Nearly five hours into a deposition before House Oversight Committee investigators, Les Wexner's attorney Michael Levy leaned in and whispered what he probably assumed no one else would hear.
"I will f–king kill you if you answer another question with more than five words, OK?"
The 88-year-old former Victoria's Secret owner had been answering questions about his decades-long relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. Levy, apparently unsatisfied with the length of those answers, delivered his advice with all the subtlety of a man who forgot microphones exist. The committee released the full video footage on Thursday.
Levy did not respond to The New York Post's request for comment. Probably wise.
The Post reported that the deposition covered the full scope of Wexner's entanglement with Epstein, who managed his wealth for decades before pleading guilty to soliciting a minor for prostitution in 2008. Wexner arrived with prepared remarks and a clear strategy: distance, denial, and the posture of a man who got conned.
"I completely and irrevocably cut ties with Epstein nearly 20 years ago when I learned that he was an abuser, a crook and a liar."
He described Epstein as a "world Olympic con artist" and accused him of having "stolen vast sums" of his fortune. How much, exactly, remains unspecified. Wexner was adamant on the central question: he did not "witness, condone or enable" any of Epstein's sex crimes.
On the matter of Epstein's Caribbean island, Wexner said he visited once with his wife and described it as "crummy" and "a pile of rocks." In a letter he wrote for a book compiled ahead of Epstein's 50th birthday, Wexner offered this explanation:
"He was a bachelor so I drew a pair of boobs."
He said he was "trying to be funny." The investigators, one imagines, were not laughing.
Wexner addressed two names that have orbited the Epstein investigation for years: Donald Trump and Prince Andrew.
On Trump, Wexner said he could not recall being with Epstein and Trump at the same time, though he acknowledged they may have "coincidentally" crossed paths at a Victoria's Secret fashion show. In Wexner's telling, Epstein "held [Trump] out as a friend." That framing is worth noting. Epstein collected names. He cultivated the appearance of closeness with powerful people. The distinction between someone a con artist claims as a friend and someone who is actually a friend matters, and Wexner's testimony underscores it.
On Prince Andrew, Wexner was blunt. He said they had only "one brief, like, two-sentence phone conversation" about buying and selling aircraft.
"I never met Prince Andrew … So I wasn't aware of anything."
The timing here is notable. On the same day the committee released Wexner's deposition footage, British authorities detained Prince Andrew for hours over allegations that he shared state secrets with Epstein. The Epstein web keeps tightening, even across the Atlantic.
Reps. Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, and Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, have claimed Wexner was one of six men "likely incriminated" by his Epstein ties. They pointed to Wexner's appearance in millions of investigative materials released by the DOJ in late January.
That bipartisan claim carries weight precisely because it is bipartisan. This is not a partisan fishing expedition. When a progressive Democrat and a libertarian-leaning Republican agree that the evidence points somewhere, it tends to mean the evidence actually points somewhere.
Federal prosecutors initially listed Wexner as a potential co-conspirator following Epstein's arrest in July 2019. But according to an email from a New York Field Office agent included in the DOJ's Epstein files, the FBI found "limited evidence regarding his involvement." Wexner's testimony appeared designed to reinforce that conclusion.
Whether it succeeded depends on what those millions of pages contain and how seriously Congress pursues the trail.
The Epstein case has been a slow-motion indictment of every institution that touched it. The original 2008 plea deal was a travesty. Epstein's death in a Manhattan jail cell while awaiting trial on child sex-trafficking charges robbed victims of their day in court and the public of answers. For years, the powerful names in Epstein's orbit remained shielded by legal process, institutional inertia, and a political establishment that seemed content to let the story die with him.
That era appears to be ending. The DOJ's massive document release, the congressional depositions, the detention of a disgraced royal on another continent: these are the gears of accountability finally grinding forward. The question is whether they grind far enough.
Wexner sat for five hours. He gave his answers. His lawyer threatened to kill him for talking too much. The cameras caught all of it.
Now it's up to Congress to decide whether the answers were enough, or whether the real questions haven't even been asked yet.
