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From The New York Post, "California model says Jeffrey Epstein posed as a Victoria’s Secret scout to grope her":
A California model claims convicted pedophile Jeffrey Esptein posed as a Victoria’s Secret scout and manhandled her more than a decade ago.
“His weapons were his hands,” Alicia Arden told the New York Times about the alleged May 1997 incident inside Epstein’s Santa Monica hotel room.
Arden, who was then 27 years old, claimed Epstein identified himself as a talent scout for Victoria’s Secret.
He then lured her back to his hotel room under the premise of her auditioning for the brand’s catalog, she said.
While inside the room, Epstein allegedly grabbed her, attempted to undress her and told her he wanted to “manhandle” her, the Times reported.
[…] Her claims are similar to those from another model — Elisabetta Tai — who alleged that Epstein posed as a Victoria’s Secret recruiter and attempted to grope her in 2004.
Wexner's Victoria's Secret also worked with an Epstein-funded modeling agency accused of supplying Epstein with underage girls.
From Bloomberg, "Victoria’s Secret Has More Than a Jeffrey Epstein Problem":
Jeffrey Epstein is supposed to be history at Victoria’s Secret—and at its parent company, L Brands Inc., for that matter—but he’s that skeleton that keeps rattling around the closet to remind everyone that he once was an all-too-lively part of the business. Epstein had a two-decade-long reign as close confidant, financial manager, and right hand to the corporation’s chief executive officer, Leslie Wexner. He even had the CEO’s power of attorney at one time.
Although he wasn’t an employee at Victoria’s Secret, Epstein also influenced the way the lingerie company operated, associating with the division’s chief marketing officer, Ed Razek. In 2005, for example, Razek was a guest at Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, welcomed by young women who said they were working as models for Epstein. Razek told fellow guest William Mook, head of Mok Industries LLC in Columbus, Ohio, that Victoria’s Secret used Epstein models and that his girls were in “the major league,” according to Mook.
Epstein’s relationship with Wexner and L Brands officially ended in 2007, a year and a half after the financier was charged with several counts of sexual misconduct in Florida. He pleaded guilty to one charge and spent just 13 months in jail with work release privileges. That penalty was widely derided as exceedingly lenient and, after sex trafficking charges against Epstein were resurrected in July, fresh outrage over the 2007 plea deal led to the resignation of U.S. Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who’d been attorney general in Miami in charge of the prosecution. Epstein is now sitting in a Manhattan jail awaiting trial—and perhaps fresh revelations of salacious secrets. Last week he was found injured in his cell and put on suicide watch.
L Brands’ efforts to distance itself from Epstein may not have been all that clean a break. Epstein at one point had a $1 million investment in MC2 Model Management, according to a sworn deposition by a former company bookkeeper. MC2 is owned by Jean-Luc Brunel, a Frenchman who is alleged in a civil lawsuit to have brought girls as young as age 12 to the U.S. for sexual purposes and provided them to his friends including Epstein. Brunel even visited Epstein when he was first imprisoned in 2008. Victoria’s Secret continued to work with MC2-represented models after Wexner severed ties with Epstein. At least three MC2 models walked in Victoria’s Secret’s 2015 fashion show, and the agency’s models were at auditions in 2017 and 2018. They’ve also posed for its catalogs and website. In a 2014 letter to Brunel, his business partner, MC2 President Jeff Fuller, cited worries by Saks, Nordstrom, Macy’s, and other clients about Brunel’s friendship with Epstein. There was no mention of concern on the part of Victoria’s Secret.
Epstein was reportedly found "semi-conscious" and in a "fetal position" in his jail cell last week and his accusers are worried he won't make it to a trial.
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