Are alleged sex claims enough for Ohio State to sever ties with Wexner and his millions?

Jim DeBrosse is a veteran Ohio journalist and a graduate of the Ohio University Scripps School of Journalism.

Q: Was Les Wexner one of the powerful business executives that you were trafficked to?

A: Yes…

Q. How many times did you have sex with Les Wexner?

A. Multiple.

— From Virginia Giuffre’s Jan. 16, 2016 court deposition

With just two words under oath, Virginia Giuffre’s testimony has shed new and disturbing light on the years of rumors swirling around billionaire retail magnate and Columbus-area resident Les Wexner and his decades-long relationship with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex predator and trafficker of underage teens like Giuffre.

As part of a settled 2013 civil lawsuit, Giuffre’s deposition was among the hundreds of pages of court documents ordered unsealed by a federal judge on Jan. 9.

Wexner, who built a single Columbus store into a mall-based shopping empire, became Epstein’s biggest financial client in 1989, handing over the financial management of his $1.4 billion business and his charitable foundation to a young man virtually unknown on Wall Street.

By also granting him power of attorney, Epstein was authorized to cash Wexner’s checks and give away his money.

That was a mystery, and still is, unless you happen to believe Giuffre and a handful of other victims who have testified that Epstein hid surveillance cameras in nearly every room of his luxury properties to blackmail the many powerful men drawn into his honeytrap of underage sex.

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Now the question is whether Giuffre’s sworn testimony is enough to remove Wexner from Ohio State University’s Board of Trustees and his name from two of OSU’s most prestigious facilities: the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.

Wexner has said he had no idea what vile deeds Epstein was committing until Epstein’s 2006 arrest in Florida. Epstein pleaded guilty in June of 2008 of procuring and soliciting a child for prostitution. Epstein eventually paid a $5.5 million settlement to three of the more than two dozen teens who sued him. In February 2008, Wexner said he was replacing Epstein with a new investment manager.

Eleven years later, facing new and more serious charges of sex trafficking, Epstein was found hanged to death in his jail cell after an inexplicable two-hour period when the prison’s video cameras happened to be broken and both jailers keeping a suicide watch over his cell were sound asleep.

Epstein’s long-time companion and chief procurer of underage teens, Ghislaine Maxwell, was convicted on similar charges in 2022 and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison.

Wexner has denied Giuffre’s accusation and has not been charged with any crime. An attorney who has represented a number of Epstein victims has said he had doubts about Giuffre's claims on Wexner, but Giuffre's own lawyers have insisted she is telling the truth.

Often without court testimony to back them up, accusations of sexual harassment and inappropriate touching resulted in career-ending resignations for hundreds of powerful men during the #MeToo era, including Sen. Al Franken, Public Radio star Garrison Keillor, Fox News chief Roger Ailes, Amazon Studios head Roy Price and Ohio State Senator Cliff Hite.

But Wexner’s reputation at OSU — at least publicly among university officials — has survived intact.

Nor has the Epstein scandal kept Wexner from leveraging his donor influence to bully at least two university presidents from office.

Along with hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, Wexner was one of the big money contributors to Harvard who forced President Claudine Gay to step down on charges of plagiarism and the far flimsier accusation that she had ignored acts of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus.

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The year before, Wexner and his wife Abigail led the drive to oust OSU President Kristina M. Johnson from office for reasons that are known only to the Wexners and their allies.

And, oh, by the way, he’s also the university’s largest single donor, with $200 million in contributions.

As reported by The Lantern, the public reaction to the Epstein scandal so far from OSU’s new president Ted Carter is that Les and Abigail Wexner have been "incredibly generous" to the university and "we should be thankful to them and their family for that kind of generosity."

"The second is that I know what has been written up in the media no differently than anybody else, and I don't know anything more. But for those that are worried about this, the word I would use is patience. Let the facts play out," Carter told the OSU student-run newspaper as part of a Q and A.

From archives: Largest gift in history | Wexner, Limited foundation to give OSU $100 million

The reluctance of OSU to speak out against a major benefactor may have much to do with the financing of public universities in Ohio, which ranks 40th among states for support per college student.

According to OSU’s 2022 budget figures, more of the university’s $9.1 billion in revenue came from endowment distributions and donor gifts ($557 million) than was dribbled out from state tax coffers ($493 million). And unlike state funds that are tethered to bothersome things like instruction and university operations, those private donations can be spent on $140-million student recreation centers and $194-million stadium renovations, or to pay coaching staff higher salaries than the university president.

OSU can stand behind the generosity of donors like Wexner but, in doing so, campus leaders risk damaging the university’s good name – a name thought so prestigious that they trademarked the word “the” as the school’s self-designated honorific.

Perhaps only criminal charges will change official minds at OSU. But in the court of public opinion, those two claims from a victim under oath – “yes” and “multiple” times to being trafficked to Wexner as a young teen – will likely outweigh hundreds of millions of dollars in donations.

Jim DeBrosse is a veteran Ohio journalist and a graduate of the Ohio University Scripps School of Journalism.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: How much has Wexner donated to OSU? Enough to ignore sex allegations