Five former wrestlers from Ohio State University have formally asked the state’s inspector general to investigate the school’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein. They also asked for an investigation into two of the school’s biggest benefactors, Abigail Wexner and her husband Leslie, who they claim “helped Jeffrey Epstein sexually assault a young woman named Maria Farmer.”
Farmer claims she was assaulted by Epstein in 1996 at a property owned and secured by the Wexner’s. Abigail Wesner is a Vice Chair of the Board of Trustees at OSU.
Farmer filed a complaint last year in New York alleging she was violently assaulted by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell while she was working on an art project at Epstein’s guest house at a property in New York, owned by the Wexners. Farmer claims she called local police after the attack, but they failed to respond. The police department says records are expunged after two years.
In a series of interviews with The Washington Post, Farmer, 50, spoke publicly for the first time about Wexner and his wife, Abigail. She never met Leslie and says she spoke to Abigail only by phone while at the New Albany home. But she says she holds him “responsible for what happened to me” because the alleged assault happened at the hands of one of his closest advisers on property Farmer says was monitored by Abigail and the Wexner security team. She says that she was held against her will at the property by Wexner’s security staff after her alleged assault, until her father came to pick her up.
Davies said in December that Leslie Wexner had cut ties with Epstein in 2007 after the first allegations surfaced that he was trafficking in and sexually abusing young women.
Prior to that, Epstein was Leslie Wexner’s money manager. Their relationship was so close Wexner, best known as the founder of the firm that owns Victoria’s Secret, gave Epstein power of attorney and made him a trustee of the Wexner Foundation, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.
The five wrestlers have accused their alma mater of failing to protect them from Dr. Richard Strauss. Over 350 former OSU students have filed 17 lawsuits against the univeristy alleging OSU knew of the abuse and failed to stop it. Strauss died by suicide in 2005. They said they went to bat for Farmer because she also received the brushoff from OSU.
“Ohio State has shown that, without maximum public pressure, it will turn a blind eye to sexual predators,” the letter to Meyer states. “It ignored the reports of Richard Strauss’s abuse and it is now looking the other way on Jeffrey Epstein and Abigail Wexner.”
See more at NBC News.