A Convenient Death

by Alana Goodman

  That is, it’s likely the charitable trusts have been avenues for Epstein to pay himself off with Wexner’s money. Bloomberg’s Joe Nocera discovered how this scheme might have worked.10

  “In a 13D filed in late March 2002, Epstein is listed as trustee or co-trustee for the Wexner Children’s Trust II, which held 1.3 percent of L Brands stock, as well as something called Health and Science Interests II, which held 3 percent of the shares. (Wexner himself held 15 percent of the stock.) The document shows that on March 26, Wexner moved 15 million shares, worth over $250 million, from the Wexner Children’s Trust, which he solely controlled, to the Health and Science Interests II, where he was a co-trustee with Epstein. The next day, Health and Science Interests II sold 49,800 shares at $17.50 a share,” Nocera reported.

  “It is possible that the sale was simply a diversification move—though . . . Epstein had never registered with the SEC as an investment professional. It seems more likely that it was a way to put money in Epstein’s pocket. There are a half-dozen 13Ds that show a similar pattern: Wexner transfers L Brands stock from trust he solely controls to one where Epstein is a trustee. Within days, the Epstein-managed trust sold the stock.”

  Reporters for ABC News would go further in tracking the money ties between Wexner and Epstein. “Records show that between 1991 and 2006, Epstein oversaw the sale, mostly through the New York Stock Exchange, of more than $1.3 billion of company stock held by these trusts, representing a vast pool of cash largely controlled by Epstein,” ABC would report in January 2020.11

  “Much of the money was certainly used for charitable purposes, but . . . a potential pattern appears to emerge, one in which Epstein liquidates large amount of stock on behalf of these trusts and then, shortly after, makes large purchases for himself, including homes, planes, even a private island,” the report stated.

  Again, this financial forensic accounting is nearly impossible without a clear view into Epstein’s and even Wexner’s accounts. But the financial relationship is extensive—and all one-sided.

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  Being locked up is usually not considered good for business. Especially if you’re supposedly running a client-facing money management firm.

  Wexner publicly began separating himself from Epstein. “As the allegations against Mr. Epstein in Florida were emerging, he vehemently denied them. But by early fall 2007, it was agreed that he should step back from the management of our personal finances,” Wexner wrote in a letter to his family foundation in 2019.

  But Epstein was telling a different story to friends, claiming that his first guilty plea in 2008 was of no major concern, according to a friend who discussed the matter with him.

  A good friend was worried about Epstein’s income stream from Wexner after the arrest, he revealed in an interview. So he picked up the phone and called him, “How are you going to make a living?”

  “Oh, come on, you believed that crap?” the friend recalls Epstein saying on the phone.

  The friend adds, “So, Wexner always continued to give to him.”

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  So what connected them? What was the subplot? Some think it was blackmail. It had been rumored for years that Wexner was gay. In 1985, New York magazine published a piece titled “The Bachelor Billionaire: On Pins and Needles with Leslie Wexner.”12

  With a wink and a nod, the magazine labeled the forty-seven-year-old a “confirmed bachelor.”

  “He doesn’t seem to want a child, and, despite what he says about the perfect woman . . . he seems to be waiting to achieve some mystical harmony and balance in himself first,” the author would write.

  The magazine would go on to quote Wexner as saying, “A lot of people think because I am not married I am asexual or homosexual, but I enjoy a relationship with a woman.”

  The article’s implication was clear—that the fashionista with an expertise in women’s lingerie may not have the hands-on experience someone in his position in the 1980s might have been expected to have. That is, that he may be unfamiliar with the sexual needs of women.

  “We all suspected/knew that Les Wexner was gay,” says a former Wall Street source whose firm worked with Wexner’s. “I’ve heard that he and Epstein had an affair,” the source added. “This is all about keeping that quiet.”

  Some might laugh at the idea of Epstein’s having an affair with Wexner, but these are not the only allegations that he was interested in men—or perhaps boys.

  His former friend and colleague Steven Hoffenberg said that Epstein was in fact gay. “He lived in the Solow building on Second Avenue,” Hoffenberg explained. He then claimed he never set foot in Epstein’s Manhattan apartment because “I didn’t want to be in that box. I’m straight. Epstein was not.”

  Hoffenberg declined to provide further details except to say, “I spent years with him and his activities.”

  Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the socialite who introduced Epstein to her many friends, including President Bill Clinton, once remarked to a mutual acquaintance that she believed Epstein was gay because he never made a move on her.

  Another acquaintance of his remarked, “We always thought he was gay . . . I thought he was obnoxious, and I thought he hated women. He never seemed affectionate to the women.”

  Others sources were a bit more circumspect. “I think he was ashamed of being gay, and he was supermacho as the result of it and would have sex with women, would brag about his women,” one associate of Epstein’s confided. “My own theory was that because he was embarrassed and ashamed and he didn’t want anybody to know that he liked boys, but that’s speculation.”

  If Wexner was gay, he could not allow the public to know. “It wouldn’t do for a CEO of a big company like the Limited to be gay,” the source added. “It was a time when you couldn’t do that.”

  Which best explains the financial concessions that Wexner for years made to Epstein. It was never a fiduciary-client relationship. It was one made up of blackmail and extortion.

  And it didn’t stop there. It went way beyond just Wexner, especially as Epstein’s cachet in America began to wane after he was locked up late in the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  “He was blackmailing, you know, shahs and sultans and everything from the Mideast. I think it was blackmailing everybody,” said a source.

  “That was his business play—blackmail. Not financial services advice,” he added. “Please, that’s ridiculous.”

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  It turns out that in 1996 Bob Fitrakis of the Columbus Free Press dug into this story. He was looking into a local political controversy when he first came across the name Jeffrey Epstein.

  Southern Air Transport, then a scandal-plagued, CIA-owned airline that gained infamy in the 1980s for shuttling weapons to the contras and trafficking cocaine, had abruptly decided to move its world headquarters to Columbus, Ohio. The city’s wealthiest man, Leslie Wexner, was rumored to be behind the move and was using the planes to transport merchandise to his Limited stores.

  “We were looking at a story on how Southern Air Transport came to Columbus. How did this CIA-connected airline end up in Columbus? And people said, well, it’s Wexner. But it’s not really Wexner. Epstein’s handling all the logistics for him,” said Fitrakis.

  Fitrakis started asking around about Epstein, a supposed money manager from Manhattan whom local officials would jokingly refer to as “Les’s gal Friday.” Wexner’s relationship with Epstein had seemed to materialize out of nowhere and was a puzzle to many in Columbus. The L Brands founder was a deliberate and deeply shy man, born and raised in Ohio, who dressed in carefully coordinated suits and didn’t marry until he was middle-aged. Epstein, with his booming Brooklyn accent, tracksuits, and unabashed social climbing, was a different breed.

  Fitrakis soon learned that Epstein had consolidated enormous powe
r over Wexner’s life and finances in just a few years after the two met in the mid-1980s. The Limited founder had gifted Epstein a $70 million home in Manhattan, put him at the helm of his family’s foundations, and signed over durable power of attorney—allowing Epstein unrestricted access to Wexner’s billions.

  When Fitrakis checked with his sources from the Ohio inspector general’s office, he found that Epstein was also on their radar.

  “They used to call [Epstein] ‘the boyfriend,’” said Fitrakis. “There was concern by the inspector general; they were concerned whether or not Epstein was blackmailing Wexner.”

  “Everyone thought [Wexner] was enthralled. I mean, they thought it was like Rasputin,” he said. “And a lot of them suspected it was sexual.”

  14

  The Smart Set

  Brockman, Dershowitz, and the “Intellectual Enablers”

  What does that got to do with pussy!

  JEFFREY EPSTEIN

  Real money managers are single-minded. Their days and nights revolve around markets, currencies, and anything else that might further their—and their clients’—financial interests. That was not Jeffrey Epstein.

  Instead, he spent hours every day preying on underage girls and actively sought to cultivate an aura of intellectualism. He liked to think of himself as a man of many sophisticated interests, perhaps to mask his baser activities.

  Epstein’s “best pal for decades” was the artist and scientist Stuart Pivar, who is now ninety years old. They became close as fellow board members of the New York Academy of Art, which Pivar founded with Andy Warhol. “I adored him,” Pivar told Mother Jones in an interview.1

  They also had business dealings together. Pivar would act as a kind of consultant for Epstein, offering advice on what sorts of artworks he should purchase and how he might decorate his many homes. Pivar claims, however, that Epstein routinely ignored his advice and took active pleasure in buying fakes. “He was amused to put one over on the world by having fake art,” his friend now recalls.

  But Pivar liked him and credits his friend with doing “amazing, incredible, amazing, remarkable things for science” by uniting intellectuals and funding, or mostly promising to fund, many of their ventures. “He brought together scientists for the sake of trying to inculcate some kind of a higher level of scientific thought, even though he himself didn’t know shit from Shinola about science,” Pivar told the magazine. “He never knew nothing about anything.”

  Epstein did not let his limited knowledge, nor lack of education, get in the way of gathering some of the smartest minds—on a regular basis. “In his peculiarly inquiring mind, let’s say, like a child who is fresh to the world—because he has no compunction about approaching people—he brought together the most important scientists like Stephen Gould, like Pinker, like all of those people, and myself even, at dinners, and would propose interesting, naive ideas. Steve Pinker describes that,” Pivar recalled.

  He would often interrupt these high-level gatherings with some of the strangest—simplest—questions. “Oh, what is gravity?” Epstein would ask, for example. His dinner guests would be flummoxed. “And because he was Jeffrey, why, they would—and as the founder of the feast—they would listen to him and try to give [answers]. He was attempting, somehow, in his ignorant and scientifically naive state, to do something scientifically important,” Pivar recalled.

  Perhaps Epstein was amusing himself by mocking academics—just as he mocked the art world by hanging up frauds around his house.

  But why were some of the academically praised minds so keen to gather with Epstein, only to be bombarded with questions asking to define gravity? Why were they so willing to sign up to be mocked, and what did the smart set see in this unconversant college dropout that kept them coming back for more? Simple: money. “He had no compunctions about inviting people, and since he had money, they would listen. He would promise money to people and, of course, never come across, by the way. That’s what’s called a dangler. Didn’t he promise $15 million to Harvard? I don’t know if they got two cents,” Pivar said.

  In fact, Harvard received more than two cents from Epstein. Between 1998 and 2007, it received at least $8.9 million from the child predator, the university’s president, Lawrence Bacow, admitted in a 2019 statement. A 2003 gift of $6.5 million went to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, while $2.4 million went elsewhere. Bacow also admitted the university had repaid Epstein’s generosity with an honorific designation as a visiting fellow. “Stephen Kosslyn, a former faculty member and a beneficiary of Epstein’s philanthropy, designated Epstein as a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Psychology in 2005,” Bacow said.

  But Pivar is right: Epstein had promised much more philanthropy to the institution. Rarely did his promises match reality.

  Epstein had pledged a total of $30 million to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which came about when Professor Martin Nowak, a biologist and mathematician, visited Epstein’s private island.

  “Jeffrey was the perfect host,” Nowak noted in his book SuperCooperators: Altruism, Evolution, and Why We Need Each Other to Succeed, published in 2011. “I asked a casual question about what it was like to dive in the warm, clear waters around the island. The very next day a scuba diving instructor turned up. When the British cosmologist Stephen Hawking came to visit, and remarked that he had never been underwater, Jeffrey rented a submarine for him.”

  The rest of the money never came through. Despite apparently coming up $23.5 million short of his stated pledge to Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, Epstein would continue to state falsely that he had given the money.

  And when Epstein faced legal problems after the Palm Beach police began looking into his sexual crimes in 2005, Harvard took a principled stand—to keep every last dollar Epstein had given it. “Mr. Epstein’s gift is funding important research using mathematics to study areas such as evolutionary theory, viruses, and cancers,” Harvard said through a spokesman to the school newspaper on September 12, 2006. “The University is not considering returning this gift.”

  But at least for Harvard, there does appear to have been a distancing; Bacow now says that the university didn’t accept money from Epstein after his guilty plea. (There’s still evidence that he maintained a relationship with Nowak as late as 2014, however.)

  Which for Epstein was no problem. He found a more welcoming environment just down the street in Cambridge at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. An MIT investigation, conducted by lawyers retained by the university to investigate its ties to Epstein and released in 2020, discovered that before his legal problems the institution of higher education accepted one donation of $100,000. But after his 2008 guilty plea, MIT accepted $750,000 distributed in nine donations.

  “The post-conviction donations,” the lawyers’ report disclosed,2 “were all made either to support the work of the Media Lab ($525,000) or Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Systems and Physics Seth Lloyd ($225,000).” An additional sum of money, $60,000, was totally off the books—given from Epstein directly to Professor Lloyd’s personal bank account.

  Most damning for MIT was that “members of the Senior Team who approved MIT’s acceptance of Epstein’s donations were aware that Epstein had a criminal record involving sex offenses.” And with that money, Epstein became somewhat of a fixture around campus—visiting at least nine times between 2013 and 2017.

  In the report, which was released after Epstein’s 2019 death, MIT lawyers concluded that Epstein was attempting to “launder his reputation by associating himself with reputable individuals and institutions.”

  Which at least is partly true. By being seen with professors and by being tied to prestigious universities, Epstein hoped to be seen as an intellectual himself.

  But perhaps the most explosive allegations in the report would be that Epstein had secured donations from his wealthy friends for MIT. �
��In 2014, Epstein claimed to have arranged for Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates to provide an anonymous $2 million donation to the Media Lab. He also claimed that same year to have arranged for a $5 million anonymous donation to the Media Lab from Leon Black, the co-founder of Apollo Global Management,” the report stated.

  These allegations were surprising for no other reason than that they signified a closeness between Epstein and Gates, and between Epstein and Leon Black, that both powerful and rich men had strenuously sought to avoid. (Gates, for his part, denied to MIT that Epstein had anything to do with his financial support for the university.)

  “Gates and the $51 billion Gates Foundation have championed the well-being of young girls,” The New York Times would note.3 “By the time Gates and Epstein first met, Epstein had served jail time for soliciting prostitution from a minor and was required to register as a sex offender.”

  That first meeting was in 2011, well after he had been publicly shamed by his guilty plea. The relationship would continue, with Gates playing down how close the pair was or denying that there was ever a direct financial relationship.

  “His lifestyle is very different and kind of intriguing although it would not work for me,” the Microsoft mogul would tell colleagues in an email in 2011. The pair apparently mulled the idea of a philanthropic partnership, though there’s no proof that they ever went forward with it.

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  The MIT report also suggested that central to Epstein’s efforts at MIT was John Brockman, the prominent New York literary agent. He had been the one to make some of these connections with professors.