Joyce Beatty's deafening silence on Leslie Wexner's Epstein problems, explained

Beatty sees the billionaire as a friend, albeit not the kind worthy of a public defense against allegations of sexual misconduct. Her cowardice will damage Ohio Democrats in a pivotal election year.

From left to right: Brutus Buckeye, Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, Jeffrey Epstein, Leslie Wexner, and Brutus Buckeye.

The Republican Party’s silence around Ohio State University benefactor Leslie Wexner being an unindicted co-conspirator of international sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein isn’t shocking to anybody who hasn’t been in a coma for the past 35 years.

The Grand Old Party capitulated to an increasingly senile, career white-collar criminal because nobody makes the rural hogs stomp the floor harder.

Donald Trump is more popular than any other Republican politician. He could end any of their careers with a social media blast in a tone usually reserved for some poor son of a bitch who just stumbled out of an insane asylum, let alone one serving as president of the United States.

The still-incomplete Epstein Library from Trump’s illegitimate Department of Justice hosts 5,300 files mentioning Trump. He once labeled Epstein “a lot of fun to be around” and a “terrific guy” who liked “beautiful women,” though many of them were “on the younger side.”

In recent years, the Ohio Republican Party has leveraged its ill-gotten, gerrymandered legislative supermajorities and used the rallying cry of “protect our children” to invade libraries, public bathrooms, and healthcare clinics with feverish right-wing fantasies masquerading as serious legislation.

None of them, apparently, has any concerns about the president’s decades-long friendship with the world’s most infamous dead pedophile.

Wexner is an extension of their apparent moral conundrum, given that the teenage anorexia magnate is the only person in the world more connected to Epstein.

Republicans can’t pound the drum on Wexner without implicating their odorous orange god.

However, if you believe Democrats represent an approximation of “the good guys,” then you might be surprised at the lack of fire coming from Ohio Democrats on the issue.

To date, only two members of Democratic legislative superminorities in State Rep. Christine Cockley (D-Hilltop) and State Senator Bill DeMora (D-Columbus) have gone on record calling for Wexner’s name to be removed from Ohio State’s campus.

Every other Democratic politician has remained silent on the issue.

The party’s gubernatorial nominee, Dr. Amy Acton, hasn’t mentioned Wexner (or Epstein) since she lambasted her likely Republican opponent, Vivek Ramaswamy, for “protecting pedophiles” on Nov. 13.

Dr. Amy Acton has gone radio silent on the Epstein Files and “protecting pedophiles” since Leslie Wexner came into the national spotlight for his decades of enabling the world’s most notorious pedophile.

Dr. Acton hasn’t even mentioned Wexner in passing, despite U.S. House Oversight Democrats securing Wexner’s deposition, which is set to happen on Feb. 12 in New Albany.

The Ohio Democratic Party’s hesitancy to play hardball with Wexner can partly be explained by Wexner and his wife, Abigail Wexner, having donated to various Ohio Democrats through the years.

Those donations came in spite of Wexner being a longtime Republican until he allegedly left the Republican Party in 2018, when we now know Trump’s Department of Justice was investigating him as Epstein’s co-conspirator.

But why won’t Columbus Democrats like Mayor Suburbs, City Attorney Zach Klein, City Council President Shannon Hardin, or City Councilman Emmanuel Remy join Franklin County Commissioner John O’Grady in giving their tainted Wexner money to charity?

That question starts and ends with longtime Columbus Congresswoman Joyce Beatty.

Joyce Beatty considers the Wexners to be friends

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-Columbus) vacationing in the apartheid state of Israel [circa 2023].

Most Ohio politicians who have received Wexner money in recent years will claim ignorance about any donation from the state’s richest man.

A lot of them are lying. But it’s true that Wexner will cut checks to politicians without a prior conversation.

Congresswoman Beatty, however, is in a rarer league. She considers the Wexners to be legitimate family friends.

Since 1999, the Wexners have donated $68.1K to her campaigns. They were donating to her late husband, Otto Beatty, before that.

The money by itself is peanuts.

But Beatty hasn’t needed campaign money, outside of a long-shot challenge from Columbus lawyer Morgan Harper in 2020, thanks to the deal she cut with Ohio Republicans when they decided to gerrymander Ohio with laser precision after Ohio elected America’s first gay Muslim Marxist Kenyan president in Barack Obama in 2008.

From The Intercept in 2020:

After the 2010 tea party wave, the new census knocked down Ohio’s congressional delegation from 18 to 16.

Republicans began gerrymandering the state, and entered into negotiations with Otto Beatty and Joyce Beatty over the contours of the district that Beatty now represents, according to testimony by Ray DiRossi, a Republican operative involved with the gerrymandering effort.

DiRossi testified that “a number of people, including myself who had worked with [Joyce Beatty] thought that she would be an ideal candidate” for the new gerrymandered Democratic district.

Stuffing so many Democrats into one district — Republicans referred to Columbus as “dog meat voting territory” and a “Franklin County Sinkhole” — enabled Republicans to amass a 12-4 majority in the House delegation, despite the state being more evenly split between the parties.

Beatty has used her safe Democratic dog meat sinkhole of a seat to climb the Congressional seniority ladder despite being considered “a laughing stock” of a legislator, according to one Capitol Hill veteran who spoke to The Rooster recently.

In 2018—the same year that gerrymandering’s downwind effects helped then-Attorney General Mike DeWine eke out a narrow victory over bizarre nerd Richard Cordray in the gubernatorial election—Beatty founded the Congressional Civility Caucus with then-Ohio Republican Congressman Steve Stivers.

Stivers conspicuously had nothing substantial to say about Trump’s many vulgarities, which by that point had been debasing the country’s highest executive office for nearly two years.

Beatty continues to tout her membership in the Civility Caucus alongside Ohio Republican Congressman Mike Carey. This despite Carey having nothing to say about Trump’s open corruption, childlike tantrums and diminishing mental state.

And that’s all without mentioning Betty’s longtime support of Israel: A fascist, genocidal ethnostate sitting on top of a nuclear arsenal.

Joyce Beatty has remained silent about Wexner’s connections to Epstein, despite her attending a candelight vigil with survivors in November

Left: Congresswoman Joyce Beatty boasting about standing “in solidarity” with Epstein’s victims, claiming that “abuse of any kind is unacceptable and must be condemned. Right: The perverse personalized birthday card Leslie Wexner wrote Jeffrey Epstein on his 50th birthday. The card belonged to a book, orchestrated by convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, where seemingly everyone in Epstein’s life made overt references to his sexual appetite for “young women” and girls.

Congresswoman Beatty has long boasted about her friendship with billionaire Les Wexner. Though while Wexner is close enough to brag about that association in numerous media profiles, the thong salesman is apparently not the kind of friend worth defending from baseless accusations of gross, serial sexual misconduct.

But it’s hard to know what Beatty actually believes about Wexner’s connections to Epstein.

She has gone radio silent about the Epstein Files since standing “in solidarity” with Epstein survivors at a November candelight vigil in which she bravely declared “abuse of any kind” to be “unacceptable.”

In December, during a chance encounter in the Columbus City Council’s legislative chamber, The Rooster asked Beatty what she thought about Wexner dodging subpoena service in the Dr. Richard Strauss class action lawsuit against Ohio State, and whether she agreed with survivors’ demand that Wexner’s name be removed from the Woody Hayes Athletic Center.

Beatty pretended not to be familiar with the news, given that she’s busy “fighting for the people” in Washington D.C.:

The feigned ignorance was embarrassing in the moment. It’s gotten even worse in the 45 days since.

As The Rooster exclusively reported on Feb. 11, Wexner, the then-chairman of the Ohio State University Board of Trustees, was subpoenaed alongside Trump in a Jane Doe lawsuit against Epstein in August 2009.

At the next trustees meeting on Sept. 18, Chairman Wexner gaveled the oversight body into executive session and didn’t reconvene the trustees in public until the following morning.

At an unspecified later date, Wexner’s lawyer (and current Ohio State Board of Trustees chairman) John Zeiger received a copy of the settlement between Epstein and “Jane Doe #102,” meaning that Zeiger, and by extension, Wexner, had every reason to believe there were at least 101 other Jane Does with litigious claims against Epstein.

Beatty was Ohio State’s Senior Vice President of Outreach and Engagement at that time.

Ohio State created the position for Beatty and awarded her a $320K annual salary in 2008—three years after Wexner had returned for his second rodeo as trustee and one month after Ohio State hired Wexner’s L Brands executive Tom Katzenmeyer as communications director.

"Joyce is one of the most accomplished public servants I know and exactly the right person to help us take a more comprehensive approach and make our programs even more effective,” then-President E. Gordon Gee told The Dispatch.

Beatty left her lucrative position in 2012, the same year that Wexner resigned as a trustee, with eight years left in his term.

Gee would later be implicated by Ohio State’s independent investigation into the Dr. Richard Strauss scandal, which named him 33 times and cited him as culpable for allowing Dr. Strauss to retire with prestigious “emeritus” status that he used to continue his sadistic abuse in private practice.

Beatty, coincidentally, has had nothing to say about that scandal in the heart of her Congressional district, either.

Nor has she said anything about Epstein having an annual $75K retainer with Ohio State’s OB-GYN chairman, Dr. Mark Landon, who, coincidentally enough, delivered Wexner’s children.

Beatty, however, has had time to make the rounds on national television shows touting her lawsuit against Trump for slapping his name on the Kennedy Center.

Here’s one example with Jake Tapper of CNN:

On one hand, it’s understandable. Trump illegally putting his name on a memorial to one of the most respected presidents in the United States is a breach of the civil decorum that Beatty ostensibly holds close to her heart.

And while the lawsuit is noble, we’re at a stage in the American Experiment that demands public officials at every level be able to tend to multiple irons in the dumpster fire that has become our society.

Ultimately, Trump slapping his name on the Kennedy Center is a peanut on the shit pile in that pig’s sty. It doesn’t pose a danger to any resident in the Columbus-based district that sent her to Washington, D.C.

The multiple scandals brewing at Ohio State do.

Beatty’s champion of bipartisan civility and standing in solidarity with survivors of sexual abuse looks pitiful when compared to her ongoing silence about Wexner—who, even in the most charitable interpretation—enabled the most evil plot in recent human history.

The Rooster has been blogging about Wexner’s connections to Epstein almost since its inception in December 2018.

This storm has been brewing for a lot longer than that.

The days of deflecting Wexner and Ohio State’s Epstein problems as baseless internet conjecture are over. And unless you think Trump’s Department of Justice has covered itself in glory with the release of the Epstein Library, then the worst is yet to come.

The best time for Beatty to throw the Wexners under the bus was in 2009, when, as Ohio State’s Senior Vice President, she almost assuredly heard institutional rumblings about Chairman Wexner being served in a lawsuit involving allegations of heinous sexual misconduct against a longtime friend who, we would learn 10 years later, was also a seven-figure Ohio State donor.

The second-best time to denounce Wexner was in 2019, when Ohio State—led by Wexner’s lawyer, Chairman Zeiger—laughably investigated itself over Epstein-related issues.

The third-best time was in December, when The Rooster put Wexner on a platter that could have created much more potent headlines than more Democratic shrieking about Trump’s incivility.

I’m not sure if there’s a fourth-best time.

But Beatty’s intentional strategic silence on Wexner will tarnish her legacy forever if she doesn’t get her soul right with God—and quickly, too.