Ohio State will keep Les Wexner's name on campus buildings despite Epstein ties
The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center in Columbus (Construction Dive)Ohio State University will keep billionaire donor Les Wexner's name on its medical center, arts center and football complex, the university's top academic officer decided Friday, ending a months-long review of hundreds of requests to remove it over Wexner's close association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Interim Provost Trevor Brown announced the decision Friday morning in a letter to the university's Standing Advisory Committee for the Review of University Space and Entity Names, telling the committee it should not move forward with a fuller review of the requests. The decision means the committee will not send a recommendation to university President Ravi Bellamkonda, who said in August that he hoped to have a decision by the end of the year.
From January through September of this year, 512 people — including alumni, current employees and students — submitted requests regarding Wexner-named spaces, raising nine different categories of claims and offering about 6,000 pages of supporting documentation, according to the committee's report. On October 7, the committee recommended a full review of three of the allegations: Wexner's relationship with Epstein, alleged personal sexual misconduct, and alleged abusive employment practices at Wexner's businesses.
Brown said the university's naming review procedure requires “substantial evidence” of misconduct to justify an assessment of gross reputational harm. “As your report makes clear, Mr. Wexner has faced allegations of misconduct but has never been charged with or convicted of a crime,” he wrote. “Mr. Wexner has denied these allegations, including under oath, and if I were to ask the committee to conduct further review, you would be in the nearly impossible position of searching for substantial evidence of misconduct where law enforcement entities, Congressional committees and international media outlets have not discovered such evidence.”
Brown added that the committee “is not and was never intended to become an investigatory body like a law enforcement or auditing organization,” noting it has neither subpoena power nor access to private records. He left the door open to revisiting the matter, writing that the procedure allows a further review “should new information become available” and that the university could return the matter to the committee if substantive evidence becomes public. “For now, however,” he wrote, “the committee's work is done.”
Wexner's name is on the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Les Wexner Football Complex at the Woody Hayes Athletic Center. Wexner, the New Albany billionaire and founder of L Brands and a former university trustee, has given more than $200 million to Ohio State since graduating in 1959. A donation in 2011 supported a major expansion of the university's health care infrastructure, including the medical center that now bears his name, and $25 million from Wexner in 1989 founded the arts center in honor of his father.
That philanthropic reputation came under scrutiny after more details emerged of Wexner's deep ties with Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died in 2019 and served for years as Wexner's financial manager. Wexner has long said he severed ties with Epstein in 2007 after learning of the allegations against him and discovering that Epstein had siphoned tens of millions of dollars from him, and he has denied knowledge of Epstein's abuse and trafficking of girls — an assertion an attorney for Epstein's victims has said was “very highly likely to be true.” His name appears more than 1,000 times in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department, according to prior reporting by The Lantern, Ohio State's student newspaper, and he was deposed by the House Oversight Committee in February as part of its investigation into Epstein.
The decision comes in what the Associated Press called arguably the highest-profile of the denaming protests to arise at U.S. universities this year in the wake of the release of the Epstein files. The documents contained references to numerous wealthy donors whose names appear on campus buildings across the country, and universities have resisted renaming in almost every case — Harvard also decided in June to keep Wexner's name on spaces at its Kennedy School.
This is the second renaming request Ohio State has declined this year. In August, the committee decided not to take action on a request to remove former university president William Oxley Thompson's name from the library, citing his history as a supporter of racial segregation. In late January, the university also rejected a request to consider removing Wexner's name from the football facility. Survivors of sexual assault by former university doctor Richard Strauss have said Wexner's association with Epstein runs contrary to Ohio State's values.
Sources: The Columbus Dispatch, “Despite Epstein ties, Ohio State will keep Les Wexner's name on campus buildings” (Nov. 6, 2026); The Associated Press, “Wexner name to remain on Ohio State buildings despite Epstein-driven protests” (Nov. 6, 2026); The Lantern, “Les Wexner's name will remain on university buildings following university decision” (Nov. 6, 2026).
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