Why is Jeff Epstein's best friend still calling shots in Columbus?

Certified pervert Les Wexner bragged about "the largest AI investment in the world" coming to Columbus without mentioning that he would stand to make billions of more dollars from it.

Despite our steady population growth, Columbus will never be a true Big City until two things happen:

• We build a mass transit system worthy of the Big City.

• We take Leslie Wexner’s name off several buildings and shun him like a Hell-bound pariah until he croaks.

To City Hall’s credit, we took a massive step forward on that first point last fall, when Columbus voters approved the LinkUs transit package.

As for Wexner, he remains comfortable attending board meetings for his medical center and the local children’s hospital, as he did in May.

From Samantha Hendrickson of The Columbus Dispatch:

Wexner, who is chairman of the board and for whom the medical center is named, said that "probably the largest AI investment in the world will happen in Columbus" and predicted that "100 more" medical technology companies will follow the incoming tech boom, drawn in by current economic development in the region.

"Columbus is the largest city in Ohio," Wexner said. "We don't publicize that – and I know in the real estate business that I'm in, people are always shocked at how big we are and how fast we've grown."

Talking about how Columbus is underrated is like heroin to our leaders. Which makes sense in a way, because you generally don’t want civic leaders who get sexually aroused by people talking about the shittiness of your city.

But it’s quite the turnaround coming from Wexner, who is responsible as anyone for the rise and success of Jeffrey Epstein, the most infamous dead pedophile in world history.

As you might have heard, Epstein is back in the news recently.

President Donald Trump, usually a master at driving narratives and manipulating media, has put his stumpy pink penis into several light sockets over the past week while discussing that infamous dead pedophile, who appeared in several videos and photographs with Trump throughout his life.

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Wexner, however, isn’t the President of the United States. In my opinion, Wexner chose to reside in Central Ohio to escape the media scrutiny that would come with living in New York.

That’s as true today as it was when Epstein was trafficking and raping women in Wexner’s guest house, which the billionaire was also credibly accused of doing by a victim who has since died by suicide.

In Columbus, Wexner still gets treated like a business tycoon.

He gets to have his thoughts about how the city will host “the largest AI investment in the world” credibly reported in the press, largely because he’s a billionaire.

As it turns out, however, Wexner’s bullishness on “AI investment” and “biotech hubs” is largely due to his significant investment in the ostensibly emerging technology.

From Jemima McEvoy of forbes.com:

Instead, the fashion mogul has more than doubled his fortune thanks in large part to some savvy bets in a different industry: technology. Over just the past three months, the mogul’s net worth–which includes assets held in his children’s and wife Abigail’s names–has soared to $10.1 billion from $7.9 billion, according to Forbes’ estimates.

The biggest driver of this increase: a 4% stake in CoreWeave, one of the buzziest artificial intelligence companies around. On Monday, CoreWeave announced it is buying crypto miner Core Scientific in a roughly $9 billion all-stock deal. Coreweave’s market capitalization has almost tripled since its March IPO to nearly $73 billion today, and Wexner’s stake is now worth $2.8 billion.

It’d be hard to argue that the explosion in so-called “AI technology” hasn’t been a boon for Wexner. But it’s hard for me to believe that “the largest AI investment in the world” would benefit Central Ohio at large, especially when the company leading that charge is also investing in an environment-ravaging cryptocurrency mining company.

We’re already seeing that the data center boom has led to water scarcity and higher electricity bills for everyday customers. They have also delayed the shift to green energy.

In Memphis, Twitter’s AI bot, Grok, is largely responsible for poisoning a poor Black community.

Wexner’s hometown, New Albany, which he transformed from a patch of farmland into a replica colonial plantation, has heavily invested in data centers from multiple corporations that now line Beech Road.

Each data center employs roughly 15 to 20 people and pays nothing close to a fair share in taxes.

Is this really something we should want to bring to Columbus? Does that benefit everyday Ohioans? Or does that just benefit people like Wexner who are heavily invested in “AI technology” that’s driving this data center boom?

Wexner likes to present himself in public as a humble children’s thong salesman with a philanthropic heart. However, it’s clear that he’s not acting out of kindness; his actions are always driven by self-interest, including his charitable endeavors, which serve to launder his reputation overall.

It’s worth asking why our civic leaders and traditional media institutions are treating Wexner like he hasn’t been directly linked to the world’s most infamous dead pedophile for decades.

This isn’t some rabid-eyed conspiracy theory, either. It’s been documented that their decades-long friendship went all the way back to when Wexner plucked Epstein, then a creepy high school math teacher, from obscurity and put him in charge of Victoria Secret’s finances over the repeated objections of company executives.

This didn’t happen in some faraway land. It happened in New Albany, on property that he still owns

And now he apparently feels good enough to resurface to peddle the myth of “AI technology,” which is little more than a pattern-matching machine, without having the decency to admit that he’s heavily invested in propagating that notion.

Wexner wouldn’t get away with this in New York. He chose Columbus, back when we were little more than a mid-sized college town.

But if we’re ever going to become the city he brags about us becoming—while living in the suburbs—we must reckon with his ugly legacy and not be distracted by shiny objects like hospitals that we could have built without his charity if we had taxed him properly in the first place.

Young Mussolini is falling apart at the finish line