Wife of Jimmy John’s billionaire founder: I was raped, I was shunned, I had to tell the kids everything… but there’s hope now

Leslie Liautaud was getting changed one morning when her mother unexpectedly walked into her bedroom and gasped in horror at the sight of her daughter’s near-skeletal body.

Then 15, she had managed to hide her shrinking frame beneath baggy clothes for months, but this time there was no mistaking the fact she’d been starving herself.

Looking back Liautaud, now 51 and married to Jimmy John’s sandwich chain’s billionaire founder Jimmy John Liautaud, reflects: ‘It was nothing to do with dieting or truly wanting to lose weight. It was about trying to regain some form of control when I felt completely powerless.’

More than thirty years later Liautaud is still dealing with the trauma that triggered that teenage eating disorder – a sexual assault which the published author and playwright has now channeled into her second novel.

Released by Blue Handle Publishing on May 10, ‘Butterfly Pinned,’ is based loosely on her own experience of rape and also takes in the exploits of real-life predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Today, speaking exclusively to the Daily Mail, Liautaud recalls how translating her own painful past into fiction forced her to confront it in a way she had not yet done – not least because it meant sitting down with her three adult children and telling them what happened.

‘I had a wild moment when I realized amid all the excitement and hoopla of the book coming out, that I hadn’t talked to my kids about this,’ Liautaud says. ‘I thought it would be better if they found out what happened from me first.’

She had told her husband soon after they’d met in the mid-1990s, but he wanted his wife to break it to Spencer, 31, Lucy, 26, and 25-year-old Fred on her own.

‘They all came over to the house, and Jimmy respectfully said, ‘Why don’t you have this conversation without me so you can answer whatever questions they have?’ Liautaud says. ‘I could tell they were all very nervous, and Spencer kind of chuckled and said, ‘So are you and dad getting a divorce or what?’

The children listened intently as she described how another eighth-grader at her middle school in Kansas City, Missouri, had invited himself around to her home.

‘He was, by far, the most popular kid at school and everybody held him up on a pedestal,’ Liautaud says. ‘He asked if he could come over one day after class and I was flattered because I didn’t think I was worthy of his attention.’

She already felt like a misfit because her family was far less wealthy than others at the school and hoped the visit might boost her street credibility. But her innocent agreement for the pair to watch TV while her parents — a teacher and a worker for General Electric — were out took a horrifying turn.

‘I had zero sexual experience at 14, and never even kissed a boy,’ she says. ‘And I thought, ‘We’re just going to hang out.’

‘But it was a physically forced assault where he held me down.’

Liautaud says she felt ‘detached’ during the rape. ‘I was very much in survival mode and it’s crazy where your mind goes,’ she says. ‘I remember lying on my bed and the sheets had been taken off to be washed.

‘I dissociated from my body and felt just so embarrassed that the bed was like that. And then the boy got up and walked out of the door, leaving me there.’

She was far too scared to tell her parents. ‘I had no outward injuries, but there was a lot of self-blame,’ Liautaud says. ‘I was terrified and completely confused.’

She says she didn’t want to tell anyone what happened — an all too common reaction among survivors of sexual abuse.

‘I wanted to forget about it,’ Liautaud says. ‘I didn’t want to explain what had physically happened to my mom and dad. At 14, your body is an embarrassing thing to start with, let alone when it’s been violated. And I thought they’d be mad that I’d let a boy come to the house.’

The next day, Liautaud was shunned by her classmates. ‘The boy announced to his friend group in school that I’d wanted to have sex and consented,’ she says. ‘Nobody was sexually active at the time, and I was labelled all the names that you would assume, like a “slut” and a “whore.”

‘I absolutely became this very loose piece of trash. And it fed into the narrative because I was from a low-income family, and this was a very high-income group of kids.’

The assault took place around two months before the start of the summer vacation. Shockingly, Liautaud was subjected to even more shaming when she timidly passed around her yearbook to be signed on the last day of school.

‘The boy drew a large penis on the front cover of my yearbook, and then some of the girls started writing insults too,’ she says. ‘As an adult, I would have had the confidence to say it wasn’t true. But, at 14, I didn’t have the tools. It made an exceptionally horrible situation that much worse.’

She threw away the yearbook before her parents got to see it. Mercifully for Liautaud, her father was about to be transferred in his job at GE, and they moved to a different area of Kansas City. Liautaud started a new high school away from her tormentors that September.

But the damage was done. She tried to carry on with her life by pushing the memory down, but the flawed coping strategy created another problem in the agonizing form of anorexia.

At one point, she weighed less than 100 pounds. It was only after her mom walked in on her that time during her freshman year, that she admitted skipping meals and all snacks.

‘Mom sat me down and confronted me in a very loving way,’ Liautaud says. ‘I broke down and it all came pouring out about the sexual assault.

‘I can only imagine what was going through her head, “Why didn’t I know this before?” and “Why didn’t you talk to me about it?”‘

She was admitted to a clinic for eating disorders and underwent therapy. ‘I couldn’t really think straight,’ Liautaud says. ‘Your brain doesn’t function properly when you’re malnourished.’

However, she responded well to advice that her anorexia had sprung, not from a desire to lose weight, but from trying to regain power over at least one aspect of her life now the rape had threatened it so badly.

Liautaud’s coping mechanism was obsessively counting the number of calories she ate. ‘There’s a feeling that, when your own decision making has been stripped away, your mind needs to reassert control,’ she says.

Thankfully, she was discharged from the clinic after three weeks when doctors said she’d regained a healthy amount of weight and was developing a safer attitude towards food.

Liautaud says that her children were ‘very sad, but very empathetic’ when she told them about the rape and her subsequent eating disorder. ‘They asked if I needed anything from them, but their overall tone was gratitude for knowing because I’d finally been able to share my story,’ she says.

As for her 61-year-old husband, Liautaud had taken him into her confidence soon after they started dating when she was 23 and he was 33. She was a single mother at the time because her first marriage to Spencer’s father, her college sweetheart, had broken down after three years.

She married the fellow divorcee, in 1998, a year after they were introduced by mutual friends at a sports game in Chicago, where they both lived at the time. The restauranteur — who is now worth an estimated $1.7 billion after opening his first Jimmy John’s sandwich shop in 1983 at the age of just 19 —adopted Spencer when he was five years old.

‘I told Jimmy what happened when we were sharing life stories at the beginning of our relationship,’ Liautaud says, confessing, with the benefit of hindsight, that she’d mistakenly thought she’d come to terms with the rape by then. ‘I was almost mechanical in the way I related it, like it was no big deal.

‘He said he was sorry to hear what had happened, and I thought we moved on because it wasn’t something we dwelled on.’

However, this avoidance technique didn’t improve her ability to completely trust others — even Jimmy.

As their marriage went on Liautaud would sometimes find herself withdrawing from intimacy. ‘I couldn’t explain it to Jimmy, but it was almost like this visceral reaction,’ she says. ‘He’d say, “Why won’t you let me touch you? Are you mad at me? What have I done?”

‘The thing was, I wasn’t mad at him at all. It was just a pattern because the wound hadn’t been completely cleaned out. Without knowing it, I wasn’t allowing myself to completely let my walls down again.’

She says it wasn’t a regular occurrence but, when it happened, she dealt with the stress in a similar manner to before: ignoring it.

Jimmy was immensely patient and recommended that she invested in more therapy.

‘I did a lot of work to realize this was this a completely different situation,’ Liautaud says of sex with her husband. ‘And if I could be present in the moment and understand that I’m in a safe relationship with someone that I love, I’d be ok.’

She says the treatment paid off. ‘Jimmy and I went through the process hand in hand, and it made our marriage so much stronger,’ she says.

It’s taken years of such soul-searching and self-acceptance for Liautaud not to keep blaming herself — or, perhaps surprisingly, even her attacker. ‘I’ve learned to realize that there must have been something very bad going on with that boy to have done what he did at the age of 14.’

Indeed, she hopes he received some kind of psychological support himself. ‘I have gotten to a point where I feel sorry for him,’ she says. ‘I know that abuse can be cyclical and generational.

‘To move on from it, I’ve had to forgive him. And in forgiving him, I really have come to believe something was happening with him.’

Still, it took courage for Liautaud to revisit the topic of sexual abuse in ‘Butterfly Pinned.’ The novel features manipulative characters who groom the main protagonist, a college student, by promising her entry into a glamorous world. Like Liautaud, she ends up being raped.

The writer also examined the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and was struck by how easy it is for rich narcissists to prey on young, impressionable women. But the novel has light as well as dark.

‘There is an important message of hope and survival,’ Liautaud says of the inspiration she drew from her own experience.

She is now looking forward to the launch of the book, starting with an event on the day of publication in Nashville, Tennessee, her adopted city from where Jimmy runs his business.

In October 2023, the billionaire threw a star-studded 50th birthday party for Liautaud at the Twelve Thirty Club downtown. Sir Elton John performed, and Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel were among the guests.

‘Jimmy and I have a wonderful life together and a great partnership,’ Liautaud says. ‘There have been ups and downs — pretty much what you get in every normal marriage — but we are lucky enough to be each other’s best friends.’

If you have been sexually assaulted, please call the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 800 656 4673.