A Community Festival Brought To You By Wexner
A Community Festival Brought To You By Wexner
“Winter gray and falling rain, we’ll see summer come again. Darkness falls and seasons change…”
(“Weather Report Suite, part 1” 1973)
Seasons turn as sunlight illuminates the dreary Buckeye State again, gradually melting the snow, ice, and synthetic breezes of frost flakes. Nearing springtime, planning resumes for vacations, reunions, concerts and festivities. Far from a fly-over or fly-out-of state, Ohio is often the topic of national news, as well as grandiose music festivals featuring top jam-bands and national acts. These large-scale corporate productions are organized by booking agencies which produce events at various sites for Ohio festival-goers around the state with fantastical and wondrous names. In some cases, these events may last a year, a few years, and with proper planning, even decades.
In Ohio’s capital city Columbus, the longest-running and signature fest is the Community Festival, a.k.a. Comfest. Since 1972, the Community Festival organization has produced fifty-three physical festivals, starting on the lawn of Ohio State’s Hillel fraternity before finding its home at Goodale Park, bordering the Short North and Arena Districts. One key distinction setting Comfest apart with most Columbus festival events is that it is entirely community-oriented and volunteer-driven. According to a 2013 Columbus Dispatch article credited to ‘Staff Writer’, the “party with a purpose” has one main goal in mind: to give back to the community. As quoted within by a former organizer:
“This event is all volunteer run with no corporate sponsors. We do this event and then give money back to the community through gifts and grants to the tune of over $300,000 in the past several years.”
For its first forty-seven years from 1972 to 2019, the annual festival tradition continued unabated until the wretched grip of a pandemic. In spring of 2020 the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in state-wide shutdowns, with restrictions on large public gatherings from spring until late summer throughout Ohio. Varying dependent on local, county and state-wide mandates in effect, these restrictions affected businesses, schools, congregations, and performances, resulting in cancellations of national concert tours… and even the 48th annual Community Festival.
These events quickly transformed from in-person gatherings to Zoom meetings, Facebook livestreams, Youtube broadcasts, and virtual festivals broadcasted live to community constituents. During its online events in 2020 and 2021 the do-it-yourself Virtual Team recognized the local entertainment, spirit, purpose, impact on current events, respected traditions and long history of Comfest 365 days-per-year, previewed in the Free Press Cyber-Salon in June 2020.
Hopewell culture was not a single group of people, but a spiritual movement that linked many communities
What are the origins of Comfest?
As the Columbus Community Festival returned to Goodale Park in June 2022 for the first time in three years, reporter Matthew De Bonis provided perhaps the most accurate account to date in WOSU Public Media, a National Public Radio and Public Broadcasting Company affiliate.
“Depending on who you ask, you may get a different answer on how the idea for a festival arose. But one thing we know for sure is that it was born around a nexus of activity at the corner of 16th and Waldeck Avenue, a block east of the Ohio State University campus.
The area was home to three campus faith organizations, the Ohio State Hillel, the United Christian Church, and the Wesley Foundation, which today is known as Summit on 16th United Methodist Church.
In the early 1970s, these buildings provided meeting space and offices for some of the groups collectively known as the Community Union. It included a food co-op, a crisis hotline, a tenants union, a free clinic, and the Columbus Free Press, then an underground anti-war newspaper.
All these organizations worked together with small business owners and neighborhood residents to get the first ComFest off the ground.”
According to the publication’s website: “The original Columbus Free Press grew out of the anti-war movement on the campus of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio in October 1970… Members of the Free Press were also founders of Community Festival.”
Atop the publication’s masthead of The Volunteer Staff is Editor & Publisher: Bob Fitrakis. Mr. Fitrakis is a well-known name in central Ohio in various roles including political candidate, Green Party activist, and currently Professor of Political Science in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Columbus State Community College.
Columbus Free Press Salon, May 2020 - photo by Ernst Wehausen
Though many articles have been published over the years about the confluence of Mr. Fitrakis, Lesley Wexner and Jeffrey Epstein, the proximity of several of these connections were less transparent within most overlapping circles within the central Ohio community. When Epstein was arrested in July of 2019, Business Insider reported:
“Epstein also had a hand in helping Wexner build a model town in New Albany, Ohio, through his development firm The New Albany Co. Epstein invested a few million dollars of capital into the project and became a partner in the company, according to a 2002 article in New York magazine. …
Back in 2002, New York magazine spoke to Bob Fitrakis, a Columbus-based investigative journalist who had written extensively about Wexner, about Epstein’s role in the project. Fitrakis said that before Epstein got involved, the financial preparations and groundwork for development were ‘a total mess.’
‘Epstein cleaned everything up, as well as serving Wexner in other capacities – such as facilitating visits to Wexner’s home of the crew from Cats… .”
Goodale Park, Columbus, Ohio - June 2023
To his credit, Attorney Fitrakis himself has written voluminous articles along with two books on this topic, while wearing several hats as an investigative journalist. In a June 18th, 2020 article titled Jeffrey Epstein: There’s much more to the story, Bob Fitrakis wrote, and I quote:
“Not many people know that the infamous Jeffrey Epstein spent a lot of time in Columbus in the 1990s and owned the second most valuable house in Franklin County (where Columbus resides), in the plush Stepford suburb known as New Albany. I investigated central Ohio billionaire Les Wexner’s and Jeff Epstein’s ties to the intelligence community more than 20 years ago.”
Indeed, not many people know.
This past Tuesday, NBC News reported that one of three people once considered co-conspirators to Epstein was billionaire Leslie Herbert Wexner. As of Friday the 13th of February, Forbes Magazine reports the real-time net worth of Les Wexner & family is estimated at over nine billion dollars, currently ranking him #374 in the world today. Presently, Wexner is the co-founder and chair of Bath & Body Works, Inc., former principal of Victoria’s Secret, Abercrombie & Fitch, and several other retail corporations.
Residents of central Ohio are largely familiar with Wexner’s name, as it adorns buildings ranging from the Wexner Center for the Arts where he sits as Chair of the Board of Trustees. Long known as an art magnate, according to a New York Times report published February 6th of this year Wexner has been described as “the most important contributor to the staggering growth in Epstein’s fortune”.
Towering within sight of the Wexner Museum on the Buckeye campus amid constant expansion and construction lies the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center. On February 10th, the local affiliate NBC4 reported that Mark Landon, a physician and professor at OSU and the chair of the obstetrics and gynecology department, received quarterly payments of thousands of dollars from Epstein in the early 2000s.
Les Wexner & Family $9.1 Billion real-time net worth, Feb. 2026
Also on the Ohio State University campus, the family’s name is omnipresent as the namesake of Wexner Jewish Student Center. These structures and chapels are justly acknowledged as resolute pillars of strength recognizing the Jews’ undaunting determination and perseverance, following unspeakable holocaustic atrocities at the hands of the German army during their European invasion in WWII. Financial support to the local Hillel chapter is encouraged by donations to its stand-alone 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, self-stated as “fully dependent on the support of the community.”
In the late 1980’s, the board of trustees once again saw need for a new building to house the Hillel Foundation. According to a 2011 article published by the Columbus Jewish Historical Society:
In 1990, the OSU Hillel commenced a large fundraising campaign, which included a presentation to the Wexner Foundation, owned by Leslie Wexner, the owner of many clothing companies and a philanthropist in the Columbus area. The OSU Hillel was not a stranger to requesting funds from the Columbus community – it was the first Hillel to create a community-based endowment fund.The efforts of many volunteer solicitors and the Hillel staff paid off. Once enough money was pledged to the Foundation, the building of the Wexner Hillel Foundation began.
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Unredacted Epstein files and planned deposition thrust Jewish philanthropist Leslie Wexner back into spotlight, The Forward published last week. In this article, it was reported that “Wexner later granted Epstein power of attorney beginning in 1991, and federal records describe how Epstein used that authority in property and other transactions.”
.
On February 18th, members of Congress are set to depose billionaire Les Wexner on behind closed doors at his New Albany mansion in Ohio, where he will presumably testify under congressional subpoena behind closed doors.
However, the above connective paragraphs are entirely unrelated, with no bearing upon the Columbus community festival.
Comfest returns to Goodale Park
In November 2025, the Community Festival officially announced Comfest’s return to Goodale Park in June 2026, by way of their official social media platforms and the organization’s website.
ComFest performer applications are now open for ComFest 2026, returning to Goodale Park June 26-27-28th, 2026! — ‘Comfest Bands’
On the webpage for the 501(c)(3) charitable organization, ComFest “invites grant applications to support and sustain programming consistent with ComFest’s principles, which are rooted in community, social justice, and progressive activism. Through this we promote living the ComFest way all year round.
Since 1997 ComFest has given out over $688,000, including $242,000 in endowment grants, $190K in additional grants, donations of $175K to individuals and the houseless, along with $52,000 given to ‘community relations.'” Updates regarding the upcoming Community Festival can be found on the organization and festival’s website.
As the event has always been “volunteer run with no corporate sponsors” the members of the community are always encouraged to sign up to volunteer at volunteer.comfest.com. In exchange for donating their time to the community’s festival its musicians and volunteers receive a t-shirt, and plastic chips of no monetary value which are redeemable exclusively at Comfest commercial foods and alcoholic beverage sales.
Comfest 2026 applications open
In many circles and Venn diagrams of our lives, communities near and far are gradually raising their voices and their awareness of the impact on our local, national, and global landscape even from a solitary, focused perspective.
While the declassified files related to the international scandal continue to released to the public, the tentacles of his illicit multifaceted operation continue to be brought to light in unsettling proximity. From crowdsourced social media to independent non-profit publications, the endeavor continues to ensure that these disturbing new revelations do not remain in darkness.
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Statistics indicate that approximately one in three women, one in four men, and equally gendered, trans- and non-gendered people have experienced physical, emotional, or psychological abuse by an intimate partner. This abuse can manifest in various forms including physical violence, emotional manipulation, and psychological distress. The prevalence of such abuse highlights the need for awareness and support for survivors, emphasizing that abuse occurs in all genders and contexts. Shining light on long-hidden truths becomes self-evident when ensuring that democracy does not die in darkness in real-time.
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Justice.gov/Epstein
Medium.com Investigation (2019)
Interactive Global Map Of 2026 Files
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“Let justice be done, though the heavens fall,” proclaims Oliver Stone in JFK, through the vehicle of Jim Garrison. Ironically, it was the real-life David Ferrie who may have been summing up his experience with D.A. Jim Garrison when he composed a statement that could apply equally towards Oliver Stone’s ends-justify-the-means rationalization of Garrison’s behavior: “If this is justice, then justice be damned.” 1
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