DEEP DIVE: How the Modeling Industry Built the Epstein Pipeline

Four men. Four agencies. Decades of the same methods, the same cities, the same victims. The fashion world gave them cover. The U.S. government gave them titles.

Let me walk you through something.

If you wanted to build a system to exploit young women and make it basically invisible, you’d design something that looked exactly like the New York modeling industry of the 1990s. You’d recruit teenagers from countries where they don’t speak English. You’d fly them to a city where they know nobody. You’d put them in apartments you control and charge them rent they can’t afford. You’d sponsor their visas so they can’t leave without your permission. And you’d surround them with rich, powerful older men who treat access to young women like a perk of the job.

That system existed. It was real. Hell, some would even argue it still exists.

It operated in broad daylight for decades. And the men at the center of it were not lurking in the shadows. They were throwing parties at Fashion Week, dining at Cipriani, and getting profiled in Vanity Fair.

Their names are John Casablancas, Jean-Luc Brunel, Paolo Zampolli, and Jeffrey Epstein. Two of them are dead under suspicious circumstances. One ran a modeling agency funded directly by Epstein. And the fourth is currently serving as a Special Envoy in the current Trump administration.

If that last part made you do a double take, good, you’re paying attention.

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John Casablancas Built the System

You can’t understand any of this without starting with John Casablancas. He founded Elite Model Management in Paris in 1972 and basically invented the ‘supermodel.’ Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer. All Elite. He turned the modeling industry into a multibillion-dollar global business.

He also had sex with children and everyone around him knew it.

At 42 years old, while still married, Casablancas started a public relationship with 16-year-old Stephanie Seymour. Not a secret relationship, no, a public one. He didn’t even try to hide it. Nobody at Elite intervened.

When he was 50, he married a 17-year-old named Aline Wermelinger who had won one of his own modeling competitions in Brazil. She was closer in age to his kids than to him.

John Casablancas and his third wife, teenager Aline Wermelinger.

When he died in 2013, The Guardian’s obituary described his open preference for what he himself called, “child women.”

It wasn’t like nobody inside Elite tried to stop it. Two of the agency’s own top female executives, Lisa Herzog and Trudi Tapscott, went to Casablancas and executive Marie Anderson Boyd personally and demanded it stop. Marie’s response was that “men have needs.”

The conversation ended there. The behavior didn’t. Now here is where it gets somehow even more uncomfortable.

John Casablancas and sitting President Donald Trump were friends. They ran in the same circles, collaborated on pageants, and shared agency representation throughout the 1990s New York modeling scene.

Trump sponsored Casablancas teenage modeling contest two years in a row, 1991 and 1992, hosting the contestants at the Plaza Hotel and serving as a judge. On camera he called Casablancas “my friend John.”

Casablancas told the crowd Trump had said yes before the pitch was even finished.

A woman named Lisa Boyne publicly claimed that she attended a dinner in 1996 with Trump, Casablancas, and several models. She said that the men refused to move to let the women leave the booth, instead making the models walk across the table so they could look under their skirts.

Elite Model Management later signed Ivanka Trump as a model at age 15. Once the allegations against Casablancas became impossible to ignore, Trump distanced himself. He tends to do that.

Ivanka Trump

And in a 1999 BBC investigation by reporter Donal MacIntyre accused Elite Model Management of pushing drugs on underage models and enabling sexual assault by agency executives. Marie was secretly filmed apparently offering an undercover reporter £300 for sex.

More disturbingly, he was caught on tape bragging about his intentions to sleep with 14-to-16-year-old girls who were finalists in the upcoming Elite Model Look contest. Xavier Moreau, the President of Elite Model, was also filmed making explicit racist slurs.

Casablancas issued what was described on the internet as an “unconditional apology” and he publicly suspended both Marie and Xavier Moreau. Then Casablancas walked it back. The company claimed that the executives were ‘tricked’ into saying what they said by undercover agents who ‘provoked’ them on purpose.

Elite Model Management launched a massive £1.7 million libel lawsuit against the BBC and MacIntyre. The BBC backed down in June 2001 after first defending their reporter. The turning point came when they had to hand over hundreds of hours of unused footage. Elite’s lawyers used that footage to argue the documentary had been selectively edited to push a story the filmmakers had already decided on. We know now that was never the case. But the system protects the monsters. Real journalism is rare, and when it happens, it gets shut down like this far too often.

The settlement let both Marie and Moreau keep their jobs at the agency — jobs that paid very well — despite the fact that he was bragging about blatant pedophilia on film.

The original 1999 BBC "MacIntyre Undercover: Fashion Industry" episode is essentially locked away. After Elite sued the BBC for libel and settled in June 2001, the BBC agreed not to rebroadcast it and quarantined all the raw footage.

Someone read the piece. Someone found the episode and sent it to me. As of 06-19-2026, it’s available on the internet archive and can be seen by clicking here. To the person who sent me this — thank you — this is what keeps journalism alive. ♥

This is the man who mentored Paolo Zampolli. This is the man who told Zampolli to move to New York and start his own agency. Keep that name in mind as you read.

One of the women who complained eventually just quit. A federal lawsuit filed years later under New York’s Child Victims Act alleged that Casablancas and Marie literally competed with each other to see who could have sex with the most young models.

The lawsuit described the people running Elite as “the very adults responsible for taking care of these child models.”

John Casablancas died of cancer in 2013, meaning he never faced criminal charges or directly defended himself against these recent civil suits, though his estate and the agency’s legacy were severely implicated.

But the legal fight isn’t over. In late 2024, a U.S. federal appeals court brought Carré Otis’s lawsuit against Marie back to life after a lower court had thrown it out, clearing the way for a trial and keeping the heat on what’s left of Elite’s old leadership.

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Jean-Luc Brunel Got Caught in 1988 and Nothing Happened

Jean-Luc Brunel’s story might be the most enraging part of all of this, because the system had every chance to stop him and just... didn’t.

Brunel ran Karin Models in Paris starting in the late 1970s. He discovered Christy Turlington when she was 14. He discovered Sharon Stone and Monica Bellucci. He was also, according to nearly two dozen models who spoke to CBS, drugging and sexually assaulting the young women in his ‘care.’

Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel photographed together at Epstein’s isolated New Mexico property, Zorro Ranch.

In 1988, 60 Minutes aired a segment called “American Girls in Paris,” reported by Diane Sawyer. It was a seven-month investigation produced by Craig Pyes, a two-time Pulitzer winner. Five models went on camera to accuse Brunel of drugging them. One accused him of raping her while unconscious.

Pyes later said that hundreds of girls had been harassed or molested and that additional victims were too afraid to appear on television. Brunel’s agency had turned housing into a profit center, marking up rent by as much as 500 percent and weaponizing the debt to keep models trapped and compliant. The agency controlled the apartments, the visas, and the cash flow.

If you complained, you got deported. If you went public, your career was over.

So what happened after this explosive 60 Minutes investigation? Nothing.

French authorities launched no criminal investigation. Brunel denied everything and kept right on working. He co-founded a new company called Next Management Corporation with his brother in 1988. The agency launched the following year and became a legitimate player in the New York market.

Steven Mnuchin, Donald Trump, and Ivanka Trump.

And here’s a detail that should make your jaw drop. Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s former Treasury Secretary, was listed as the New York process agent for Next Management Corporation — the company tied to Jean-Luc Brunel, who the FBI would later name as an Epstein co-conspirator.

According to The Daily Beast, his name stayed on those records for over a decade. His office said he had no idea and didn’t remember meeting the Brunel brothers. Congress has never investigated it. There’s never even been a formal inquiry.

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Then Jeffrey Epstein Showed Up

Ghislaine Maxwell introduced Brunel to Epstein in the early 1990s. And if you understand what Epstein needed, you understand immediately why Brunel was so useful to him.

Authors Note: A significant number of the sources used in this piece required archive digging. Articles that were once publicly available have quietly disappeared from legacy outlet websites. Draw your own conclusions about why.

Epstein needed a constant supply of young, vulnerable, isolated women. Brunel ran modeling agencies full of exactly those women. It was a match made in hell.

In 2004, Epstein gave Brunel approximately one million dollars to launch MC2 Model Management, with offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv.

MC2 was reportedly a nod to Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², with the missing “E” standing for Epstein.

The agency had real clients like Nordstrom, Macy’s, and Target. But according to Virginia Giuffre, Epstein’s most prominent victim, MC2 was also functioning as a cover for sex trafficking.

Models were housed in Epstein-controlled apartments at 301 East 66th Street in Manhattan. That address appears in Epstein’s black book. It’s also listed many, many, many times in the Epstein files.

His brother, Mark Epstein owned the majority of units at 301 East 66th Street. But the building traces back to a transfer from Leslie Wexner, Jeffrey’s billionaire ‘patron’, in the early 1990s.

Nobody has fully explained why.

Despite Mark holding legal title, witnesses, building staff, and court documents all point to Jeffrey as the one actually running the place. He used it to house girls being trafficked through MC2, kept close to his mansion, in a building where his network controlled the staff and security. It’s also where he would house his associates — including Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak — when they would visit New York.

Here’s what doesn’t add up: why were Epstein’s guests staying in the same building where he was keeping trafficking victims?

Epstein didn't make careless mistakes with logistics. If he put someone in that building, there was a reason. Either he trusted them completely, wanted to surveil them, wanted them exposed to the operation, or wanted them on the hook.

The stupidest explanation is coincidence. Epstein did not do coincidence.

The numbers on Brunel are staggering. He appears in thousands of documents in the Epstein files database. He took at least 25 flights on Epstein’s private planes between 1998 and 2005. He had 10 different phone numbers listed in Epstein’s contacts. An FBI document from August 2019, unredacted just recently, officially designated Brunel as a co-conspirator in the Epstein investigation.

Giuffre testified under oath that Maxwell directed her to have sex with Brunel, and that Epstein bragged about sleeping with over a thousand of Brunel’s models. She also said that Brunel sent 12-year-old French girls to Epstein as a birthday present.

Giuffre, the most important witness in the Epstein case, died by a reported suicide in 2025. She never saw full accountability for the men she named.

Virginia Giuffre

Brunel was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in December 2020 while trying to board a flight to Senegal. French authorities charged him with rape of minors, sexual assault, and human trafficking. He was found hanging in his cell at La Santé Prison in February 2022. Ruled a suicide. Just like Epstein. In a prison. He was set to testify against Epstein and was secretly working with law enforcement before he died.

Right before trial. One of his victims, Thysia Huisman, said the circumstances were “so suspicious” and that she didn’t believe it.

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Paolo Zampolli: Who Is He, and How Does He Fit Into All of This?

Now we get to the part of this story that is still unfolding.

Paolo Zampolli. He is Trumps United States Special Representative for Global Partnerships as of March 11th, 2025.

And he didn’t come from nowhere. He was born in Milan in 1970 into serious money. His father ran a company that held the Italian licenses for Star Wars toys and the Easy-Bake Oven. The family owned one of the biggest houses on Ibiza, kept a castle outside Milan, and were related to the Agnellis, the dynasty behind Fiat and Ferrari. This is important context, because the people in this story don’t tend to come from nowhere either.

When Zampolli was 18, his father died in a skiing accident. He eventually sold the family business to a group connected to Silvio Berlusconi, who was later convicted in connection with sexual encounters with an underage girl. It was overturned. The appeals court ruling found that while he had paid a teenager for sex, there was no proof he knew she was a minor.

If you’re noticing a pattern, you should be.

John Casablancas was the one who pulled Zampolli into the modeling world. In 1994, Zampolli organized a Look of the Year contest for Casablancas on Ibiza. Press coverage later reported that underage girls had been flown to the event without their parents and given male chaperones. Shortly after, Casablancas told him to move to New York.

By the mid-1990s, Zampolli had launched ID Model Management in SoHo. The business model was the same one we keep seeing in this story: recruit young women from Eastern Europe and South America, sponsor their visas, house them in apartments he controlled, and make them financially dependent. Same structure, different name on the door.

One of his first signings was a Slovenian model named Melania Knauss. You may know her as Melania Trump.

The details are thin, but it’s reported that he spotted her in Milan in 1995, sponsored her visa in 1996, and brought her to New York. Then, in September 1998, he introduced her to Donald Trump at a Fashion Week party at the Kit Kat Club. That single introduction would make Zampolli one of the most connected people in Trump’s orbit for the next thirty years. Trump reportedly called him “My Paolo.”

Now here’s where it gets interesting.

According to investigative journalist Vicky Ward, who wrote the 2003 Vanity Fair profile of Epstein, Zampolli’s biggest commercial client during this period was Victoria’s Secret.

Victoria’s Secret was owned by Leslie Wexner, who was called before the House Oversight Committee in early 2026 to answer for his ties to Epstein. Wexner was Epstein’s primary financial backer. Ward described the whole network as almost impossibly tight, saying it was “wheels within wheels” and everybody was connected to everybody else.

She wasn’t wrong. Let’s talk about that:

Zampolli and Brunel were both named as defendants in a 2005 class-action lawsuit called Shelton v. Elite Model Management. ID Model Management and Paolo Zampolli appeared on the same defendant list as Karin Models LLC and Jean-Luc Brunel. Both were proteges of John Casablancas. Both operated in the same New York and Miami modeling world. A 1997 newspaper clipping from the Asbury Park Press places both of them at the same modeling showcase in Holmdel, New Jersey.

A fashion photographer named Clayton Nelson told French media he personally witnessed Brunel, Zampolli, and Trump following a model at a restaurant.

Then there’s Adriana Mucinska. This one is wild. Mucinska was a model signed to Zampolli’s ID Models. She was also, it turns out, a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “Core Four.”

The Core Four: Sarah Kellen, Adriana Ross, Nadia Marcinkova, and Lesley Groff.

That’s the inner circle of women who were Ghislaine Maxwell’s proteges and who actively lured young girls and women into Epstein’s orbit for profit.

In 2013, Zampolli co-founded the Sustainable Oceans Alliance with Maxwell’s TerraMar Project as a founding partner. TerraMar shut down days after Epstein’s arrest. Maxwell has since offered a full account of what she knows, but only if Trump grants her clemency. He hasn’t responded.

Buried in the January 2026 document release was an 11-page proffer agreement from a witness interviewed three days after Epstein’s arrest. Two things stood out. First, that Zampolli was trying to buy Elite Models with Epstein as his partner. Second, that it was Epstein, not Zampolli, who introduced Melania to Trump. That’s sworn testimony. Lying under a proffer agreement carries up to five years in federal prison.

Zampolli called it fake news. He has never testified under oath about any of it. No committee has subpoenaed him.

Meanwhile, the DOJ has been caught over-redacting names. The administration announced an investigation into Democratic ties to Epstein and has opened no known investigation into its own. Across Europe, people are being arrested and forced to resign. In Washington, they’re still being given titles and security clearances. No hearing has examined the modeling industry’s role in the Epstein operation. The 1990s agencies were not a backdrop to this story.

They were the infrastructure. And the men who built them have never had to answer for it publicly. The only real question left is whether anyone is going to make them.

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There is one more detail about Zampolli’s personal life that has received almost no mainstream attention but may be the most chilling thread in this entire story.

And I want to give a huge shout out to bekah day who covered this EXTENSIVELY on her Substack, and who MUCH of this information on Zampolli comes from.

Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian-born woman, was pursued by Zampolli beginning when she was just 15 years old. He was about 16 years her senior. He sent her gifts, offered her modeling work, and by the time she was around 17, they were together “romantically.”

That was around the same age that Amanda appears in Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs. She shares a child with Zampolli. She has told people close to her that he was abusive throughout their relationship, and photographic evidence of bruises has been documented. In September 2024, she filed for custody of their child and child support, launching an aggressive legal battle against him.

Then, in June 2025, Amanda was arrested in Miami after an anonymous CrimeStopper tip led to a sting operation at the med-spa where she worked as a receptionist. She was immediately placed on an immigration hold.

She sat in ICE custody for approximately three and a half months and was deported to Brazil without due process, right as the national conversation about Epstein was intensifying again.

They followed the Jean-Luc Brunel and Epstein tactics. Deporting their victims.

Zampolli has admitted to having Amanda’s name flagged through Homeland Security, a system that would alert him if she tried to leave the country or travel.

Her mother, Tania, filed for custody of the grandchild in New York Supreme Court on September 5, 2025, and requested a restraining order against Zampolli.

That also has never been investigated by any “main stream” journalist at a major outlet or any member of Congress. Only independent journalists. Because we aren’t owned by the ultra-wealthy predator class.

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The System Was the Point

Here’s what I need you to understand about this whole thing. It was never just about four bad guys doing bad things. It was about a system that was engineered to produce exactly these outcomes, and that system was operating right inside one of the most visible industries on earth.

Four modeling agencies ran parallel operations during the 1990s and 2000s with almost identical playbooks. Elite Model Management under Casablancas. ID Model Management under Zampolli. MC2 Model Management under Brunel, bankrolled by Epstein. And Trump Model Management, founded by Donald Trump in 1999, which brought approximately 250 foreign models to the United States on H-1B visas according to Reuters. A CNN investigation found the agency appeared to have violated immigration law, and former models alleged they were told to lie to customs officials.

Same visa tricks. Same model apartments. Same financial dependency. Same isolation of young foreign women in a city where they had no safety net.

The locations where all of these people converged are documented. Trump Tower, where Brunel rented an apartment. Mar-a-Lago, where Virginia Giuffre was recruited by Maxwell at age 16 while working as a locker room attendant. Cipriani restaurants in Manhattan, where Zampolli was a daily regular and where the proprietor, Giuseppe Cipriani, appears in Epstein’s black book. The famous photograph of Trump, Melania, Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell together at Mar-a-Lago, taken on February 12, 2000, captures the social proximity of all of these worlds at their peak.

Now, I want to be precise about what is established and what is not.

Paolo Zampolli has not been charged with any crime related to the Epstein case. He does not appear in Epstein’s black book or on any flight logs. No sworn testimony by Zampolli about Epstein exists in public court records. These are facts.

But he was mentored by John Casablancas, a documented predator of teenage girls. He operated in the exact same professional ecosystem as Jean-Luc Brunel, a designated FBI co-conspirator.

One of his own models ended up in Epstein’s inner circle. An FBI witness swore under oath that he was trying to buy a modeling agency with Epstein as his business partner. He built a charity with Ghislaine Maxwell. He was accused in a federal RICO complaint of steering victim evidence to Harvey Weinstein’s defense team. And the introduction that bought him thirty years of access to the most powerful man in the country is now contested by a federal document suggesting Epstein was the one who actually made it happen.

He currently works for the U.S. government. Nobody has subpoenaed him. Nobody has asked him a single question under oath.

And he is not the only one. Alexander Acosta, Trump’s first-term Labor Secretary, was the federal prosecutor who handed Epstein the plea deal of a lifetime in 2008, allowing him to dodge federal sex trafficking charges and walk after 13 months. A federal judge later ruled that deal was illegal. When the January 2026 document dump dropped, it included the indictment Acosta’s office had ready to go, 56 pages, dozens of counts. It was finished. It was sitting there. Acosta buried it and later joined the Cabinet of the president who promised to release the Epstein files.

Why do so many people connected to Epstein and other convicted sex offenders keep turning up in U.S. government positions?

Three million pages of documents are still being analyzed. French prosecutors have reopened investigations. People across Europe are being arrested and forced to resign. In Washington, the people with documented Epstein connections are still getting titles, security clearances, and government salaries. At some point that stops being a coincidence and starts being a pattern.

The full story isn’t finished yet. But what we already know should be enough to make anyone ask why nobody in a position of authority seems particularly interested in finishing it. Or even looking into it.

Four men operated four modeling agencies with the same methods in the same city at the same time, moving in and out of each other’s social circles, sharing the same restaurants and the same parties and sometimes the same young women. They are all linked to the President of the United States of America. The fashion industry treated it like an open secret. The legal system barely touched it. And many men involved are still working, still in a position of power, and have never had to answer a single question under oath about any of it.

Maybe it’s time someone asked. Let it be us.

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