Quote:Les Wexner was the most influential mall tycoon of the late ’90s and early 2000s. As CEO of L Brands, Wexner oversaw The Limited and The Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, Express, and — most crucially for millennial teens — Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch. Wexner’s brands defined what it meant to be a cool young person in that era, and did it so successfully that Wexner became very, very rich on the backs of his devoted adolescent customer base. The defining aesthetic of a generation was the result of his vision.

All of which gets a little concerning when you consider just how many men who worked for and with Wexner have been accused of sexual misconduct involving very young people — starting with Jeffrey Epstein.

Quote:Wexner’s persistent presence in the Epstein story is often overlooked, as he’s not a household name in the way that President Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Bill Gates are. Still, Wexner’s influence is undeniable because his companies were so central to the prevailing aesthetic and ethos of the 2000s. When I was a teenager in those years, every girl I knew got her first bra at Victoria’s Secret, and most of my classmates either wore or aspired to wear Abercrombie’s jokey graphic T-shirts. The companies that made up L Brands were as fundamental to the experience of being a millennial adolescent as speculating over the state of Britney Spears’s virginity was.

Wexner’s brands were not neutral purveyors of clothing. They defined culture and were architects of what was cool, which is to say they provided teens, tweens, and young adults with an ideology of what is acceptable and desirable, and what is not.

At L Brands mall stores, being cool meant being thin (neither Victoria’s Secret nor Abercrombie was what we would today call “size inclusive”). It also meant being white. Abercrombie infamously refused to hire people of color to work the sales floor and sold numerous racist T-shirts, while Victoria’s Secret dressed white models as “sexy little geishas” and Black models in jungle-themed lingerie.

Perhaps most importantly, though, at L Brands stores, what was cool was what was raunchy. The late 1990s and early 2000s were a sexualized and then pornified era, and perhaps nowhere was this grim, compulsory sleaze as evident as it was at the mall.

In her 2025 book Girl on Girl, the journalist Sophie Gilbert describes Abercrombie’s trendy, envelope-pushing raunch circa 1999. As Gilbert writes:

Quote:The Abercrombie & Fitch Quarterly’s Christmas issue that year, titled ‘Naughty or Nice,’ featured nude photo spreads, mentions of oral sex and threesomes, and an interview with the porn actress Jenna Jameson, in which she was repeatedly harangued by the interviewer to let him touch her breasts. The publication provoked outrage in the media, but the company’s strategically sexual marketing to its teenage consumer base was sound: A 2000 Time story reported that sales had increased sixfold in just six years.

Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret televised its annual Fashion Show for the first time in 2001. In 2002, the brand launched Pink, its first collection aimed at teenagers. Pink joined the Fashion Show in 2006, featuring young models in barely there lingerie, clutching cheerleader accessories and stuffed animals.

“Les was pretty excited about Pink, and so it got a lot of attention,” a former CEO of Victoria’s Secret said of Wexner in a 2022 documentary. “He saw an opportunity, and he likes to exploit an opportunity.”

All of this is to say that the people who taught young millennials how to be cool were people with a history of inappropriate conduct around the very young. In that case, it is perhaps not a coincidence that the cool to which they taught teenagers to aspire was a pornographic kind of cool.

We’ve spent much of the past 10 years unpacking the baggage of the 2000s: all that sleaze, all that casual misogyny, all that fat-shaming, all that cynical, performative raunch — and at the same time, that intense fixation on innocence, on purity, on virginity. The contradictions have troubled me so much that I built a whole essay series around it. Over time, what I’ve found strangest about the raunch-purity paradox of those years is that it felt so compulsory, as if there were no other options outside of the binary with which we were presented, no other way to be a person that had worth.

You had to diet yourself as thin as possible, because the Abercrombie low-rise jeans required it, and you had to navigate people (often adult men) reacting to your partially exposed Victoria’s Secret underwear, because the thongs required it. Complaining about any of the above felt like a waste of time: It meant you would come off as humorless and uncool and behind the times, and anyway, what other options did you have?

As millennials move through their 30s and 40s, we’re still making sense of the misogyny and racism that was normalized by adults in our teen years. At this point, it’s worth asking the question: Did the people who did this to us do it on purpose? Were we simply watching capitalism in action? Or was it something closer to being groomed?

Quote:The details are disturbing, and the scale of harm is staggering. We need this anger. But we need to harness it better, to help us answer troubling questions about the societies we live in. Questions like, what kind of world makes Epstein’s web of power—and those who participated, knew, and stayed silent—possible? And, crucially, what kind of world would have stopped it? The biggest question: what can we learn from the information and patterns emerging from these files that help us identify the current “Epsteins” still operating in obscurity?

It is tempting to treat Epstein as an outlier. But that story is too simple. Epstein operated in a system that protects status and male entitlement. He did not abuse power in a vacuum. He abused power in a culture that too often excuses it. 

Quote:If we are serious about preventing future Epsteins, boys and men must be central to the solution. Not as saviors, but first as survivors themselves and as accountable participants. That means calling out abuse within professional networks, refusing to shield powerful friends, demanding transparent investigations, and supporting survivor-centered systems.

Quote:Epstein, then aged 41, had a lodge named after him on the grounds of the Interlochen Center for the Arts youth camp in Michigan, and funded academic scholarships there, he told her.

Quote:Most men in the Epstein circle are apparently heterosexual, but they treat each other with grand romance. Men are for lofty declarations of yearning, misogynistic banter and intellectual advice, while young girls are for sex and thrown away, and grown women are mostly useless except if they service it all.

Quote:In the report, the woman names President Donald Trump as a witness, saying she knows him because “he participated regularly in paying money to force me to (redacted) with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.”

Quote:Aid groups report gang-rapes with some women being held over days after fleeing El Fasher, in which at least 60,000 are thought killed

Quote:More than fifty children were raped by Sudan’s paramilitary forces as they fled the fallen city of El Fasher, aid workers have said.

Six weeks after the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the city in North Darfur, experts estimate at least 60,000 people have been killed – making it by far the worst single atrocity in Sudan’s nearly three-year civil war.

Medical workers told local media that 54 children were raped or sexually assaulted while escaping towards Tawila, some 25 miles west of El Fasher. They didn’t provide further details.

Another group, the Sudanese Doctor’s Network, said at least 19 women were raped as they fled north towards al-Dabba. Two victims are now pregnant and receiving medical care at a nearby displacement camp, they said.

Quote:An undefeated rural Virginia high school football team won a regional semifinal game last weekend in highly unusual circumstances: without their head coach, who police said had disappeared just two days before. 

This week, authorities made the situation clearer just days before the next playoff game, saying Union High School’s Coach Travis Turner is wanted on five counts of child pornography possession and five counts of using a computer to solicit a minor. 

Police have been scouring the mountainous area for Turner, leaving a community grappling with allegations against a man trusted to teach high schoolers and lead a successful football team, which now presses for a potential state championship in his absence.

Quote:Sex offenders will no longer be entitled to parental responsibility for children conceived through rape, under new measures proposed in parliament for England and Wales.

In a government-backed amendment to the victims and courts bill, due to come before parliament on Monday 27 October, parental responsibility will automatically be restricted where a child is born of rape.

New reforms will also see parental responsibility restricted when a parent is convicted of serious sex offences against any child, not just their own.

It will mean sex offenders will no longer be able to intervene in decisions about medical care, schooling and overseas travel.

Quote:The biggest rape trial in French history tore her world apart, but Caroline Darian is still fighting for justice – and answers – of her own

About Justice Defense Fund The Justice Defense Fund (JDF) is a 501©(3) nonprofit committed to empowering survivors of tech-facilitated sex trafficking, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and image-based sexual abuse to seek justice through strategic litigation and advocacy. As a non-partisan and non-religious organization, we champion broad support for governmental and corporate policies to prevent online sexual crime.

About JDF Our Work
Through our two strategic programs, Public Pressure Campaigns and Litigation & Survivor Support, JDF is dedicated to ending impunity for abusers and bringing justice to victims of online sexual crime.

Quote:New York Attorney General Letitia James says Trump's rule change is “endangering families, silencing survivors and threatening public safety.”

Quote:A coalition of states sued the Trump administration on Wednesday over a rule change requiring survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence to immediately prove their citizenship status in order to receive certain federal aid.

[...]

In effect, they say this rule change requires states to review survivors’ immigration status prior to giving them aid, straining state resources and leaving behind thousands of domestic violence and sexual assault victims.

This could even discourage even lawful residents and U.S. citizens from using federal aid if they cannot immediately produce the required documentation in the aftermath of their abuse, the states argue. They note that many abusers have been known to restrict a victim’s access to their legal documents to retain control over them.

Quote:“The basic question here is whether a bunch of rich pedophiles and Epstein accomplices are going to face any consequences for their crimes, and Scott Bessent is doing his best to make sure they won’t,” Wyden said in a statement. “From the beginning, my view has been that following the money is the key to identifying Epstein’s clients as well as the henchmen and banks that enabled his sex trafficking network. It’s past time for Bessent to quit running interference for pedophiles and give us the Epstein files he’s sitting on.”

Quote:Multiple former students said Reynolds was “very touchy” and heard rumors of his “inappropriate behavior with students… especially athletes.” There was also a petition signed by over 50 female students on campus in 2019 saying Reynolds’ behavior had troubled them—in his theology class, he told them to write testimonies about their personal traumas, leading some of the women to believe he was trying to identify the most vulnerable targets. But Reynolds still remained on staff until 2024.