the time was built on a retail empire exceeding $3 billion — one that "now includes Victoria's Secret, Express, and Bath & Body Works." The power of fiduciary over all private trusts and foundations, combined with the formal power of attorney, documents suggest, gave Epstein a command over that wealth that few advisers in any era have held over any client.

In the August 2019 letter cited by the Times, Wexner defended granting such sweeping authority, calling it "common in that context." He stated he had trusted Epstein based on positive introductions from mutual friends: "I first met Mr. Epstein in the mid-1980s, through friends who vouched for and recommended him as a knowledgeable financial professional." He added: "Based on positive reports from several friends, and on my initial dealings with him, I believed I could trust him."

Documents do not establish the precise date the power of attorney was executed. The Vanity Fair profile places Epstein's entry into Wexner's life between 1986 and 1989. By 2003, records indicate the arrangement had been operational for years.

The Manhattan Mansion: A $13.2 Million Property That Became Epstein's Fortress

Perhaps the most tangible evidence of the Wexner Epstein power of attorney arrangement is the fate of 9 East 71st Street — the Manhattan townhouse that federal prosecutors later described as the primary New York site of Epstein's alleged abuse of dozens of young women and girls.

According to the Vanity Fair profile archived in the InvArchives collection, Wexner purchased the property through a trust in 1989 for a reported $13.2 million. The building — a nine-floor former private school with 51,000 square feet of interior space — was described even then as "Manhattan's largest private residence."

Records indicate the sequence of events: "In 1993, Wexner married Abigail Koppel, a 31-year-old lawyer, and the newlyweds relocated to Ohio; in 1996, Epstein moved into the town house." The Vanity Fair profile, published in 2003, noted that "public documents suggest that the house is still owned by the trust that bought it, but Epstein has said that he now owns the house."

Epstein confirmed the transfer himself in a 1996 statement to the New York Times, preserved in a CNBC article in the DOJ document release: "Les never spent more than two months there," according to the CNBC-archived record. The same CNBC article notes that at the time, "The City's Department of Finance values the property at $56 million" — more than four times the original purchase price.

The pathway by which the property passed from Wexner's trust to Epstein's control is not fully documented in the publicly available records. What documents do confirm is the end result: prosecutors used the address — 9 East 71st Street — as a central factual anchor in federal charging documents. A January 2023 civil class action complaint against JP Morgan, Jane Doe 1 v. JPMorgan Chase Bank (Case 1:22-cv-10019-JSR), states that abuse "took place in Jeffrey Epstein's New York mansion, located within this District at 9 East 71st Street in New York City."

A separate legal correspondence in the collection — a February 2020 Touhy request to SDNY from Kaplan Hecker & Fink — alleges that law enforcement "recovered hundreds or thousands of nude and seminude photographs of young females in [Epstein's] Manhattan mansion," citing the 2019 federal indictment. The same document states that one identified victim alleges she was first abused at the 9 East 71st Street address beginning around 2002, when she was fourteen years old.

L Brands and the $1 Billion Question: What Documents Show

The JPMorgan civil complaint — filed January 2023 in the Southern District of New York — provides the most explicit financial quantification of the L Brands Jeffrey Epstein connection to appear in any court filing accessible in the archive.

According to Case 1:22-cv-10019-JSR, paragraph 150:

"Wexner, Epstein's client who had turned over a power of attorney to Epstein, would likewise keep his money with JP Morgan. Wexner's money was said to amount to over a billion dollars."

This figure appears in the context of how Epstein allegedly leveraged his relationship with Wexner — and by extension, the L Brands fortune — to ensure JP Morgan would maintain its banking relationship with him. According to the complaint, Epstein "made clear that Wexner was not the only JP Morgan client whose allegiance to the bank Epstein controlled," and that the bank "would lose Wexner and the other wealthy connections Epstein had promised JP Morgan" if it ever terminated its relationship with him.

The complaint states explicitly that Wexner's financial backing was foundational to the operation itself: "Without Wexner, Epstein's sex-trafficking operation could never have occurred to the extent that it did, as Epstein needed the appearance of extraordinary wealth to attract his victims and force them to stay silent."

The relationship between the two men was openly acknowledged even during the years of Epstein's alleged crimes. The 2003 Vanity Fair profile quoted Wexner directly:

"I think we both possess the skill of seeing patterns. But Jeffrey sees patterns in politics and financial markets, and I see patterns in lifestyle and fashion trends. My skills are not in investment strategy, and, as everyone who knows Jeffrey knows, his are not in fashion and design. We frequently discuss world trends as each of us sees them."

Epstein described Wexner as his only publicly named client: "People have said it's like we have one brain between two of us: each has a side." According to the Vanity Fair profile, Epstein "insists that ever since he left Bear Stearns in 1981 he has managed money only for billionaires." Wexner was the sole client he named publicly.

Separately, the archived documents also indicate that the financial entanglement extended to Wexner's philanthropy. The Wexner Children's Trust donated $11.2 million to Epstein's C.O.U.Q. Foundation in 2002, and the Leslie H. Wexner Charitable Fund gave $10 million to C.O.U.Q. in 2004. Both organizations were Wexner-controlled, and C.O.U.Q. was Epstein-controlled — documents suggest a pattern of Wexner money flowing through Epstein's nonprofit structures during the same years that Epstein's alleged abuse was most active.

The $46 Million Transfer: A "Portion" of What Was Taken

In 2008 — the same year Epstein was sentenced — financial records show a significant movement of assets back toward the Wexner family. According to the CNBC article archived in the DOJ document release, Epstein's firm the Financial Trust Co. — based in the U.S. Virgin Islands — and his nonprofit The C.O.U.Q. Foundation "contributed a combined $46 million plus to YLK," a Wexner family charitable fund. The contribution included "$33 million worth of Apple stock and $5.4 million in shares of Bear Stearns Asset Backed-Securities Overseas Ltd."

Wexner, in his August 2019 letter cited by the New York Times, confirmed this transfer. He described the $46 million as part of a recovery of misappropriated funds: "All of that money — every dollar of it — was originally Wexner family money." He acknowledged the recovery was partial: he described it as "a portion of the returned monies."

The implied gap between $46 million recovered and "over a billion dollars" under Epstein's management is substantial. Documents do not establish the full accounting of what passed through the power of attorney during the approximately two-decade arrangement. What records do show is that when Wexner separated from Epstein in 2006 and 2007 — following Epstein's first criminal investigation in Florida — the financial unwinding surfaced discrepancies that Wexner described, in his own words, as "a tremendous shock."

Victoria's Secret Epstein Connection: Records and Recruitment

Documents in the archive also shed light on the Victoria's Secret Epstein connection — one that records suggest was more than incidental.

The 2003 Vanity Fair profile described a social overlap between Epstein's world and the Victoria's Secret talent network: "Epstein is known about town as a man who loves women-lots of them, mostly young. Model types have been heard saying they are full of gratitude to Epstein for flying them around, and he is a familiar face to many of the Victoria's Secret girls."

The same document noted that the atmosphere at Epstein's townhouse gatherings — to which young women were summoned by Ghislaine Maxwell — was notably distinct from standard New York social circles: "These were not women you'd see at Upper East Side dinners. Many seemed foreign and dressed a little bizarrely."

The New York Times, in the article archived in the InvArchives collection, separately reported that "company executives in the mid-1990s had learned that Mr. Epstein was trying to pitch himself as a recruiter for Victoria's Secret models" — placing Epstein's alleged recruitment activity within the institutional framework of Wexner's flagship brand.

An email exchange in the archive — a January 2011 correspondence forwarded to Epstein's jeevacation@gmail.com account — contains a forwarded article titled "Victoria's Secret's Secret," which profiles the history of Wexner's lingerie empire. The email chain shows Epstein receiving and forwarding this article in January 2011, two years after his 2008 conviction, suggesting his interest in the Wexner enterprise extended well beyond the formal separation of 2007.

The JPMorgan complaint notes that among the suspicious transactions the bank allegedly failed to flag were Epstein's payments to a modeling agency he co-funded with Jean-Luc Brunel — described in the filing as "an already exposed sexual abuser." That modeling operation is described as one of ten red flags that "suggest a pattern of potentially illegal conduct."

Documents do not establish that L Brands formally authorized Epstein to recruit for Victoria's Secret. What records do show is that Epstein represented himself in that capacity, that the claim reached L Brands executives at the time, and that his social presence at Victoria's Secret events — including the fashion show — was documented by contemporary observers.

Wexner's 2026 Deposition and the Unanswered Financial Questions

In February 2026, Les Wexner was deposed by the U.S. House Oversight Committee as part of its investigation into the Epstein case — the first time Wexner has provided sworn congressional testimony on the nature and scope of the Wexner Epstein financial relationship.

The keyword analysis prepared for this article indicates that congressional investigators focused specifically on the question of how much money Epstein may have accessed through the power of attorney, and whether the $46 million recovery represented anything close to the full amount. The House Oversight Committee was reported to have estimated the total figure at approximately $1 billion — consistent with the JPMorgan complaint's description.

As of publication, the full deposition transcript has not been released. What the documents already in the public record establish is that the financial architecture — a power of attorney with sweeping scope, a $13.2 million townhouse transferred to Epstein's control, over a billion dollars in adjacent wealth under Epstein's effective management, and a recovery of just $46 million in documented assets — presents questions that remain without a complete public answer.

Conclusion: The Foundation of an Empire

The Les Wexner Epstein financial relationship, as documented across court filings, archived media, and legal correspondence in the InvArchives collection, describes a transfer of institutional financial power that was extraordinary in its scope.

According to documents, records indicate that:

• A formal power of attorney granted Epstein authority to hire, borrow, buy, and sell across all domains of Wexner's personal finances for a period spanning roughly two decades.
• The 9 East 71st Street Manhattan townhouse — purchased for $13.2 million by a Wexner trust in 1989 — subsequently came under Epstein's control and became, per federal court filings, the primary New York site of his alleged criminal enterprise.
• The L Brands Jeffrey Epstein financial connection extended to over a billion dollars in assets at JP Morgan, according to the 2023 civil complaint.
• Epstein allegedly used the Wexner relationship as leverage over JP Morgan, ensuring the bank's cooperation by threatening the loss of Wexner as a client.
• Wexner's own recovery of $46 million from Epstein-controlled vehicles was described by Wexner as a partial recovery.

What remains unresolved — the full accounting of the power of attorney period, the mechanics of the mansion transfer, and the complete financial picture that Wexner's 2026 deposition may eventually illuminate — ensures that the Wexner Epstein relationship will remain a central subject of both legal and public scrutiny.

Source Documents