Visited Jeffery Epstein’s private island but was not aware of his sex trafficking ops: Billionaire Leslie Wexner tells US House Panel

Wexner said he visited the island once with his wife and children ‘for a few hours’ while the family was in the area on their boat

• Leslie Wexner told Congress he visited Epstein's island once.
• Wexner denied knowledge or involvement in Epstein's sex crimes.
• Wexner cut ties with Epstein after discovering 2007 theft.

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Billionaire retail tycoon Leslie Wexner told a US House panel Wednesday that he visited disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s private Caribbean island but said he wasn’t aware of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation at the time.

Wexner said he visited the island once with his wife and children “for a few hours” while the family was in the area on their boat, according to an opening statement Wexner made in a deposition to congressional investigators that was provided to Bloomberg News by his attorney.

The House Oversight Committee has been investigating what role Epstein’s broad network of connections may have played in facilitating his enterprise or delaying criminal prosecution.

Law enforcement officials working on Epstein’s 2019 sex-trafficking prosecution identified Wexner as one of 10 “co-conspirators,” according to an email released by the Department of Justice in December. Wexner wasn’t charged in the case.

Wexner said in his statement that he “never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity” and “never saw or heard about Epstein being in the company of a minor girl.” He said he was neither “a participant nor co-conspirator” in any of Epstein’s crimes.

Wexner, 88, was the former longtime chief executive officer of Columbus, Ohio-based L Brands Inc., which over the years owned the Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch stores.

Wexner’s current net worth is estimated at more than $10 billion, ranking him among the 400 richest people world, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Wexner was interviewed in his home, an arrangement coordinated between congressional committee staff and Wexner’s lawyers, people familiar with the matter said.

The committee voted to subpoena Wexner last month. At the time, a representative said in a statement he would “cooperate fully with any governmental inquiry into Epstein, just as he did regarding the US attorney’s investigation into Epstein in which Mr. Wexner was told that he was neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect.”

Epstein was a long-time money manager for Wexner. An assistant US Attorney in Miami personally contacted Wexner as part of a money laundering probe into Epstein in 2007, Bloomberg reported. By 2019, after federal prosecutors in New York charged Epstein with sex trafficking, Wexner sent a letter to his charitable foundation stating that he’d largely cut ties with Epstein around 2007 and “discovered that he had misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.”

Millions of pages of files from Epstein-related probes by federal authorities have been released in recent weeks, and lawmakers have been able to view files without redactions.

Still, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland said last week after viewing unredacted files there were “mysterious or baffling or inscrutable reasons” for redacting some names in the Epstein files, including President Donald Trump and Wexner.

The massive trove has outlined years of correspondence and visual evidence connecting the convicted sex offender to some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the world. The release has brought a wave of resignations and investigations affecting powerful individuals.

Epstein was facing federal charges of trafficking underage girls when he died in a New York jail in 2019. Authorities have ruled his death a suicide.