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A big shadow over the legacy of Victoria’s Secret is Jeffrey Epstein’s business relationship with Les Wexner. How did you approach that piece of the book?
LS: I think the hardest thing was deciding how much of it we wanted to devote to that, because we could have pitched this book as a book about the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Les Wexner. That book would’ve sold very easily, but we didn’t want to do that because the reality is Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t involved in the day-to-day Victoria’s Secret business. And so we decided, as business reporters who cover the fashion industry, that we needed to write a corporate history — and he’s not a giant part of it. So, instead of weaving him through the narrative — which I think the documentary tried to do — we decided, Let’s put that in its own chapter. We could have probably spent five more years reporting this book and maybe would’ve come up with even more revelations around that. But, it’s interesting: If you look at the trajectory of Victoria’s Secret, the trajectory of Jeffrey Epstein, and the trajectory of American culture, the three things really align. Les Wexner severed ties with him in 2007, Victoria’s Secret was on the rise until then. There was foreshadowing in the early 2000s that something might be awry with the business. It peaked in 2016, right around the time of the height of the #MeToo movement, and then it really started to have its downfall around the time that Epstein was jailed.
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