Les Wexner, the 88-year-old billionaire who built a retail empire that included Victoria's Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Bath & Body Works, sat for a closed-door deposition with the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday. He told investigators he was "naïve, foolish, and gullible" to trust Jeffrey Epstein, and he denied any knowledge of or participation in Epstein's crimes.
Fox News reported that Wexner is the fourth person to appear before the committee in its investigation into how the federal government handled the Epstein case. He is also one of the most consequential. A 2019 FBI document named him as one of Epstein's co-conspirators, though he has never been criminally accused or charged in connection with Epstein's crimes.
Committee staff and lawmakers traveled to Ohio, Wexner's home state, to take his testimony. His spokesperson had declined to say in advance whether he would invoke his Fifth Amendment right. But Wexner did deliver an opening statement, and it painted a portrait that will be familiar to anyone who has followed this saga: a powerful man insisting he was the mark, not the partner.
Wexner's statement leaned heavily on the idea that Epstein operated a long and deliberate confidence scheme. He described being introduced to Epstein in the 1980s by a fellow executive, then watching Epstein play hard to get before gradually embedding himself in Wexner's financial life.
"At first, Epstein was unwilling to take me on as a client. In fact, for the first few years I was acquainted with him, Epstein offered me advice here and there while explaining that giving individual financial advice was not his focus and refusing to accept compensation. He said he was assisting me as a favor. Little did I realize that, from the very start, Epstein was conniving to gain my trust."
Two people at Bear Stearns endorsed Epstein as a financial advisor, Wexner said. Elie de Rothschild "highly recommended" him. Wexner eventually began paying Epstein, then signed over power of attorney to him. He also sold Epstein his Manhattan townhouse, the same property where federal authorities later accused Epstein of abusing young women and girls.
That sequence deserves to sit with readers for a moment. Power of attorney. A Manhattan townhouse. Decades of access to one of the largest personal fortunes in American retail. And the explanation is that Epstein was simply that charming.
Wexner described Epstein's method of building credibility through association:
"He was clever, diabolical, and a master manipulator. He was meticulous in revealing to me only glimpses into the life in which he was a sophisticated financial guru who consulted with heads of state, high-ranking politicians, royalty, university presidents, professors, CEOs, musicians, and other luminaries."
According to Wexner, Epstein orchestrated "what seemed to be random chance encounters" with prominent individuals who would vouch for him, using those connections to expand his network and "apparent credibility, even farther."
Wexner told investigators he severed ties with Epstein nearly twenty years ago. In a letter to the Wexner Foundation dated August 7, 2019, he described the unraveling. As allegations against Epstein emerged in Florida, Epstein "vehemently denied them." But by early fall 2007, it was agreed that Epstein should step back from managing Wexner's finances.
That is when Wexner says the financial betrayal came into focus:
"In that process, we discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family."
No specific figure was provided. Wexner said only that his family "was able to recover some of the funds." He described the discovery as a "tremendous shock," though he acknowledged it "clearly pales in comparison to the unthinkable allegations against him now."
This framing is worth noting. Wexner positions himself as a double victim: defrauded financially and deceived about Epstein's predatory behavior. He said Epstein "fully hid" his crimes, and that he never saw Epstein in the company of a minor.
The House Oversight Committee's investigation is not primarily about whether Wexner committed crimes. It is about how the federal government failed, repeatedly and at every level, to hold Epstein accountable when it had the chance.
The 2008 non-prosecution agreement signed off by then-U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta in Florida remains the central scandal. Epstein, armed with high-powered attorneys and connections that stretched into the highest corridors of power, received a deal that let him plead to state charges while shielding him and his co-conspirators from federal prosecution. That agreement did not happen in a vacuum. It happened because Epstein had spent decades building exactly the kind of institutional insulation Wexner now describes.
The committee has already deposed:
Maxwell's appearance was notably unproductive. Her deposition lasted less than an hour. She invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions unless she was granted clemency by President Trump.
Wexner's willingness to actually speak, even through the carefully lawyered filter of a prepared statement, makes his deposition more substantively useful than Maxwell's performance. Whether his answers went beyond the opening statement remains to be seen. Closed-door depositions have a way of producing revelations on their own timeline.
There is a recurring script in the Epstein saga. A powerful person surfaces. They express shock, regret, and distance. They describe Epstein as a singular predator who fooled everyone. They insist they saw nothing. And the public is asked to accept that a man who openly trafficked girls for decades managed to hide it from every billionaire, politician, and socialite who dined at his table.
Wexner told investigators:
"I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein's illegal activities. To my enormous embarrassment and regret, I, like many others, was duped by a world-class con man. I cannot undo that part of my personal history even as I regret ever having met him."
The phrase "like many others" is doing significant work in that sentence. It distributes blame across a crowd so large and so unnamed that accountability dissolves into collective misfortune. Everyone was fooled, so no one is responsible.
Maybe Wexner is telling the truth. Maybe he handed over power of attorney, a Manhattan residence, and decades of financial access to a man whose crimes he genuinely never glimpsed. It is possible. But the American public has earned the right to be skeptical, and the House Oversight Committee has earned the right to keep asking.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019. His victims never got a trial. The co-conspirators named in FBI documents have largely escaped scrutiny. What the committee is doing now, deposing the people who enabled Epstein's rise, whether through complicity or negligence, is the closest thing to accountability this case has produced in years.
The victims are still waiting. The least powerful people in this story always are.