Victoria’s Secret Has More Than a Jeffrey Epstein Problem

Описание: Time isn’t being kind to Victoria’s Secret. The lingerie retailer has a problem with the past and a problem with the future—and that leaves the present in a muddle of controversy.

Jeffrey Epstein is supposed to be history at Victoria’s Secret—and at its parent company, L Brands Inc., for that matter—but he’s that skeleton that keeps rattling around the closet to remind everyone that he once was an all-too-lively part of the business. Epstein had a two-decade-long reign as close confidant, financial manager, and right hand to the corporation’s chief executive officer, Leslie Wexner. He even had the CEO’s power of attorney at one time.

Although he wasn’t an employee at Victoria’s Secret, Epstein also influenced the way the lingerie company operated, associating with the division’s chief marketing officer, Ed Razek. In 2005, for example, Razek was a guest at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, welcomed by young women who said they were working as models for Epstein. Razek told fellow guest William Mook, head of Mok Industries LLC in Columbus, Ohio, that Victoria’s Secret used Epstein models and that his girls were in “the major league,” according to Mook.

Epstein’s relationship with Wexner and L Brands officially ended in 2007, a year and a half after the financier was charged with several counts of sexual misconduct in Florida. He pleaded guilty to one charge and spent just 13 months in jail with work release privileges. That penalty was widely derided as exceedingly lenient and, after sex trafficking charges against Epstein were resurrected in July, fresh outrage over the 2007 plea deal led to the resignation of U.S. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who’d been attorney general in Miami in charge of the prosecution. Epstein is now sitting in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial—and perhaps fresh revelations of salacious secrets. Last week he was found injured in his cell and put on suicide watch.

L Brands’ efforts to distance itself from Epstein may not have been all that clean a break. Epstein at one point had a $1 million investment in MC2 Model Management, according to a sworn deposition by a former company bookkeeper. MC2 is owned by Jean-Luc Brunel, a Frenchman who is alleged in a civil lawsuit to have brought girls as young as age 12 to the U.S. for sexual purposes and provided them to his friends including Epstein. Brunel even visited Epstein when he was first imprisoned in 2008. Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2-represented models after Wexner severed ties with Epstein. At least three MC2 models walked in Victoria’s Secret’s 2015 fashion show, and the agency’s models were at auditions in 2017 and 2018. They’ve also posed for its catalogs and website. In a 2014 letter to Brunel, his business partner, MC2 President Jeff Fuller, cited worries by Saks, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and other clients about Brunel’s friendship with Epstein. There was no mention of concern on the part of Victoria’s Secret.

MC2 didn’t respond to a request for comment. A representative of L Brands declined to comment beyond statements already issued. L Brands has hired an external law firm to probe any ties between the company and Epstein.

Epstein is the ghost of Victoria’s Secret’s past. But the company has more to worry about than history. Its business model—perhaps the very idea it was founded on—is increasingly at odds with society’s changing definition of beauty and the #MeToo movement, both of which are sparking a very different vision of how to portray women and their bodies. This isn’t just an exercise in political correctness. Since 2015, Wexner’s lingerie empire has lost $20 billion in market value, raising the question of whether a male-dominated company that has long presented a male point of view of women as lingerie-clad “angels” may be out of step with today’s consumer.

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