Wexner, clothier extraordinaire, is a munificent philanthropist to and supporter of Columbus institutions and causes. So is his wife and fellow philanthropist, Abigail S. Wexner.
Arguably, the Epstein/Maxwell story – will anyone fully capture it, except perhaps in a Carré-class masterpiece? – traces back before the Second World War.
That’s when the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, the future Robert Maxwell, was born in 1923 as Ján Ludvík Hoch in a dirt-poor Czech town, now in Ukraine. Amid the Second World War, eventually renamed Robert Maxwell, he was awarded one of Britain’s highest decorations, the Military Cross, for bravery,
A printing and publishing mogul in Britain and the United States – Maxwell once owned the New York Daily News – he was elected to Britain’s parliament. But U.K. regulators were unimpressed by his business practices; they said Maxwell “could not be ‘relied on to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.’ ”
Maxwell died in 1991; he was said to have fallen off his 189-foot yacht near the Atlantic Ocean’s Canary Islands. The yacht? The “Lady Ghislaine,” named for his youngest daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell.
She was perhaps the woman closest to Brooklyn-born Jeffrey Epstein, an NYU dropout who for a time was Wexner’s right-hand business associate and lived in New Albany. Epstein died in 2019 in federal custody in Manhattan in a death ruled suicide. Ghislaine Maxwell is now a 20-year guest of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons at a minimum security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas.
Robert Maxwell’s funeral was held not in Britain, but in Jerusalem: Among his mourners: Israeli then-President Chaim Herzog, and the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.
Once Congress forced Donald Trump to release millions of pages of files on Epstein, some of Ohio’s many highly principled politicians nearly trampled each other returning campaign donations from Wexner or redirecting that money to other causes. The Columbus Dispatch recently reported, for example, that among those officeholders is State Treasurer Robert Sprague, a Findlay Republican who’s running for secretary of state. He “donated the $23,000 in campaign contributions he’s received from the Wexners to Findlay Hope House,” which helps the homeless.
If “the truth” – as in, 100%,solid-gold, no questions left – ever emerges about Epstein’s ultimate masters, besides his colossal ego and talent for self-invention there, will be those who will argue that the “real story” is and will remain hidden, like whatever really happened on Dealey Plaza in Dallas in 1963 or inside Washington’s Ford’s Theatre in 1865.
If the General Assembly’s publicity hounds are really as desperate as they seem for ink and airtime, maybe they could form a special investigation committee, like the General Assembly’s 1985-86 Joint Select Committee on Savings and Loans, created after the 1985 collapse of Cincinnati-based Home State Savings Bank. The bank was controlled by an ally of then-Gov. Richard F. Celeste, a Lakewood Democrat. No wrongdoing was attributed to Celeste, and the bail —out of Home State depositors was considered a national model for constructive bipartisanship — try that in Ohio today.
As for an in-depth Statehouse look-see at Epstein? Dream on.
Thomas Suddes is a former legislative reporter with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland and writes from Ohio University. You can reach him attsuddes@gmail.com.
