A Master's Puppet: Jeffrey Epstein's Money Man
4/16/202640 min
The unsettling story of Leslie Wexner—the Midwestern retail billionaire who built Victoria’s Secret, then gave Jeffrey Epstein extraordinary access to his money and credibility. But how much did he know?
Listen to Vanessa and Justine’s podcast Fallen Angel
Read Gabriel Sherman’s Vanity Fair article on Epstein and Wexner.
Chameleon is a production of Campside Media and Audiochuck.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
[crickets chirping] Campsite Media.
Speaker 10:03
Hello?
Speaker 00:05
What is this?
Gabriel Sherman· Soundbite0:06
So what do you want me to say?
Speaker 30:07
Yeah, what's going on here? Like, why- Oh, it's just a chameleon.
Josh Dean· Host0:11
Chameleon.
Speaker 10:12
Chameleon.
Speaker 00:12
Chameleon Weekly.
Gabriel Sherman· Soundbite0:12
Oh.
Josh Dean· Host0:13
[laughs] [pensive music] As chameleons go, it would be hard to think of anyone from recent times more deserving of the term, and frankly, more despicable, than Jeffrey Epstein. Who used his ability to change colors, to trade one skin for another, to metamorphose in a relatively short time from a high school math teacher into an exceedingly wealthy and influential sex trafficker, who preyed on young women even as powerful men around him looked the other way. Because that does seem to be what happened. Epstein was kind of a nobody, a math teacher at Manhattan's elite Dalton School, when he charmed the right parent as step one in what would become a decades-long con.
Vanessa Grigoriadis· Guest1:06
If we assume he was a kid from Coney Island, just a regular middle-class schmo.
Josh Dean· Host1:14
This is Vanessa Grigoriadis, a journalist and podcast host who specializes in the lives of the rich and powerful, and who has spent decades picking apart their lives.
Vanessa Grigoriadis· Guest1:24
Gets this job at this prestigious hoity-toity Gossip Girl-esque school,