Which Fashion People Are in the Epstein Files?

On Wednesday, Democrats of the House Oversight Committee traveled to Ohio to question former Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner about his relationship with his former financial adviser. Despite being Epstein’s first prominent client, Wexner had previously avoided answering any questions about him. But in the wake of newly released documents from the Justice Department’s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, pressure is building on the many powerful friends and associates of the late sex offender.

Based on the release of more than 3 million new documents in January, Wexner was far from the only influential fashion figure in Epstein’s orbit. While Epstein was allegedly trafficking underage women and trying to rehab his image after his 2009 jail stint for soliciting sex with minors, his emails seem to reveal he was having dinner with Azzedine Alaïa, going to Vera Wang runway shows, meeting with Naomi Campbell, and touring an Hermès atelier with its CEO. Here are the biggest fashion names that appear in the new cache of documents.

Campbell has been linked to Epstein for years. Back when Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most outspoken victims, first went public with her story in 2011, she claimed Campbell was one of the powerful and famous people she met through Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Photographs later emerged of a then-17-year-old Giuffre with Campbell at the model’s 31st birthday on a yacht in Saint-Tropez in May 2001. In 2019, Campbell said that Flavio Briatore, her boyfriend at the time, had invited Epstein to the party. Depositions from other victims, however, allege that Epstein frequently name-dropped Campbell in order to meet and impress aspiring models.

The new emails appear to show he wasn’t exaggerating. In an April 2005 email, Campbell asked to speak to Epstein about a swimsuit line “for a meeting with VS to see, I have pics and some of the suits with me.” Their contact continued after Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor in 2008. Throughout the 2010s, they seem to have exchanged a slew of emails arranging calls with each other. “Naomi Campbell was having a facial and said she will call back,” read one email from Epstein’s assistant Lesley Groff in 2010. In another, from 2015, Groff wrote, “Please call Naomi right away. She says she really needs to speak with you.”

In September 2010, emails seemed to show Epstein planning a meeting with Campbell, stylist Karl Templer, and former Warnaco CEO Linda Wachner. A month later, Epstein was invited to a party in Paris celebrating “25 years of Miss Campbell’s career with Dolce and Gabbana.” He RSVP’d yes with two guests.

In January 2016, Campbell seemed frustrated that she couldn’t borrow Epstein’s plane. “Naomi has called back twice now saying she doesn’t have any back up plan as she really thought from you this would work. Says she has booked the hotel and car and driver…She is certainly fretting on this and hopes you will call her,” wrote Groff.

Campbell has long maintained that she was not aware of Epstein’s criminal behavior, and she reiterated that statement this week. “Prior to Epstein’s 2019 arrest in New York, my client knew nothing about his appalling criminal conduct,” said Campbell’s lawyer to the New York Times. He said she did not know he was a registered sex offender and cut contact with him after his 2019 arrest (two months before he died).

Campbell’s name also appears on a newly released list of people who were given Epstein’s mailing address while he was in prison in Florida in 2008. Her lawyer said Campbell “has no idea who created this list or why her name appears on this document. She never asked anyone for Epstein’s address to communicate with him in jail in Florida.”

Like Campbell, Wang’s connection to Epstein is not a new revelation. In 2023, The Wall Street Journal reported that the designer appeared in his emails and schedule between 2013 and 2017 and that she was another one of the fashion VIPs Epstein cited to convince young women of his industry sway. One friend who seemed to be making plans to visit Epstein with “2 cute friends” in 2013 emailed him asking to “Pls mention Vera Wang showroom” during their visit.

Wang told WSJ then that she regretted having a relationship with Epstein. “I never knew he was using my name in any capacity, and it horrifies and repulses me to now hear that he did so,” she said. She also appeared in Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, which was made public last year. “Think back on all we’ve been through growing up is impossible to do,” she wrote. Her tribute letter was filed in the “Girl Friends” section.

In this latest batch of emails, Wang and Epstein — aided by their respective assistants — seem to have left messages to call each other back frequently in the decade after his 2008 conviction. Emails from his assistant show that Epstein went to Wang’s fashion show at Lincoln Center in 2010. In 2013, when he took a woman named Sarah to a try on wedding dresses at her bridal store on the Upper East Side, Epstein seems to have tried and failed to get Wang herself to show up for the appointment. “Unfortunately, Vera is not available to meet up at the dress store today. I did request please be sure to let Vera know you have been asking and hoped to see her,” Groff wrote him. Later that year, he recommended a young woman “from the Agnelli family” — the dynasty behind Fiat and other luxury-car and sports brands — as a Vera Wang intern and helped get her a summer position in Wang’s design department.

In January 2025, Wang sold the intellectual property of her brand to a management group, WHP Global. She remains the chief creative officer.

For years, Epstein’s only publicly known client was Leslie Wexner, the self-made billionaire and retail tycoon who turned Victoria’s Secret into a global phenomenon. He launched the Limited in his 20s and later created Express, Bath & Body Works, and Limited Too. He also once owned Abercrombie & Fitch and Lane Bryant.

Wexner met Epstein in the mid-1980s and granted him power of attorney in 1991, giving him unusually expansive oversight over his business dealings, investments, and philanthropic work. Maxwell described Wexner as Epstein’s closest friend in the 1990s in a 2025 deposition. Epstein even had a home on Wexner’s multi-acre property in New Albany, the luxury town he developed outside Columbus, Ohio. In Epstein’s 50th-birthday book, Wexner appeared to draw him a picture of women’s breasts with the message: “Dear Jeffrey. I wanted to get you what you want, so here it is.”

By the time their relationship ended in 2007, Epstein had set himself up as an exceedingly wealthy and well-respected financial adviser with mansions in Palm Beach and the Upper East Side and a private plane. Wexner has avoided publicly addressing why he put so much trust in Epstein — and what he got out of their relationship — but has maintained that he never knew about Epstein’s criminal activity with young women, and that he and Epstein stopped working together in 2007, at which point Wexner found out that Epstein stole money from him.

The new release of documents does seem to show their direct contact ended around 2007. (With one exception. Wexner sent Epstein an email in 2008, a few days before he pleaded guilty to soliciting sex from a minor, that mentioned Wexner’s wife: “Abigail told me the result…all I can say is I feel sorry. You violated your own number 1 rule… Always be careful.”) Still, the emails also included more details about how close Epstein and Wexner once were. In 2006, Wexner quotes one of his children calling Epstein “Uncle Jeffrey,” and Epstein responds, “i miss spending time with you and your family [sic].”

After 2007, Epstein still seemed fixated on the relationship, writing in an undated letter to Wexner that “I have never once, not once, done anything, but protect your interests” and “You and I had ‘gang stuff’ for over 15 years.” (A representative for Wexner said he never received this letter.)

Today, Wexner is no longer involved in Victoria’s Secret. In 2020 and 2021, he stepped down as CEO and vacated his seat on the board under pressure about his association with Epstein. In 2021, he and his wife also sold the majority of their ownership stake.

In a new statement released this week before his deposition, Wexner said he had “nothing to hide” and reiterated that he decided to stop working with Epstein in 2007, when Epstein  was being investigated for sexual misconduct with young girls. Wexner said it was only after he ended their business relationship that he realized that Epstein had stolen more than $46 million from him and his family.

“Let me be crystal clear: I never witnessed nor had any knowledge of Epstein’s criminal activity,” Wexner’s statement said. “I was never a participant nor co-conspirator in any of Epstein’s illegal activities. To my enormous embarrassment and regret I, like many others, was duped by a world-class con man. I never saw or heard about Epstein being in the company of a minor girl.” He also said he had never been unfaithful to his wife in their 36 years together.

During a break in the deposition, the Democratic congressmen and congresswomen who traveled to Ohio said in a press conference that Wexner was taking great pains to distance himself from Epstein. They also estimated that Wexner gave Epstein a total of $1 billion in stocks and assets. “The more this deposition goes on, the less Les Wexner knows about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein,” said Congressman Stephen Lynch.

Emails and photos released in the new batch of documents show that in the early 2010s, Epstein tried to get close to Axel Dumas, the then-CEO of Hermès and a sixth-generation member of the Hermès founding family. After the files came out, Dumas said that Epstein showed up unannounced with Woody Allen for a tour Dumas led through Hermès workshops in 2013. A year earlier, Hermes turned down a request to decorate Epstein’s plane. “Epstein already had a despicable reputation,” said Dumas, who believes Epstein was targeting him as a potential client. Several requests from Epstein’s assistant to Mr. Dumas’s assistant in 2013 and 2014 were met with the response that Dumas was traveling or otherwise unavailable.

At one point in 2014, Epstein had a meeting scheduled with Dumas with his friend, the billionaire French-German banker Ariane de Rothschild. She also appeared to snag Epstein invitations to dinner with designer Azzedine Alaïa at his home in Paris. Emails indicate he joined de Rothschild at Alaïa’s home twice, once in 2014 and again a year later.

The new release of documents reveals that the French modeling agent, who was previously known to have recruited young women for Epstein, was contemplating cooperating with federal prosecutors in 2016. Around that time, Epstein emailed former Obama White House counsel Kathy Reummler, telling her that he heard about Brunel’s potential plans to cooperate, and that a friend of Brunel’s had asked Epstein for “3 million dollars so that jean luc . would no= go in [sic].” Brunel never turned on Epstein, who the files indicate was secretly backing his modeling agency, MC2, when it launched in 2005. (According to WSJ, the name of the agency was a joke between the two men and a reference to the equation E=MC², with the “E” being Epstein.)

Brunel died by suicide in 2022 in prison in France, where he had been arrested while trying to take a flight to Senegal. He was being investigated for allegations that he had raped, sexually assaulted, and sexually harassed women and underage girls.

Epstein appears to have been close with another model agent, Faith Kates, whose agency Next represented Karlie Kloss between 2008 and 2012 and discovered Lucky Blue Smith. The Daily Beast first reported Kates’s relationship with Epstein in 2019, and the new emails paint them as close friends. Epstein seems to have given her advice about the agency’s finances and her negotiation process while buying an apartment. She appeared to ask him to use his connections to get her son into the University of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, Epstein asked her to get him and his friends fashion show tickets, and asked her to consider models for representation. “U can call me 24/7 if u need some thin,” she wrote him in 2011.

In December, Kates announced her retirement from Next.