Steve Tisch Passing Giants Stake to Children but Will Still Chair Board

New York Giants co-owner and chairman Steve Tisch is giving up his shares in the NFL team after his close ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein were recently revealed, but he will remain chairman of the board.

Tisch and his siblings, Laurie and Jonathan, have asked the league whether they could transfer ownership to their children’s trusts, according to an NFL memo obtained by Front Office Sports. 

ESPN first reported on the memo. 

The transfers would need to be approved by the league’s finance committee, the memo says.

The Tisch siblings will retain their front office roles with the Giants, a person familiar with the matter tells FOS. Steve is EVP and chairman of the board, Laurie is a board director, and Jonathan is the treasurer and a board director, according to the Giants’ website. The Tisch family has been involved with the Giants since the siblings’ father bought a 50% stake in the franchise from the Mara family in 1991. 

The families recently sold 10% of the team to Julia Koch and members of her billionaire family at a $10 billion valuation. Following that deal, the Tisch and Mara families each held 45% of the team. 

Portions of the siblings’ stakes have previously been transferred to the children’s trusts in 2023 and 2024, the memo says, and the elder Tisch siblings currently hold a total 23.1% stake in the team. Following the transfers, the siblings will “no longer own any interest in the club,” according to the memo.

The Tisch siblings are all in their 70s. Steve has had five children across two marriages; one of his daughters died in 2020. Laurie has two children, including Gotham FC owner Carolyn Tisch Blodgett. Jonathan has no publicly reported children; his wife, Lizzie Tisch, has a daughter from a previous marriage. The family’s billions come from the patriarch of the family, Bob Tisch, who acquired Loews Theatres in 1959 with his brother and built it into a massive diversified company that today has businesses in areas like insurance, energy, and packaging.

The news comes less than six weeks after emails between Steve Tisch and Epstein from 2013 were released as part of the U.S. Department of Justice’s latest batch of Epstein documents, as required under a law passed by Congress late last year. 

Some of the emails appeared to discuss Epstein connecting Tisch with women. There were also emails from women to Epstein reporting back about the encounters they supposedly had with Tisch.

Tisch appears in the Epstein files more than 400 times, including one exchange between the two men from May 2013, when Epstein wrote, “I can invite the [Russian] … to meet if you like,” with Tisch responding, “Is she fun?” 

In another set of emails, Tisch said to Epstein: “Is my present in NYC?” Epstein responded, “Yes.” Tisch then asked, “Can I get my surprise to take me to lunch tomorrow?”

When the emails were released, Tisch said in a statement that he and Epstein “had a brief association where we exchanged emails about adult women, and in addition, we discussed movies, philanthropy and investments. I did not take him up on any of his invitations and never went to his island. As we all know now, he was a terrible person and someone I deeply regret associating with.”

But the story hasn’t gone away. In 2012, Tufts University outside of Boston—where Tisch graduated from in 1971—opened a 42,000-square-foot facility called the Steve Tisch Sports and Fitness Center, which houses facilities for both general students and members of the Division III athletic program. Tisch had donated $13 million to the school.

When asked by FOS last month whether the university was considering renaming the building, a Tufts athletics spokesperson said: “The University is aware and monitoring the situation.” A representative for Tufts did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Tisch’s bio on the Giants website also lists him as being a member of the board of trustees for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a founding trustee of The Geffen Theatre in Los Angeles, and a member of the board of advisors for both the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and The Preston Robert Tisch Brain Tumor Center at Duke University. Representatives for those entities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Tisch has also had a successful career in entertainment as an Oscar-winning producer. Films he has worked on include Risky Business and The Pursuit of Happyness. He received an Academy Award for producing Forrest Gump.

Tisch is not the only owner to come up in the Epstein files. A number of other major sports figures appear. Owners Todd Boehly and Josh Harris, for example, met with Epstein, the files show, while others are mentioned in conversations about real estate, such as the Dolphins’ Stephen Ross or Vikings’ Zygi Wilf. 

A photo of Mets owner Steve Cohen with a redacted person appears in the files. A spokesperson for Point72, Cohen’s hedge fund, denied that Cohen knew Epstein in a statement to FOS on Tuesday.

Epstein died in August 2019 while in federal custody on federal sex trafficking charges.

This is not the first time an NFL owner has passed control of the team to a family member amid a scandal. In 1998, former 49ers owner Edward J. DeBartolo Jr. transferred ownership of the franchise to his sister, Denise DeBartolo York, after he was recorded making a cash bribe to the governor of Louisiana. Edward DeBartolo was pardoned by President Donald Trump in 2020, during Trump’s first term.