The Nature of Secrets (My Experience Working For Les Wexner)
I met Leslie Wexner, CEO of the Limited Inc., for the first time in 1987 at a Christmas party he threw for his employees at their home office in Columbus, Ohio. I was sixteen at the time and my mom had been working for The Limited for a couple of years. She asked me to come with her and I agreed, I was a teenager and there would be free food after all.
I was raised in a lower middle class neighborhood in the inner city. I had never seen anything like The Limited's home office, it was gigantic and opulent. It looked like something straight out of Miami Vice. The design and decor were ultra modern, minimalistic.
Les was a stickler for details, the grounds were meticulously landscaped. He even bought black swans (which was an interesting but obtuse metaphor for what would come later) for the ponds on the property because they matched the building. In Columbus Les was both a celebrity and a business tycoon. Rumor had it his multi car garages all had giant turn tables in them because he didn’t like to back up his cars. He would pull in forward, flip a switch and the car would revolve 180 degrees.
"Man is not what he thinks he is, he is what he hides." –André Malraux
I was in the company cafeteria, on a balcony overlooking the crowd below and felt a presence behind me. Les was standing there with a huge bodyguard behind him. He introduced himself and we chatted for a short moment, just pleasantries, then he descended the staircase and started mingling with the crowd. I didn’t even realize he was the owner of the company until my mom told me later.
Les was also known locally for being a kind and generous man. Back then he had only just begun his philanthropic work that eventually transformed large areas of Columbus and especially New Albany, Ohio into what they are today. The Limited, Inc. was an amazing company to work for at that time. Business was booming in the eighties and early nineties. The company launched several other divisions -- Victoria’s Secret, Bath and Body works, Lane Bryant, just to name a few.
The Limited gifted company stock to their employees on work anniversaries and had an employee stock purchase plan that allowed you to buy stock with each paycheck. There were several warehouse workers there who had become millionaires from the company stock but continued to work anyway.
I applied for a job at The Limited and was hired in 1989, shortly after I graduated high school. The goal was to use the job to pay for college. I began as an order picker in the distribution center and worked my way through several other positions over the next six years. The Limited was a wonderful place to work at the time. Employees were given a turkey for Thanksgiving, hams and a Christmas bonus every year.
"Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants willing to be dethroned." –James Joyce, Ulysses
Company parties were catered by some of the best restaurants in Columbus. Les also joined us every quarter for, “quarterly briefings” which were basically a mixture of pep rallies for the employees and dog and pony shows for the shareholders, recapping the company’s performance and plans/goals for the next quarter.
One thing I remember about Les was his consistent behavior. He was always a kind, soft spoken, and highly driven individual. Although Les married in 1993 and started a family there was always a pretty persistent rumor amongst the employees that he was gay. Few people cared or even gave it much thought. It was clear that his business was his life and meant everything to him.
A few months ago I watched the Epstein documentary, Filthy Rich and was shocked to hear of Les’ potential involvement in Epstein’s web of pedophelia. I felt the same initial reaction as I did during the early days of the Bill Cosby and Michael Jackson allegations. I didn’t want to believe it.
According to wikipedia, Jefferey Epstein had become Les Wexner’s “financial manager” in 1987. This was right around the time I met him for the first time at that Christmas party. The thought of that made me shudder. I, by no means, knew Les well but did have enough interactions with him over the years to feel as though I had a good sense of who he was. It's astonishing to think about how close to the epicenter of this I was without even realizing it.
This world is either a disturbingly dark and sinister place under a very thin veneer that everyone naively accepts as "reality' or there’s more to this story. I, personally, believe that the pedophelia is only one particularly heinous part of Epstein’s larger game. I believe he was an absolute master of gaining the trust of billionaires and other very powerful people, digging up their secrets (whatever they might be) and holding those secrets against them for money and favors.
No matter what the nature of their relationship was, Epstein reportedly received (with or without Wexner’s knowledge) almost a half a billion dollars from L Brands, formerly The Limited Inc., between 1987 to 2007. According to the documentary, Wexner also gifted Epstein the multimillion dollar mansion in Manhattan that had become the epicenter of his operation.
Epstein strikes me as a particularly dangerous kind of sociopath who left a wake of destruction wherever he went. Because of his own personal wealth and influence that wake was enormous. He would stop at nothing to get what he wanted. Amongst the scores of serial pedophiles who associated with Epstein there are sure to be others who were keeping different kinds of secrets.
What were the nature of these secrets?
As so often is the case, the world may never know.
~Eric Vance Walton~
(Gif sourced from Giphy.com)
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