"Les Wexner"

“Any suggestion to the contrary is absolutely and entirely false.”

            -Wexner testimony to the House Committee on Oversight and government Reform, dated 2/18/2026

I.

At Beth Tikvah Columbus in 1956, as the first paved asphalt roads started to be oiled down in the suburban neighborhoods, there was a BRIGHT boy who lived in the Levittown house on Elm Street.  It was a 12-year-old Leslie Wexner, on his scooter on his way to the synagogue.  The Torah study the other week had intrigued him, and he had many questions.  Rabbi Albert Levin was on standby, always happy to entertain a conversation with the precocious young boy in his office.

Leslie inquired about many things to Rabbi Albert, all with regards to the search for truth.  Albert saw the delectable passion in him.  He tried his best to answer the curious boy – appropriate questions about kosher, about the meaning of certain holidays, and about textual interpretation.  But then Leslie asked about God, why God would scatter his people every which way across the known world.  To that, his rabbi could only reply, “God is a mysterious imprint of mysterious intentions.”

“But I will be blessed,” Leslie expressed.  “Like He promises to Abraham, that my descendants should number the stars.”

“Yes, you will be blessed,” the rabbi confirmed.

The thought made Leslie excited.  He scootered home, down the leafy lawn corridors of his suburban neighborhood, where women in aprons sat outside on their porches, taking smoke breaks. 

“I will be blessed!” he shouted at the busline of football boys, who glared at him with an unnerving silence, but a silence he was used to experiencing, from the moment his mother took him to the mall and he started wearing his yamaka.  But he was never embarrassed about the fact that his clothing was different from the self-styled, plaid and Tucson-red suit jacket of his private school peers.  His aunt Ida simply told him: “you are special.  You are different.  And that’s a good thing.” 

And so it was for young, gamely Leslie.

At Ohio State University where he enrolled shortly after high school, Leslie sold T-shirts during his free block.  At firs the was greeted with mocking jaunts: “what does a Jew have to do with cool?” a blond girl spat in sing-along rhythmics.  But Leslie was undaunted.  He felt the air of self-importance around him harden him.  He wanted to be rich and accomplish his manifest destiny, to start and produce and lead and gain respect.  It was at Ohio State where Leslie first developed his modern identity.

Changing his name to Les, the young marketeer perused the furnishings of the bustling Kingsdale Shopping Center in Upper Arlington when he saw an open cove at for rent.  Immediaely he saw a vision.  The cove contained his own store with his own signature, attracting all kinds of pleasurable and magnificent young people to try on his shirts and love his product.  He saw himself as a young king.

He rang up his aunt Ida and asked for $5,000 to build the business.

After one year, his parents rang him up telling him they were dropping everything to help him run the store.

His vision grew and grew.  Within three years Les was not running a store; he was running an empire.  He founded The Limited from this store, then made other stores.  His parents quit their jobs because they saw his profit.  He was humming as the American culture he grew up with was loosening its puerile norms and chastities.  He was becoming Les Wexner, maven merchandising machine.

II.

“Les is an insecure guy with a big ego. … He had a lot of money but craved respect,”

- Robert H. Morosky, The Wall Street Journal, 2002.

Limited brands expanded to twenty stores and Les moved to Manhattan.  There, overlooking the skyline which looked like a reversed candelabra, Les had another realization.

“You are blessed,” he mouthed from words of his rabbi.  Blessed meant that God was with him wherever he went.  Blessed meant that he could do no wrong.  Like Moses killed a man, but he was blessed.  Les could cause the culture to bend to his vision.  If he only knew.  If he only had the right idea.

Deeply, he prayed.  Les was a devotee to the ancient prayers.  To God on high, he asked for a vision.  Then, in a dream, it came.  In the dream, a fantastic blond girl like the ones he had seen in Columbus, Ohio had visited his store.  (Also, in the dream, he was still just a youthful storekeeper with his classic newsboy hat.)  She was a 10, with fine wavy hair and a sultry beautiful smile – all for him, he realized.  Sauntering into the store, she asked him – over the counter, with her bare shoulder nicking him – where she could find clothes a little more… available.  Immediately, in the dream, he understood what she meant.  Her virginal presence wanted to be clothed but not all-the-way.  She felt so restricted in movement, so puerile.  She longed to be stretched, to be pushed, to be punished for it.  In his dreamlike state he was awake enough to realize that she wasn’t real, that she was, indeed a figment of his imagination, but he was still awestruck.  He felt sheer pleasure at simply staring… just staring… at the American beauty with her grappleable waistline, with her shirt just barely reaching her pants… no, what if they didn’t.  Even this device was incredibly offensive in the current culture, but Les pursued it in his spellbound head.  In his dream, he shrunk her shirt even further, like it was overly washed.  He made it a size too small.  Now he was staring at skin and a bare belly button.  Now he was in on the action.  She was accessible to him.  He was his own private king. 

He was going to make kings from the robes of the women.  Like David had.  Solomon had indulged in the glory of all that the Earth could give.  Why abandon his harvest?

So now with The Limited, Les compounded the message received almost by divine visitation.  He saw the business proposition alive in his head: congruent with the changing culture, which demanded more freedom, he correctly fused the zeitgeist with his own vision of elaborate, fragrant freedom, the revelation of more beauty, more availability, for him… no, for all!  He clenched his lip and grinned.  The Other had sprung out of its cage. 

They would buy it all! 

Hence spawned his namesake for a new title of brands: Bath and Body Works, meant to evoke, as Les saw it, a new kind of intimacy between brand and consumer – the kind of soap you’d lather onto yourself to make you feel sexy; the kind of rose-colored lotion you’d use to appraise your own desirability.

To that end, Les bought and sold models.  His ad girls became skimpier and raunchier; all the while, he promoted women who reported to him, who sacrificed finding husbands and eating fast food to pledge loyalty to him; in turn, he pushed them out as the female face of his companies.  His entire personality was ointment and anointment; he was the visionary, hard-charging, Columbus Jew who made America skimpy again.  Where other brands didn’t go, he went – hard.  He lived in a country estate with female secretaries and this constant headache that could be scratched only by pushing the line in fashion yet again.

III.

“I am entirely innocent.” 

- Les Wexner deposition to Congress, 2026

The shpilkes came on nights when he didn’t smoke, have sex, or drink.  They were little muscle palpitations, buildups of tension around his shoulder that slowly wormed their ways, tortuously, into his back, into his brain.  What was God telling him?  He wailed out loud to the convertee girlfriends about the night pains that were harming him.  He blamed the devil for the shpilkes, appealing to the girl’s religion. 

“You believe in the devil, do you?”

“Yes, the devil is real,” the girlfriend said.

“It is because you have a Gentile name that God is punishing me for sleeping with you,” Les said, staring at the ceiling fan.

“What do you want me to do?” the girl said emptily.

“Change your name to Cohen,” Les said.  “You must have a Jewish name for God to remove the demons.”

So the girl did.  Les broke with up her the next year, and took on a financial adviser named Jeffrey Epstein, who was withdrawn at first but then finally agreed to take on Les’s entire estate for a hefty fee.  He was calm, mathematical, prodigious, and Jewish.  Les could trust him.

One person whom he eventually severed ties with was James Morosky, his former Vice Chariman who sold his house to join his company.  He felt no remorse about the Catholic.  The Catholic had made his money off him, and now wanted to run a church radio show.  Let him go.  Les was on to counting the stars.

But then Morosky started to blab.  He told the Wall Street Journal about Leslie’s “misogyny,” the way he treated women, the way he made his clothing appeal to the lowest common denominator.  Most of all, he hated Jeffrey.  The journalists descended upon his Ohio mansion like wolves, peppering him and advancing narratives.  The truth was, he liked it.  He was going to remain controversial during his lifetime, but he would be praised by God.  He never lost his faith.  He never lost the way he sought ever since he was a young boy.

Let the wolves come, he thought to himself as Victoria’s Secret grew to a thousand times its size.  They come to lick at his feet.

Congress came, and demanded he acquiesce to a subpoena. He was honored by it. Finally! The attention he craved. He was once again the Ohio State schoolboy, selling a vision to an unfriendly audience.

In front of the actresses who were America's government officials, he giddily recited the story that he told hundreds of times, to anyone who asked, whether the fawning Forbes magazine or the prying, preening New York mag.

And they asked him about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Les smiled. He loved this moral panic, this show that, truly, at the age of 88, he had finally conquered it all. The world behaved according to his empire.

He was defiant as he publicly denounced the man who managed his estate for 25 years.

As he was ushered home, and the cameras flashed, Les felt that God was pleased with him. God was, after all, blessing him like he blessed Abraham. With a legacy.

Back at home, Les took a pipe to his mouth and relaxed on his couch. His wife was in the office, taking a call with the children. What a world that now must respond the world he created.

He remembered his last call with Jeffrey Epstein, the only one who understood him, before he went to jail in 2009 for his first round of underage assault. 

“I’m going somewhere for just a short time,” Jeff said.

“See you on the other side,” Les coughed back.

“Hey,” Jeff said, “enjoy your package.”