Pod Insights Pablo Torre Finds Out He Funded Jeffrey Epstein. Why Is This Billionaire's Name All Over College Campuses? About this episode Victoria's Secret mogul turned mega-donor Leslie Wexner introduced Epstein to Harvard. Now, a growing protest movement to strip his name from university buildings is getting shut down. What did Epstein's money man know? When did he know it? And who really calls the shots in higher education? The Harvard Crimson's Dhruv Patel returns for Part 3 in our series on America's most prestigious school and most notorious predator, to examine Wexner and Epstein's "friendship," plus an exclusive interview and a new tranche of internal fundraising transactions that reveals $100 million in publicly unaccounted donations.
• Part 1: "The Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics" https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlmMmJkZWMzZDIxZWUyMjhjNmFiMjRh
• Part 2: How Harvard Whitewashed Jeffrey Epstein's Millions https://pod.link/1685093486/episode/NjlmNDAzYzg3MGU2M2NlYWEwMDIwYWJi
(Pablo Torre Finds Out is independently produced by Meadowlark Media and distributed by The Athletic. The views, research and reporting expressed in this episode are solely those of Pablo Torre Finds Out and The Harvard Crimson and do not reflect the work or editorial input of The Athletic or its journalists.)
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Pablo Torre? Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today, we're gonna find out what this sound is.
0:06 Speaker 01 I can't explain why I would say you're friends if we weren't friends.
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1:21 Pablo Torre? What do you tell your friends, your classmates, when you explain that you're back in New York City to do another Epstein episode with me?
1:28 Speaker 02 They say it's pretty normal now. Yeah, I think I always said the same thing in like November, they'd be like, "What the [bleep] are you doing?" Now, it's like, "It's just another Tuesday."
1:36 Pablo Torre? Yeah, another Tuesday during Drew Patel's summer vacation.
1:39 Speaker 02 Exactly.
1:40 Pablo Torre? I do want to establish, by the way, that there is... there's a lot of landmines here. It is sensitive, some of the information we're uncovering with the story of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvard University, but at the same time, there is some absurd entertainment in what we're about to discuss here, and I just need to remind people that this is part three. Part three of our ongoing series with my old student newspaper, The Crimson, where you happened to be the managing editor heading into your senior year.
2:09 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right.
2:11 Pablo Torre? Part one was a sports story in material ways, and our discovery in part one, for those who missed it, you missed out because it was a documented but confidential donation with an incredible name, Drew.
2:24 Speaker 02 Jeffrey E. Epstein Fund for Women's Athletics.
2:28 Pablo Torre? Which was a fund that was brokered in 2004, when I was still in college, by no less than then Harvard president and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, who was so personally friendly with Jeffrey Epstein that he spent part of his honeymoon on Epstein Island, as you had uncovered previously. Although Larry Summers kept Epstein's identity a secret from both the public and also the women's rugby players that this $25,000 fund was earmarked for, as those players had explained in interviews with us.
2:59 Speaker 03 Larry, there's a special circle of hell that's waiting for you. That's all I have to say about that. Like, you should have known better.
3:09 Pablo Torre? And I just want to recall the courage and the outrage of people who realize that, like you, in even more real and disturbing ways, their college experience was defined by the most notorious sex predator in modern American history.
3:27 Speaker 02 And there's this 20 years ago, suggesting that in the last two decades, maybe some things have not really changed.
3:33 Pablo Torre? And in fact, in 2020, when Harvard investigated itself about all of this, publishing their long-awaited self-report into its Epstein connections and the more than $9 million Epstein personally donated in total, what did our alma mater discover about the aforementioned Larry Summers?
3:50 Speaker 02 Nothing.
3:52 Pablo Torre? It was not a part of their investigation, it seemed. The former president of the school. In fact, Summers was not the only former president of Harvard that the university overlooked very conveniently. There was another very important person who apparently escaped scrutiny.
4:07 Speaker 02 Henry Rosowski, former acting president, a decade or so before Summers took his job.
4:12 Pablo Torre? The late Henry Rosowski, like Summers, was so close to Jeffrey Epstein, Drew, that they both very personally contributed to his 50th birthday book, which we'll also open in a bit here. But this brings us now to the new, old, bold-faced name that I've been waiting to discuss with you. Because like Larry Summers, like Henry Rosowski, this name was also not interrogated at all in Harvard's 2020 self-report, despite being the billionaire donor who introduced Jeffrey Epstein to Harvard in the first place. A man by the name of what?
4:46 Speaker 02 Leslie Wexner.
4:48 Pablo Torre? And where can you find the name Leslie Wexner on Harvard's campus?
4:53 Speaker 02 Everywhere. You go to the Kennedy School, the first thing you'll see is his name as soon as you walk in. You go inside. The place about what the cafeterias are, the classrooms are, the events are held, is called the Wexner Commons. And so his name is all around the Kennedy School of Government.
5:09 Pablo Torre? Yeah, starting in 2017, his name was put on that main artery that all the visitors got to go through, where all these classes are. And Leslie H. Wexner, for the record, is now 88 years old. The chairman of the Wexner Foundation, where from 92 to 2007, Jeffrey Epstein served as trustee. And in 1994, Wexner funded the $3.6 million construction of a Harvard-Hillel building named after the aforementioned?
5:35 Speaker 02 Henry Rosowski.
5:36 Pablo Torre? Rosowski Hall. This was a deal that Epstein personally facilitated. And then in the year 2000, Wexner and his wife Abigail became the founding benefactors of the Kennedy School's Center for?
5:48 Speaker 02 Public Leadership.
5:49 Pablo Torre? And by 2012, according to Harvard's official news outlet, The Harvard Gazette, Wexner had given, quote, "more than $42 million" to the Kennedy School, which is the last best estimate that the university has publicly released. And Leslie Wexner? In terms of how he made his billion-dollar empire.
6:07 Speaker 02 He was the founder of L Brands, which is the company that used to own and operate a bunch of retail giants. You know, you're talking Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works, Abercrombie and Fitch.
6:17 Pablo Torre? And what you should also know is that Leslie Wexner, the guy who used to run Victoria's Secret at all, is the same multi-billionaire who either transferred, provided in stocks, or directly gave an approximate total of $1 billion to Jeffrey Epstein. This, according to Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, at a press conference in February for Wexner's congressional deposition.
6:43 Speaker 02 At his estate in New Albany, Ohio.
6:46 Speaker 04 We're here because we want to talk to anyone that has information about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's crime, abuse, and trafficking of women and girls. There is no single person that was more involved in providing Jeffrey Epstein with the financial support to commit his crimes than Les Wexner. That is already, as we all know, in the public record. We've also directly heard from survivors about Mr. Wexner, about his involvement, and their concerns as to the enormous amount of money that was essentially transferred
7:26 Speaker 04 over and paid to by Mr. Epstein. And we should be very clear that there would be no Epstein Island, there'd be no Epstein plane, there'd be no money to traffic women and girls. Mr. Epstein would not be the wealthy man he was without the support of Les Wexner.
7:48 Pablo Torre? But my favorite moment from that same day, Drew, is a clip that both of us have been playing on loop a lot recently. Because if you can listen closely here, this is the voice, the soft voice of Les Wexner's lawyer during the deposition, trying to whisper something to his client.
8:08 Speaker 01 But then, all the things were inventoried. That wasn't work for me or Jeffrey. It was just regularly done.
8:18 Speaker 01 Answer the question. More than five words, okay?
8:24 Speaker 01 Answer the question, okay?
8:25 Pablo Torre? Can you spell out what was whispered there underneath the surface of that deposition?
8:30 Speaker 02 The lawyer with his smile and chuckle said, "I will [bleep] kill you if you answer another question with more than five words."
8:38 Pablo Torre? Yes. In fairness to Les Wexner, who first met Jeffrey Epstein in the 1980s, there is a lot more to say.
8:46 Speaker 02 Than five words?
8:47 Pablo Torre? Than what can be encapsulated in five words. The New York Times, for instance, reported the following.
8:53 Speaker 02 "Mr. Wexner employed Mr. Epstein as a personal advisor for years, handing him sweeping powers over his finances, philanthropy, and private life. Mr. Epstein was empowered to borrow money on behalf of Mr. Wexner and sign Mr. Wexner's tax returns, as well as hire people and make acquisitions. Over the years, Mr. Epstein obtained a mansion in Manhattan, a luxury estate in Ohio, and a private plane, possessions worth roughly $100 million today that had previously been owned by Mr. Wexner or his companies."
9:24 Pablo Torre? I mean, no less than Glenn Maxwell, Epstein's accomplice, allegedly, characterized the scope of Wexner's business relationship with Epstein in this way at her own deposition with the Department of Justice last summer.
9:38 Speaker 05 With Les, for instance, it was really all encompassing. It could go from the structure of the business, and I was in business meetings with them on the plane when they were there, so I could observe and I could hear some of this. And whilst I'm not necessarily terribly business sophisticated and sophisticated enough to be able to at least have some knowledge of what was happening. All right, so then he restructured the business. He restructured his entire personal finances and would also...
10:18 Speaker 05 Handle all of the investment strategy. I don't know.
10:21 Pablo Torre? So we should be clear as well. When presented with the idea that Les Wexner is friends with Jeffrey Epstein, was friends with him, what does Les Wexner say?
10:31 Speaker 02 Unequivocal, we were never friends.
10:34 Pablo Torre? And he says that he'd never participated in or knew about any wrongdoing. He says he severed ties with Epstein in 2007.
10:41 Speaker 02 That's right.
10:42 Pablo Torre? When he discovered Epstein had stolen money from him, which we'll get back to. But just given all the above, the thing that brings us here today is the fact that back at Harvard, there has been a months-long movement now to do what to that building at the Harvard Kennedy School with Les Wexner's name on it.
11:00 Speaker 02 So some professors and students have really been pushing the university to take Wexner's name off of Harvard's buildings. They've held protests, they've held circles where they share stories of walking into the building and feeling intimidated. The first thing you see when you walk in in the morning with your coffee is Wexner's name. So a lot of students have been petitioning the university to take his name off. Professors have backed them, staff have backed them. And so there really is a growing movement.
11:25 Pablo Torre? And across higher education, those students, those professors are not alone, by the way.
11:30 Speaker 06 Where's Wexner? Where are you? Show up. It's time. It's time to answer questions.
11:37 Speaker 07 This group, made up of former OSU athletes, believes the names of Leslie Wexner and Woody Hayes cannot coexist on the same building, and they want Wexner's name gone.
11:48 Pablo Torre? Ohio State University to take us back to sports. This is where the historically prescient Wexner had donated millions upon millions of dollars as well. At OSU, there have been protests and literally hundreds of requests to remove Wexner's name from the Les Wexner Football Complex, which is a building that happens to house one of the very best college football teams in the country. But late last month, just a couple of weeks ago, back on campus, you happened to get Harvard's official verdict, which I think may wind up being a guide for what Ohio State, which is still sorting through those roughly 500 denaming requests, ultimately decides to do.
12:32 Speaker 02 So the dean of the Kennedy School sends an email to everyone affiliated with the Kennedy School and essentially says that, "Hey, we acknowledge your efforts to take his name off the building, but we cannot take his name off." And what they cite is "legal obligations."
12:47 Pablo Torre? And what I love is that you pesky kids at the Crimson, upon receiving this news, you guys decide to do something that I have learned can be very scary to other 20-somethings in your generation, which is to say that you picked up the phone, Rufe, and who did you decide to cold call?
13:08 Speaker 02 The man himself, Les Wexner.
13:10 Pablo Torre? And you offered him the opportunity to give a young journalist some answers longer than perhaps five words.
13:17 Speaker 02 Hey, if an old guy wants to vent, I'm not going to say no. I had time.
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16:10 Pablo Torre? So before we get to Harvard's decision to keep Les Wexner's name on Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the legal obligations they cited to you, I just need to establish what Les Wexner had to do with the origin story of Jeffrey Epstein at Harvard in the first place, and how it centered around the aforementioned former dean and acting president of the university, Henry Rizovsky.
16:32 Pablo Torre? What I found back in the Crimson archives was a May 2003 article about Jeffrey Epstein, long before Epstein became this notorious figure. And what Rosowski himself wrote to the Crimson in a 2003 email about how he first met Jeffrey Epstein was this.
16:50 Speaker 02 We were introduced by a mutual friend, Mr. Leslie Wexner.
16:56 Pablo Torre? Now, according to Rosowski, Wexner connected him to Epstein around 91. And according to internal files that we have exclusively obtained in the course of our investigation, we also know that that was the year before Epstein appeared in Harvard's fundraising database for the very first time. Meaning this whole Epstein-Harvard relationship started with what is described in the contact report here as a five-day Harvard tour in October of 92 that included meeting one H. Rosowski. And by 2003, as we fast forward through time here, I should note, we had mentioned Epstein's 50th birthday book before, The Thing Organized by Ghislaine Maxwell. And what Rosowski submitted, Drew, was a piece of artwork that was placed on the page
17:39 Pablo Torre? after, an illustration of a woman's torso submitted by one Donald J. Trump, where the inscription to Epstein, as you may have read in other reporting, was, quote, "May every day be another wonderful secret," end quote. But Drew, this is where I compromise your future by having you once again remind us of what Henry Rosowski wrote.
18:00 Speaker 02 He wrote, "Dear Jeffrey, for the man who has almost everything but never enough of these, sent with best wishes for your 50th birthday."
18:09 Pablo Torre? And the next page is the illustration.
18:15 Speaker 02 It's captioned, "Tip print 2002. It's a woman's breast with a nipple shown, specially commissioned by Henry Rosowski in honor of Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday," it says.
18:26 Pablo Torre? Again, it says, actually, a technically barf day, but we don't have the time to interrogate why that is. But yes, these are two breasts, illustrated, multicolor, commissioned by the former acting president of Harvard University. Now, it isn't just Henry Rosowski and Donald J. Trump who appear in the 50th birthday book under a category labeled "friends." What the House Oversight Committee also noticed was that Les Wexner was also listed as a friend and that he had contributed some original artwork of his own.
19:00 Speaker 06 Mr. Wexner, would you please read the main body of the birthday note for the record, please?
19:08 Speaker 01 I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is. Happy birthday, your friend Leslie.
19:15 Speaker 06 And what was your understanding of what Mr. Epstein would want?
19:20 Speaker 01 He was a bachelor, so I drew a pair of boobs.
19:25 Speaker 06 You've-
19:30 Speaker 01 As a kind of a joke and offhandedly, I'd say.
19:34 Speaker 06 Understand.
19:35 Speaker 01 I hope you do.
19:37 Speaker 06 You've, uh, you've said a few times throughout this deposition today that you did not consider Mr. Epstein a friend of yours. However, you signed this letter, and I quote, "Your friend Leslie." Why would you sign "Your friend Leslie" to someone you did not consider to be a friend of yours?
19:56 Speaker 01 I don't know. I normally say Les, not Leslie, either when I write notes and, you know, I guess I could, I can't explain why I would say "Your friend" because we weren't friends.
20:14 Pablo Torre? Although, I should say, in that same deposition elsewhere, when mentioning Henry Rosowski in passing, Les Wexner sort of just casually quotes the label that he otherwise, apparently, rejects.
20:28 Speaker 01 I had to go to visit David Gergen at Harvard because I was very interested in the Center of Public Leadership. And David would say Jeffrey was up here, your friend Jeffrey was up here, and he was visiting Henry Rosowski, who was the dean of Harvard College, or he was visiting Larry Summers.
20:48 Pablo Torre? If I had a birthday and three of my friends, whether or not they agreed decades later to ever be my friends, submitted the same thematic illustration about what they think I would be super into, I think that might be striking to review in tandem. I mean, it's just three illustrations of kind of the same thing. And I point this out again because on the very next page of the birthday book, Druv, after Wexner's note and the illustration that he himself described to Congress, you do see what?
21:22 Speaker 02 Is that Wexner in the middle?
21:23 Pablo Torre? Yes.
21:25 Speaker 02 You see a picture of Epstein and Wexner holding a wine glass and a third person whose face is covered.
21:31 Pablo Torre? Yeah, Les Wexner's face, if you were to describe it objectively.
21:35 Speaker 02 He's jolly. You see a big smile. He's happy.
21:40 Pablo Torre? Mouth open, couple buttons on his sort of pinkish button-down, undone, and arm around Jeffrey Epstein and mystery person in the center of the frame. This takes us to an insurance mogul named Robert Meister. We're now in the decade that I was born, the 1980s. And I just need you to read this passage, Druv. It's from a Vanity Fair article from five years ago, where they interviewed Robert Meister himself.
22:08 Speaker 02 Vanity Fair says, "Soon after introducing Wexner and Epstein, Meister started hearing disturbing stories about Epstein's sexual proclivities. 'Think of whatever the worst thing anyone could do is, and Epstein did them all,' Meister said. The breaking point came when Epstein showed up unannounced at Meister's Park Avenue apartment with five models for Meister's sexual entertainment. 'Epstein thought he was bringing me a gift,' Meister recalled. 'I told him, "Get the [bleep] out and I never want to see you again.'"
22:33 Pablo Torre? Then there is another quote from Robert Meister after that, about what he then told Les Wexner and his wife, Abigail, allegedly.
22:43 Speaker 02 My wife and I told him and Abigail hundreds of times to stay away from Epstein.
22:47 Pablo Torre? Now, when asked about Meister's warning at his deposition in New Albany, Ohio, Wexner denied that Meister had ever warned him about this. And this now raises, I think, the logical question of how Les Wexner, again, the former head of Victoria's Secret, is claiming ignorance of Epstein's behavior around young women.
23:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:06 Pablo Torre? Drew, when you talked to Wexner on the phone, what did you learn about how he describes his perspective and his explanation for why he was not aware of Epstein's crimes?
23:18 Speaker 02 So Wexner's thesis in the entire call was he was doing his own business ventures. Epstein was in another world handling his finances. The two were never really in the same boat. They were doing their own independent activities. And so Wexner thinks he was isolated from all of Epstein's deeds during that decade.
23:34 Pablo Torre? Yeah, what the article that you wrote for The Crimson says, the article being based on your phone call with Wexner, is that Wexner, quote, "maintained he knew nothing of Epstein's criminal activity" and said he was a, quote, "victim of Epstein's deception," end quote. And just that term "victim," which he wants to hang this lantern on, the victim that he's referring to there is financial crime. If nothing else, it is the matter of him allegedly being robbed by Epstein to the tune of how much money before ties were apparently cut in 2007.
24:09 Speaker 02 He, I mean, publicly, he said around $100 million, but on our phone call, he says it could be as much as $200 million.
24:15 Pablo Torre? And just that number, which is stunning, did he ever report that to the FBI, to law enforcement?
24:22 Speaker 02 He did not, but Epstein ultimately ended up paying $100 million to Wexner, and that was revealed in February through the Epstein files.
24:30 Pablo Torre? Now, it is curious, I will continue to note here, that this was never reported as a crime as they worked out their own sort of like repayment of some kind that you alluded to, the $100 million. But this is where we also can point out that thanks to the Epstein files, where Wexner's name does appear thousands of times overall, we do know that Wexner also did not cut off all contact with Epstein in 2007 upon discovering that theft because on June 26, 2008, Wexner sent an email to Epstein as news was leaking about Epstein pleading guilty in the state of Florida to solicitation of an underage prostitute, which kicked off the whole public coverage of Epstein as child predator. And Wexner wrote this, Drew.
25:15 Speaker 02 He says, "Abigail told me the result. All I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number one rule. Always be careful."
25:25 Pablo Torre? To which Jeffrey Epstein replies,
25:27 Speaker 02 "No excuse."
25:29 Pablo Torre? And so, here, we can also observe that in yet another tranche of Epstein files. As they've been coming out all year, Les Wexner was listed in a previously redacted internal FBI document, this is from August 2019, as a co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein, as was Glenn Maxwell. Although, in fairness, as of August of 2019, according to a related FBI email, there was, quote, "limited evidence about both Maxwell and Wexner's involvement." But the co-conspirator label proved as something you also asked Les Wexner about, to which he said what?
26:06 Speaker 02 He said that that label is wrong. It's good for the media. I think he said something like, "It's good copy."
26:11 Pablo Torre? What we're arriving at here is the question of what he knew and when he knew it, which is the ancient journalistic mission here, to find that out. And so, this is where I should also reference a 2020 investigation by The New York Times into the larger, quote, "entrenched culture of misogyny, bullying, and harassment at Victoria's Secret and L Brands," this again, the parent company that Les Wexner founded. All of this taking place under Les Wexner, according to The New York Times. And what the Times reports is that in the mid-'90s, Epstein had been personally lying to Victoria's Secret models and using his proximity to Les Wexner to tell these young women that he was actually this very powerful modeling scout who could help them.
26:55 Pablo Torre? He was inviting these women for private auditions. And these private auditions, quote, "at least twice ended with Mr. Epstein assaulting them, according to the women at court filings," end quote. And so this is where, as we, again, navigate the landmines and the absurdity in tandem, we need to point out that there is yet another court filing in a separate case filed by an Epstein survivor named Maria Farmer, who alleged that she was sexually assaulted by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell while staying as an artist in residence on Wexner's estate in New Albany, Ohio, where that same congressional deposition you heard sound from earlier was taking place. This time, though, during the summer of 1996. And at one point, Maria Farmer alleged, quote, "Wexner's security staff refused to let me
27:40 Pablo Torre? leave the property," end quote, and that she also reported what had happened to her to the FBI. Now, no charges were filed against Les Wexner, who said in his deposition,
27:53 Speaker 01 "I didn't know her. I didn't know she was here, so I didn't know [BLEEP] about her. Pardon me."
28:00 Pablo Torre? And then there is just one more case that the House Oversight Committee brings to Wexner's attention in February that we also need to acknowledge here, because this one involves another Epstein victim, one of his most outspoken victims, a woman by the name of Virginia Jeffrey, who had died by suicide last spring.
28:21 Speaker 06 We previously mentioned accusations from Maria Farmer, and there were a subsequent set of allegations from another individual. Are you aware of who Virginia Jeffrey is?
28:39 Speaker 01 No. Familiar name, but I've heard it, but I can't, don't connect it to anything.
28:46 Speaker 06 Did you ever have any sexual contact of any kind with Ms. Jeffrey?
28:50 Speaker 01 No. I've never had contact since I don't even know.
28:58 Speaker 06 Ms. Jeffrey has accused you of performing sexual acts with her multiple times. You dispute these allegations?
29:08 Speaker 01 She must be confused. It never happened.
29:15 Pablo Torre? And so, all of this, in totality, is, it's the backdrop and the context for the movement back on campus, true, at Harvard, to remove the name of Leslie H. Wexner from the Kennedy School of Government. And I just want to point out something that should not be underrated in all of this, and this is true of a student journalist, but also, in this case, especially, a student at the Kennedy School who dares to say things that challenge what seems like what the university's preference about this whole Les Wexner story might be.
29:53 Speaker 02 That's exactly right. So Lauren E. Barnes is one of the students that's been rallying alongside some other faculty and some other students. And Lauren says, "We are the School of Government, and this is the largest governmental human trafficking scandal of modern times. It's really difficult for me to be seeing the news, seeing this talked about elsewhere, but then not talked about in our classes."
30:13 Pablo Torre? And to spell it out for people who aren't as well-versed in the Epstein files as the two of us are, for better and for worse, the world leaders that the Kennedy School of Government may have some academic interest in, they do include the former President of the United States, Bill Clinton, who has now been deposed himself by Congress because of his friendship with Epstein. There's also, by the way, Ehud Barak, who's the former Prime Minister of Israel, who now says that he too regrets his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, which, in his case, continued past Epstein's arrest for solicitation of an underage prostitute in 2008. And neither Clinton nor Barak, to name just two of the former heads of state involved in this story, have been implicated in Epstein's criminal activity. But the central question, which I think is worth highlighting and engaging
30:58 Pablo Torre? with here, that the students and professors raised in their movement to dename, which we should examine journalistically, is the idea of who was funding Jeffrey Epstein?
31:09 Pablo Torre? And this brings us to a particular passage that I found interesting from the denaming proposal itself, Drew.
31:16 Speaker 02 It reads, "The critical role that Mr. Wexner's money played in financing Epstein's crimes is of particular concern to the campus community. The ties between HKS and Wexner are primarily financial, which may unintentionally signal that wealth and influence may supersede values."
31:32 Pablo Torre? And so this is where I had to go on a hunt for yet more of Harvard's fundraising records related to Leslie H. Wexner, because we need to understand how much money, if we're talking about money and values and tension with each other, I wanted to figure out how much money was actually donated by Les Wexner and the Wexner Foundation, where, according to the foundation's publicly accessible Form 990s, which we polled, these are 2001 to 2006, Jeffrey Epstein happens to have been the sole trustee listed. And his longtime personal attorney, Darren Indike, this is Epstein's longtime personal attorney, somewhat stunningly, served as the Wexner Foundation's secretary, signing off on key documents during this same period, which you can review.
32:16 Pablo Torre? But when we got Harvard's fundraising records, the ones we've been searching for for a while now, the person that I wanted to call up was someone else, someone who had agreed to talk to us previously in Parts 1 and 2 of our investigation, who I found to be an essential piece of perspective on the backstage dealings of the most prestigious and richest university on planet Earth. So how should we be describing you?
32:45 Speaker 06 I am a longtime employee of the university, working primarily with donor relations, information, and fundraising data.
32:55 Pablo Torre? What level of access did you have to Harvard's internal fundraising database?
33:02 Speaker 06 Total knowledge from various angles in terms of relationship building and having a total view of a donor, and that means their professional life, their relationships, their interests in the university and outside of the university. The data that they maintain is very comprehensive.
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34:16 Pablo Torre? Subscribe now for a special offer at nytimes.com/subscribe.
34:28 Pablo Torre? So the first thing that I needed to ask our university employee source was whether they would help us verify the documents we got. And also then help us narrate what this latest tranche of internal Harvard fundraising records I'd obtained said. And so my first basic question was, how many total transactions are recorded in the database for Wexner?
34:54 Speaker 01 303 transactions recorded.
34:57 Speaker 02 So what you see here in the transactions that we obtained are rows and rows and it's descriptive. You know, you've got the date that the donation was received. You know, what fund is it going to? How much was the donation in question? There's a lot of detail here.
35:09 Pablo Torre? Yeah, hundreds of line items here in the financial history between Wexner and Harvard. You can see it on our YouTube channel visually there. And I just want to remind everybody that when it came to a dollar amount, the last best number the public has ever received when it comes to Wexner and the Wexner Foundation's donations to Harvard was what? Truth.
35:30 Speaker 02 About 42 million.
35:31 Pablo Torre? Yeah, the previously announced more than $42 million to the Kennedy School is what the Gazette had reported in 2012.
35:40 Pablo Torre? But that number, now it turns out, is a little different from what we found out here.
35:46 Speaker 01 His total university giving is $142,426,95.
35:52 Pablo Torre? Which is, I'm doing the math here, hold on, 142 divided by 42. Yeah, it's more than three times as much as previously reported.
36:01 Speaker 01 Yeah, they're missing about 100 mil.
36:03 Pablo Torre? But, you know, what's 100 mil between friends?
36:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, pocket change.
36:09 Speaker 02 Look, it was certainly surprising, right? 142 million puts Wexner among the university's most affluent donors, right? He's among probably the top 10 donors to the university. And so I think it clarifies a lot about the relationship between the university and this mega billionaire.
36:24 Pablo Torre? But I want to clarify that as for where Les Wexner's $142,426,95 went, it wasn't just going to the Center for Public Leadership and the Leslie H. Wexner Building, Prue. It actually started with what?
36:41 Speaker 02 Started with the Wexner Israel Fellowship Program in 1989. So every year, the Wexner Israel Fellowship supported 10 students who were enrolled in the Kennedy School's one-year Master in Public Administration program. And according to the foundation's website, the point of the fellowship was to, quote, "provide Israel's next generation of public leaders with advanced leadership and public management training." And more than 280 Israeli public officials have participated in the fellowship since its inception.
37:08 Pablo Torre? Right, so it is a pipeline to the government of the state of Israel. And when we asked Harvard University why this $142,426,95 number was never disclosed until now by us, and why Les Wexner also was not a focus of Harvard's 2020 self-report and to its ties to Jeffrey Epstein, even though Epstein, again, was sole trustee of the Wexner Foundation for years, a Harvard spokesperson said the following, quote:
37:42 Pablo Torre? The university's review of the recently released Epstein documents is ongoing. The university will continue to evaluate, based on its ongoing review, what additional actions may be warranted, considering information that has come to light in these documents. And then there's more that we will put on the YouTube channel, but the statement then concludes, Jeffrey Epstein's crimes were abhorrent and reprehensible, and the university is committed to reviewing the documents expeditiously, to determine what actions may be warranted, in line with Harvard's policies and standards of conduct. End quote.
38:14 Speaker 02 I think for the university, the entire Epstein saga has been a very deliberate response. And I think the point that they've really consistently make is that, look, our report came out in 2020. These files only came out in 2025 or 2026. We didn't know this information. And so their response has always been, hey, we're learning this information just as you are. Give us time. That's when their gut response to this story, other stories involving other people, like Summers or other Harvard professors, it's always a matter of time for the university.
38:44 Pablo Torre? Yeah, they're trying to establish how fair it is for them to be reactive as the federal government releases these tranches. And what we've done in this now three-part series, as always, is point to the information internal to Harvard University that they've had the entire time, at the very least, since 1989.
39:02 Speaker 02 That's right. That's right.
39:04 Pablo Torre? And so that's our process of fact-checking. And I should point out, too, that if you're, look, if you're going to decide to not take this donor's name off a building, a building like the Leslie H. Wexner Building, one that conspicuous amid what had been described in the denaming proposal as this massive human trafficking slash sex abuse governmental scandal, I do think, I don't know, a bit more transparency, a bit more explanation would be warranted here. But when you go to the university to get the reason, the rationale, for why they didn't rename the building, you referenced before the phrase "legal obligations."
39:46 Pablo Torre? Which kind of reminds me of when the NBA Commissioner David Stern vetoed the Chris Paul trade by simply saying basketball reasons. In this case, legal obligations as explained by Harvard was what?
39:59 Speaker 02 We consistently went to Harvard, asked them to tell us what legal obligations were. They wouldn't give any more information. But when the dean, Jeremy Weinstein, new dean, joined about two years ago, he told everyone that the Office of the President told him and the people that submitted the request for the students, people like Lauren, that, quote, "The university's legal obligations prohibit such a denaming. No more information."
40:21 Pablo Torre? Right. Their proposal, apparently, there could have been a two-part process. You start with the Office of the President, and then you take it to the Kennedy School, where the aforementioned dean, Jeremy Weinstein, could have offered his own verdict. But it seems that this process got shot down at step one.
40:41 Speaker 02 Exactly.
40:42 Pablo Torre? Because legal obligations. And the professors and the students, for their part in this, as they are learning about the legal obligations, they said what?
40:53 Speaker 02 We went to them expecting them to have more information, but they were in the same boat. They didn't have much color as well. So Lauren, one of the students who backed the proposal, told us that she received just a four-sentence email from the Office of the President about an hour before Weinstein informed everyone of the decision. And for Lauren, it was the first communication the group got since March. And she told us that she had a lot of questions that she was still left with.
41:15 Pablo Torre? Right. And the professor, Matthew Abom, who helped lead that same effort, his quote was?
41:21 Speaker 06 The contact person to the president's office didn't explain the reasoning, which is something that they need to challenge if they can't legally, Dean Andy Golden.
41:34 Pablo Torre? And so this is where I just want to pause for a second to just acknowledge, I think one of the most remarkable things about your hour with Les Wexner drove.
41:46 Pablo Torre? When you went to him after hearing or not hearing, rather, about the legal obligations that you were seeking clarity on, Wexner was pretty blunt about what seems like the most obvious question that this whole process, this whole multi-month process would raise. Again, this is from the article you published in The Crimson after your conversation with Wexner. He says first about the deposition, we've been playing these clips from, quote, "I wasn't worried about it because I didn't know anything. I wasn't guilty, so I was very happy to give the statement and the deposition to end it all. The only thing that I was guilty of is being stupid," end quote.
42:25 Pablo Torre? And then he goes on to say, very simply, that when it comes to the legal obligations Harvard is referring to, he has, quote, "no idea," end quote. I just find the lack of not even a good answer, but an answer.
42:45 Speaker 02 The man himself doesn't know.
42:46 Pablo Torre? It's stunning. And we heard instead from the Wexner family spokesperson, who ultimately did not offer a comment on the record either. Our other source, our internal fundraising source at Harvard, decided to weigh in when they thought about what all of this meant.
43:04 Speaker 01 If I were a student at Harvard or a student at one of these places, I think this would be a very crystallizing experience about like who the true customer of these places is. It is not the students paying tuition. It might feel like you're a customer because you're paying this money and ostensibly, you know, through organizing or whatever with the university, you can change things and stuff, but really who they're concerned with in terms of who calls the shots are the Les Wexners.
43:35 Speaker 02 And speaking of the Les Wexners calling the shot, I think Les Wexner did exactly that around October 2023. And so there's some backstory here between Les Wexner, the billionaire, and Harvard. Essentially, after October 7th, Les Wexner was appalled at how slow-walked Harvard's response to October 7th was, the statement that Claudine Gay, then president of Harvard, issued.
43:56 Pablo Torre? Right, this is in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks
43:58 Speaker 02 Exactly.
43:59 Pablo Torre? in Israel.
44:00 Speaker 02 Exactly. So Les Wexner was deeply unhappy about how Harvard responded to that. He was unhappy about the kinds of statements that top administrators were issuing.
44:08 Pablo Torre? And so "Tiptoeing and equivocating" were the words that
44:12 Speaker 02 Exactly.
44:12 Pablo Torre? Wexner had used in public there.
44:14 Speaker 02 And so October 7th happens about, you know, one to two weeks later, October 16th, the Wexner Foundation ends the Wexner Israel Fellowship, which again had been going on for about 34 years. And so Les Wexner says at Harvard, "You're not issuing an unequivocal response to the terrorist attacks. We're going to go ahead and just end any partnership that I have with you."
44:34 Pablo Torre? Right. I mean, this was a huge controversy on campus. These campus groups again held Israel responsible for the ongoing violence, which itself is an entire other saga that is a multi-part series to dive into. But what the upshot is here, to the point of the internal source that we just heard from, is it was Les Wexner who cut off Harvard, not the other way around. And this happened in October of 2023. And this is the part that brings us to the last new thing that I had found in our search for the records that our alma mater does not want to tell the public about. Because this thing, which is saved in Les Wexner's file internally
45:17 Pablo Torre? in the fundraising database, is a physical object. It is a yellow note, a piece of stationery dated October 23rd, 2023, written in the aftermath of those October 7th attacks. But the reason I want to read it here is because as we continue to contemplate Harvard's response to Jeffrey Epstein and its responses to these scandals that it may face in the future, this note, which reads Leslie H. Wexner across the top, with his phone number and email address, both listed on the right-hand side, "is addressed by hand to Harvard, President and Board of Overseers."
45:55 Pablo Torre? Could you now please read, Dhruv Patel, how Leslie H. Wexner begins the note by hand?
46:03 Speaker 02 He says, "The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crises, maintain their neutrality." And that's from Dante Allegri.
46:12 Pablo Torre? And then there was just one more sentence. Quote, "Please do not respond. The bell cannot be unrung. Just think and learn."
46:25 Pablo Torre? Les Wexner.
46:36 Pablo Torre? Pablo Torre Finds Out is produced by Walter Avaroma, Maxwell Carney, Ryan Cortez, Juan Galindo, Patrick Kim, Neely Lohman, Rob McCray, Matt Sullivan, Claire Taylor, and Chris Tumanello. Studio engineering by RG Systems. Sound design by Andrew Bersick. Digital strategy by Bailey Carlin and Andrew Northern. Theme song, as always, by John Bravo.
46:57 Pablo Torre? And we'll talk to you next time.
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