Former Ohio State University students suing the school for failing to protect them from being sexually abused by a campus doctor demanded Wednesday that billionaire Les Wexner’s name be removed from a football facility he helped fund because, they allege, he has avoided being served with a subpoena to testify about Dr. Richard Strauss.
The former students held an on-campus protest to put pressure on Wexner to testify and brought up his past friendship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Wexner’s name should not be on the Les Wexner football complex because he continues to defy subpoenas from lawyers representing students who are suing Ohio State for not protecting them from Strauss, and because of his association with Epstein,” former OSU wrestler Mike DiSabato said before the protest. “Epstein and Maxwell were directly involved in funding this facility.”
Lawyers for the Strauss survivors who are currently suing OSU for damages have told the federal judge overseeing their case that Wexner’s private security has barred their process servicers from subpoenaing him. They said his attorney has refused to accept and forward the subpoena to Wexner and has said that Wexner has no information relevant to the case.
Last month, they asked Judge Michael H. Watson for an alternate way to deliver the subpoena to Wexner, but the judge has not ruled on their request, according to court records.
A Wexner spokesman declined to comment on the protest or the subpoena evasion allegation.
Wexner is the founder of retail giant L Brands Inc., which is now known as Bath & Body Works, and which once owned Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant and The Limited. He is also one of OSU’s top benefactors.
Wexner served on the OSU board of trustees when Strauss abused young men at the school, mostly under the guise of doing physicals, from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. Strauss died by suicide in 2005.
Wexner’s $2.5 million donation in 2007 to build the football complex was matched by a donation from a foundation run by Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted in December 2021 of recruiting and grooming teenage girls to be sexually abused by Epstein, records show.
Epstein was Wexner’s money manager from the mid-1980s until 2007. Wexner cut ties with Epstein a year after his once-trusted friend was charged by Florida authorities in 2006 with having sex with a minor.
OSU conducted a review, conducted by EY and released in 2020, of Epstein’s gifts to the university. Of the 2007 donation by his C.O.U.Q. Foundation, it concluded: “The review found that this gift, which supported a renovation of the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, originated from the Wexner Children’s Trust and the Leslie H. Wexner Charitable Fund and not from Jeffrey Epstein.”
OSU’s lawyer, Michael Carpenter, in a motion filed Dec. 10 in the Southern District of Ohio, said there’s no need to subpoena Wexner because the university “has not identified Mr. Wexner as a witness in this litigation.”
In response to the alumni demand that Wexner’s name be removed from the facility, OSU spokesperson Benjamin Johnson referred a reporter to the university’s official “naming review procedure” which, among other things, states that renaming “will only occur under exceptional and narrow circumstances.”
Strauss accuser Steve Snyder-Hill filed a formal request on Thursday to have Wexner’s name removed from the building.
Two weeks ago, the Strauss survivors staged a protest at an OSU board of trustees meeting where they held up posters with the words “WHERE’S WEXNER” on one side and a photo on the other side of Wexner with Epstein.
Wexner has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Strauss case and has also condemned Epstein’s crimes as “abhorrent.”
But for many years, Epstein was the primary investor and money manager for Wexner. Their relationship was so close that the mogul gave Epstein power of attorney and made him a trustee of the Wexner Foundation.
Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial in jail on sex trafficking charges.
OSU has been battling lawsuits since 2018, when DiSabato and other former wrestlers went public with allegations that Strauss had sexually abused them and hundreds of other students and that the school knew about it but did nothing to stop him.
An OSU investigation published in 2019 found that “at least 177 male students were sexually abused by Strauss.” And since then, the university has paid out more than $60 million in settlements to 296 people.
