Les Wexner ignored harassment at Victoria’s Secret
Like many recipients of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship,
Avigayil Halpern depends on the stipend to cover her living expenses. Halpern,
23, uses her scholarship money to pay for food and rent while she pursues
rabbinic ordination through Yeshivat Hadar, an egalitarian yeshiva in New York
City.
Shortly after Halpern found out she had received the
prestigious fellowship last year, its founder, Leslie Wexner, landed in the
news because of his close ties to Jeffrey Epstein, a financier and convicted
sex offender who later died in jail.
Then, this week, the New York Times reported about a culture
of sexual harassment and bullying of female employees and models at Victoria’s
Secret, the lingerie brand owned by Wexner’s L Brands. The article alleges
misconduct at the hands of an executive, Ed Razek, and says employees who
reported the misconduct to Wexner said they did not see any action taken as a
result. Employees also alleged that Wexner himself made offensive comments
about women, according to the article.
The new article has renewed Halpern’s discomfort about
benefiting from Wexner’s philanthropy.
“It hurts to read these things,” Halpern said. “I’m a woman
in my early 20s. I’ve experienced sexual harassment. I know what that feels
like, and to think about the ways in which I might be contributing to upholding
the reputation of someone who’s been contributing to that behavior is really horrifying.”
Halpern said the breadth of Wexner’s giving deepens her
concerns.
“It creates a class of Jewish leaders who are in some ways
beholden to Les Wexner, and I worry about what the impact of that is going to
be,” she said.
The foundation did not respond to requests for comment by
the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. In August 2019, it released a letter from Wexner
himself addressing his relationship with Epstein. “To be clear, I never would
have imagined that a person I employed more than a decade ago could have caused
so much pain,” Wexner wrote. “I condemn his abhorrent behavior in the strongest
possible terms.”
Wexner’s impact goes far beyond any one program. His
foundation has also given millions of dollars to Jewish causes in the United
States and Israel. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has a center
named after him. And his influence is particularly large in his home city of
Columbus, Ohio, where a Jewish nursing home and a center at the Hillel at Ohio
State University are among the many institutions bearing his name.
But it is the fellowship programs that are perhaps inducing
the most soul-searching among beneficiaries of Wexner’s largesse. The
prestigious Wexner Graduate Fellowship/Davidson Scholars Program, founded in
1988, has more than 570 graduates working in synagogues, schools, nonprofits
and other Jewish institutions.
Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of
North America and a past fellowship recipient, addressed the New York Times report
in a lengthy public Facebook post on Sunday.
“Many of us have felt since the Epstein stories started
breaking that we had to engage in some reckoning with our adjacency to this
scandal and all that it represented, as beneficiaries of Les Wexner’s wealth,
our bios and reputations marked with his name,” he wrote. He added that he had
cautioned against reckoning publicly in the past but now felt compelled to do
so.
Kurtzer said that he does not view money as “tainted” but said
he regretted “participating in the limited set of activities that involved
lionizing Les himself,” such as the foundation’s 30th-anniversary party that
was held in an airplane hangar. He also called for a greater separation between
the Wexners and the fellowship.
“The most legitimate thing that the Wexners can do right now
for the benefit of their historically valuable nonprofit work is to endow the
Foundation either with money now or with a set of binding long-term pledges; to
step aside from its board, or flood it with outsiders who have equal votes; to
give over all autonomous leadership of its direction to its capable
professional leaders; and to cement the Chinese wall that will make clear that
that charitable work is not defined by, and should not continue to reverberate
from, whatever is revealed from any ongoing investigations,” he wrote.
Similar debates have played out recently following scandals
around other Jewish megadonors. Some institutions are no longer accepting
donations from the Sackler family, the Jewish family whose pharmaceutical
company is at the center of the opioid crisis, and allegations last year that
Michael Steinhardt, the billionaire who helped establish Birthright, had
sexually harassed women, raised questions about his role in funding
organizations in the Jewish community.
One person who responded to Kurtzer’s post said she was
sorry he had missed a robust conversation on the topic at this year’s convening
of Wexner fellowship recipients.
“I’m sorry too,” Kurtzer wrote. “But I don’t really think
this belongs entirely in closed door space anymore.”
Many recipients of Wexner’s giving have not yet joined
Kurtzer in speaking publicly. Most institutions to which JTA reached out for
this article did not respond. And many past and present fellows contacted by
JTA did not respond or said they did not want to speak on the record.
One current fellow agreed to speak anonymously, saying he
worried speaking publicly could damage his career prospects. He said that the
latest report “confirms a lot of the nervousness and displeasure” that he had
felt when he read the reports about Wexner’s ties to Epstein last year.
“If the culture of Victoria’s Secret is filled with
misogyny, is that something that we want to replicate in the American Jewish
community?” he asked. “What does it say that something that this foundation has
looked to as source of leadership that who they look to as a leader has these
stories coming out about him?”
The fellow said that prior to the stories coming out, he had
been “very excited” about the program.
“I think this has cast a large shadow over the fellowship,
not just for myself but also for others,” he said. “Now when I talk about being
a Wexner fellow, the name Wexner is also associated with these stories that are
coming out in the New York Times. Now the name Wexner is associated in some
ways with the name Epstein.”
Those who are engaging publicly with the latest report said
it provides a new chance for reflection.
“To me it’s an opportunity to take a step back and look at
the web of corruption that we’re all a part of and say ‘OK, me, my particular
self, what are the one or two ways that I’m in a position to push the needle on
whatever kind of issue away from abuse and towards justice, even just a little
bit?’” said Rabbi Sarah Mulhern, a Wexner fellowship graduate and faculty
member at the Hartman Institute.
Mulhern sees part of her answer to that as “committing to
pushing the community to have this conversation — and specifically to commit to
pushing them to have it in a Jewishly rooted way.”
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