Gabriel Sherman

It's good to see you.

I mean, Wexner in the 1980s and 1990s was, you know, almost as rich as like Mark Zuckerberg is today.

The largest private yacht owned by an American.

It was like one of the first super yachts before like the Saudi princes started in the Russian oligarchs started building them.

I would liken him to Ray Kroc, who founded McDonald's, like the modern McDonald's, in that Wexner was really the first person to globalize retail and to see retail as entertainment, the way fast food became entertainment.

Now, looking at him as a human being, he's a very complicated person.

Wexner lived in fear of

you know, kind of being his own man and making his own life choices separate from business.

So I've been covering the Epstein story writ large since he was arrested in 2019.

And I kept asking myself the question, where did Epstein get his money?

When Epstein died, he had a $550-plus million estate.

But no one could explain where the money came from.

And so as I looked into that question, I kept circling back to the only named client he had, which was the billionaire Leslie Wexner.

And the more reporting I did, I realized that Wexner is the strongest link that we have to understanding the source of Epstein's wealth.

For 20 plus years, the only client that Epstein publicly talked about was Wexner.

And friends of Epstein's that I interviewed would say that they would ask him, you know, whose money do you manage?

Who are your other clients?

And he says, well, I can't get into it.

And, you know, Epstein was a master bullshit artist.

And, you know, it leads most people to believe that he didn't really have any other clients and that, you know, he latched on to Wexner in the mid to late 1980s.