There are secrets and there is Victoria’s Secret.

The Head of Victoria’s Secret Says Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Are Like Roman Emperors

BY Katie Reilly

November 2, 2016 at 11:20 AM EDT

NEW YORK, NY – JUNE 07: Les Wexner speaks onstage at the 2016 Fragrance Foundation Awards presented by Hearst Magazines – Show on June 7, 2016 in New York City.

The CEO of L Brands, which owns Victoria’s Secret, compared Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to two of Rome’s most notorious emperors, faulting their divisive campaign for distracting shoppers.

“We have Nero and Caligula arguing about the future of Rome, and like fools we’re listening to it,” Ohio billionaire Les Wexner said Tuesday during the company’s investor day.

Wexner, in remarks reported by Bloomberg, said the presidential election had distracted consumers.

“We’ve got this peculiar election,” said Wexner, who has donated to Republican candidates in the past. “On the one hand, you can choose somebody who’s absolutely nuts or somebody who’s probably very selfish and dishonest.”

He didn’t clarify which candidate had earned a comparison to which emperor. Caligula was murdered by his advisers after a short, tumultuous reign as emperor. Nero, his nephew, was a tyrant known for debauchery who fled the city during a revolt against him.

https://fortune.com/2016/11/02/les-wexner-donald-trump-hillary-clinton-roman-emperors/

Jeffrey Epstein held Power of Attorney for Lex Wexner. How he managed to end up doing that after his brief and unsuccessful career in teaching, can be learned if you check out facts at Snopes and other sites:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/bill-barr-jeffrey-epstein-book/

One important paragraph:

Epstein was fired at the end of the 1975-76 school year. Peter Branch, interim headmaster after Barr’s departure, told The Miami Herald that Epstein “had not adequately grown as a new teacher to the standard of the school.”

But more on Les Wexner:

July/August 2021 Issue

The Mogul and the Monster: Inside Jeffrey Epstein’s Decades-Long Relationship With His Biggest Client

Of the many mysteries that still surround the life and crimes of the notorious financier, the source of his wealth, and thus his power, might be the greatest. His long-standing business ties with his most prominent client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner, hold the key.

Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair

https://archive.vanityfair.com/article/2021/7/the-mogul-and-the-monster

Les Wexner knew Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton very well, so he was in a strong position to make comments about them. But what about the qualities in this Ohio based billionaire, Les Wexner? Answers are easily found on the Internet, if you can be bothered to look. He obviously has been of interest to investigative journalists during his long life. So I just picked out a few quotes and links.

So starting with how revered Mr Wexner was:

Jew of the Week: Les Wexner

Les Wexner

Leslie H. Wexner (b. 1937) was born in Ohio to Russian-Jewish immigrants. He dropped out of law school to help his parents, who opened a small clothing shop after struggling for many years in low-level jobs in the garment industry. At 26, he loaned $5000 and opened his own sportswear store for young women, called ‘The Limited’. The store was a hit, pulling in $160,000 in sales in its first year. Just 6 years later, the company went public. Wexner has been its CEO since then, making him the all time longest-serving CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Over that time, he has taken his company to new heights, starting a number of new businesses, and acquiring others, including Victoria’s Secret, La Senza, Pink, Bath & Body Works, and Abercrombie & Fitch. He now oversees 3000 locations around the world, and his net worth is estimated at around $6 billion. A sizable portion of this wealth goes to charitable causes. Wexner has donated millions to the United Way, Hillel, Birthright, and Ohio State University. He has given over $160 million to the Columbus Foundation, and pledged $100 million for medical and cancer research. His own Wexner Foundation provides funding for Jewish leadership programs, master’s degrees in rabbinics and Jewish studies, Jewish day schools in the US and universities in Israel, as well as sponsoring Israelis studying at Harvard. For his extensive philanthropic work and business acumen, Wexner has won numerous awards and honourary degrees.

https://www.jewoftheweek.net/?s=Les+wexner

From the above 2021 article by Gabriel Sherman we can read how  Wexner first employed Harold Levin as his money manager in 1982. Levin was a happy man to gain such employment, but was eventually replaced by Jeffrey Epstein.

Wexner entrusted Levin with increasingly ambitious projects. Starting in the mid-1980s, Levin purchased thousands of acres of farmland in New Albany (population 414) on the outskirts of Columbus, where Wexner planned to build his very own town modeled on an 18th-century Georgian village. “Les sent me to Richmond, Virginia, to look at architecture he wanted to copy,” Levin said.

On one of Levin’s trips to New York in 1989, Wexner asked him to meet a brilliant young financier who wanted to pitch an investment opportunity.

Levin had never heard of the man, Jeffrey Epstein, which was odd. After working for Wexner for seven years, Levin knew virtually every player on Wall Street (a few months earlier, Levin says, he met with arbitrageur Ivan Boesky). Levin’s skepticism was confirmed as soon as he arrived at Epstein’s Madison Avenue office. There were no visible signs of a trading operation; just Epstein sitting behind a desk that didn’t even have a computer. “Epstein was trying to explain a currency trade he wanted to do. I have an MBA from Ohio State, and I didn’t understand a word the man said,” Levin recalled. Levin went back to Columbus and reported that Epstein was a fraud. “I told Les, ‘Stay away from him,’ ” Levin remembered. Wexner agreed not to do the trade.

But despite warnings, such was the Epstein charm that Wexner dismissed Levin and made Epstein not only his financial adviser, but eventually gave him Power of Attorney.

Sherman goes on:

Wexner paid Epstein’s predecessor about $600,000 a year in today’s dollars. Epstein, a former high school math teacher from Coney Island, Brooklyn, was worth a reported $559 million. His estate included a 51,000-square-foot Manhattan town house (bought from Wexner); a private jet (formerly owned by The Limited) and a helicopter; a Caribbean island; a Paris apartment; a Palm Beach mansion; and a 10,000-acre New Mexico ranch. (Epstein’s brother’s real estate company also had majority ownership of a Manhattan condo building on East 66th Street where Epstein allegedly housed girls. The building was formerly owned by Wexner.) Prosecutors say that Epstein built his vast sex-trafficking ring throughout the ’90s and early aughts. In other words, Epstein became Epstein during his long association with Wexner.

And after Epstein’s arrest, Wexner stated:

Wexner said during a speech in September 2019. In a letter to his charitable foundation around this time, Wexner claimed Epstein had “misappropriated vast sums of money from me and my family.” Epstein had reportedly transferred back nearly $47 million to a Wexner-controlled charity fund in 2008.

But Wexner’s belated attempts to explain himself only raised more questions. Why, for instance, did Wexner not report Epstein’s alleged $47 million theft to the FBI? Or how could Wexner claim to be blindsided by Epstein’s duplicitousness? “I told Les, ‘I wouldn’t trust Epstein to cross the street—why are you trusting him with your money?’ ” recalled Jerry Merritt, a former Ohio state highway patrolman who served as The Limited’s security chief for more than 25 years.

In reporting this article, I spoke to more than 30 people who had firsthand encounters with Epstein or Wexner. (Wexner, who announced he was stepping down from the board of his company in March, declined numerous interview requests.) The story that emerged is a deeply strange one. Sources say Epstein occupied different roles in Wexner’s life depending on the audience. “Jeffrey compartmentalized. He told you what you wanted to hear,” Epstein’s former lawyer Alan Dershowitz told me. Epstein sometimes portrayed himself as a surrogate son to a lonely billionaire. He told some people he was Wexner’s fixer. Dershowitz said that when he became Epstein’s criminal lawyer in 2007, Epstein boasted that Wexner would not testify against him. Whatever the nature of their relationship, Epstein’s long-standing connection to one of America’s richest men inarguably aided his public profile, adding to his air of legitimacy and thus his power.

Further on Sherman relates he talked to Robert Meister, who had introduced Epstein to Wexner:

Wexner met Epstein sometime around 1986. They were introduced by Wexner’s close friend the insurance mogul Robert Meister, whose firm handled insurance for The Limited. I spoke with Meister in April, and he opened up for the first time about the origins of Wexner and Epstein’s relationship. It was history that Meister, 79, found difficult to revisit. “I walked away from Epstein a long time ago, and I’ve been trying to erase him from my mind ever since,” he said. Epstein struck up a conversation with Meister on a commercial flight to Palm Beach. Meister remembered being impressed with the young banker. In reality, Epstein lived in a one-bedroom apartment and ran a fledgling investment firm. (Epstein had been forced to leave Bear Stearns in 1981. He told Securities and Exchange Commission investigators he had been penalized after letting a friend borrow money to buy stock, that there were irregularities with his expense account, and that there were rumors at the firm about his relationship with a secretary.) “He was a great bullshit artist,” Meister said.