What do the disclosure documents tell us about the relationship between Epstein and Wexner?
As many stories have pointed out since Epstein’s arrest on July 6, Wexner was tightly connected to Epstein. Indeed, in the two major profiles of Epstein published in 2002 and 2003 — in New York magazine and Vanity Fair — Wexner is quoted effusively praising Epstein.
(Late Monday, Wexner sent an email to L Brands’s employees saying he had been unaware of Epstein’s “illegal activities” and “regretted that my path ever crossed his.”)
In a story published Saturday, Bloomberg News documented how, after Wexner discovered him in the late 1980s, Epstein became a kind of aide de camp to the billionaire. He was a board member of several of Wexner’s foundations and the president of N.A. Property Inc., a company Wexner started to create the town of New Albany, Ohio, in suburban Columbus, where Wexner lives.
But the L Brands financial disclosure documents from the 1990s and 2000s suggest that their relationship was even closer than that. In Schedule 13D documents filed with the SEC from that era, Epstein is listed as a trustee — sometimes with Wexner, sometimes by himself — on a handful of Wexner trusts, including several for Wexner’s children. Some of the transactions in the 13Ds raise the possibility that Wexner may have paid Epstein by letting him sell L Brands stock out of those trusts.
For instance, 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.
It is possible that the sale was simply a diversification move — though, as I noted earlier, 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. (An L Brands spokesperson would not respond to any questions about Epstein’s involvement in Wexner’s trusts.)
It is impossible to know for sure whether the proceeds from those stock sales wound up in Epstein’s pocket, because we don’t have access to his tax returns. But it is a very real possibility.
What can we learn about Epstein from his foundation disclosures?
For more than a decade, Epstein had a foundation called the C.O.U.Q. Foundation Inc. At its peak it had more than $20 million in assets. There’s no particular theme to Epstein’s donations: In 2002, for instance, according to the C.O.U.Q. 990, he gave $400,000 to the Institute for Advanced Study, $50,000 to the University of Maryland, $50,000 to the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund, and $25,000 to the Edge Foundation, an offbeat nonprofit where he was friends with its creator John Brockman.