Early Saturday morning, on a couch tucked into a quaint corner of my best friend’s Manhattan apartment, I woke to a text from Leslie informing me that Jean-Luc Brunel was found dead overnight.
“Fuck dude, hanging in his cell” she wrote.
I sat up in shock, immediately scouring news online, uncovering details of a suicide eerily similar to Epstein’s. Down to the shredded bed sheets and broken cell cameras leaving us no trace of the last hours leading up to his death.
The timing of it, almost like a permanent surrender in the wake of Virginia Giuffre’s recent legal win. With her lawsuits against Brunel, still lingering in the shadows.
My suspicions peaked immediately. Understandably, considering the outrageous amount of coincidences we’ve been forced to digest up to this point, throughout a 20 year investigation where the more you learn, the deeper you dive, the more mysteries you’re forced to contend with. Anyone remotely familiar with the case though knows the death of Jean-Luc means shutting the door on yet another vital witness who possessed valuable insight into the inner workings of Maxwell and Epstein’s elaborate crime ring.
Brunel himself had been in jail, placed under formal investigation since 2020, accused of sexual harassment and the rape of girls aged between 15 and 18 in France. His name had been raised multiple times throughout the trial - specifically in reference to the three 12 yr old sisters he purchased as a birthday gift to Epstein on a flight Virginia Giuffre detailed in a 2016 deposition.
She said that the French girls, believed to be triplets, were a gift from Epstein's longtime acquaintance and frequent guest Jean-Luc Brunel.
'Jeffrey bragged after he met them that they were 12-year-olds and flown over from France because they're really poor over there, and their parents needed the money or whatever the case is and they were absolutely free to stay and flew out,' Giuffre said.
She said she saw the three girls with her own eyes and that Epstein had repeatedly described to her how the girls had massaged him and performed oral sex on him. And were flown back to France the next day.
“He went on to tell me how Brunel bought them in Paris from their parents, offering them the usual sums of money, visas, and modeling career prospects.”
“Laughing the whole way through, Jeffrey thought it was absolutely brilliant how easily money seduced all walks of life, nothing or no one that couldn't be bought.”
Jean-Luc pictured with an unnamed 15 yr old girl in Paris
Brunel’s role as Epstein’s lead business associate was instrumental in keeping the ring expanding and evolving. As third in line to Ghislaine, he was responsible for extending Maxwell’s initial design, fishing for local high girls (teenage victims that typically graduated to co-conspirators) into a polished, worldwide operation using a well respected modeling agency (first his own, then the one funded by Epstein) as a direct pipeline, offering up struggling models as sex slaves to clients on a global scale.
So that everywhere Epstein and his friends traveled, there were throngs of young women at their whim. Lured by extensive connections and the promise of a big break in an industry they were brand new to.
In one model’s diary, documenting her experience in France during the early 90s, she wrote in reference to her run in with Brunel “the casting couch is very real.”
With a career that spanned more than 40 years, Brunel had a reputation for pulling in heavy weight talents, discovering some of the biggest names in modeling, including Milla Jovovich, Sharon Stone, Monica Bellucci, Christy Turlington, Emma Heming and Angie Everhart.
He also had a reputation as a reckless “coke head” prone to drugging girls by lacing drinks at parties. Often spotted carousing around Paris nightclubs alongside Hollywood elites like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski and Francis Ford Coppola.
As one young man remarked in a reddit thread I stumbled upon, regarding Brunel’s reputation:
“My ex gf was a fashion model in the nineties with one of the biggest NY agencies. She worked constantly until she turned down an ‘opportunity’ to go to dinner with a Hollywood star who was at least forty years older than her (The Joker)
Celebs would go through the agency lookbook and choose a girl as if it were some kind of catalog. I’m sure it still goes on.”
As Giuffre stated “These were what seemed like really nice people with not so nice intentions setting an impression of how the dignified wealth play and behind closed doors they had as much civilized manners as a barbaric chimpanzee in heat.”
“Giving a girl a step up in finances by teaching them their only worth is what lay between their legs, us girls all were the same in the end, regardless of what country we come from, what language we spoke or our cultural differences, we were all being used for one thing alone, our youthful looks and beautiful bodies.”
The stories I came across, personal accounts of incidents involving Brunel, shared in obscure articles and comment threads revealed exactly how prolific his preying of underage girls had been, advanced and protected by an army of industry enablers.
As evidence by another online woman’s account:
“I remember my Ukrainian teacher in Saudi Arabia, she told us that she once worked with Jean-Luc Brunel as an 18 year old model in late 90s. She told us why we shouldn’t or consider to be in the modeling industry because of men like Brunel. She gave us a 20 minute biography description of her life as a model she started at the age of 16 and quit modeling at the age of 20. I remember her telling us that when she was at the age 18, there was a Givenchy runway show after they finished their part, Brunel would take many models to an afterparty filled with old wealthy men and they would chose approximately 4 to five girls for each. The moment she knew she wanted to quit working with Brunel when she saw her fellow friend being drugged and escorted to the hotel suite with 2 old men. I remember her comparing the modeling industry as human trafficking. She quit modeling and proceeded her life to study at a university and later-on married a Jordanian man and worked in Saudi Arabia as an international teacher. If only i had something to contact with her, I would’ve got more information about Jean-Luc Brunel.”
Oddly enough, my recent visit to New York was originally intended as a work trip. Specifically planned to interview a victim of Epstein’s I’d been in communication with on IG for a couple months. A model, now in her late 20s, who had recently moved back to the East Coast from LA. Her story reaching back to 2013, exposing a grim glimpse into how the trafficking operated at the tail end of Epstein's & Brunel’s reign.
Involving real estate all around New York City. Apartment buildings housing models signed to his agency, set up to accommodate lunch time appointments for high profile business men, brokers, bankers, politicians, and celebrities. The city’s wealthiest men, prone to dropping by at any hour of the day to have sex with these young women whom, she claims, were often times drugged and held against their will.
Girls were recruited as models from around the world and brought to the US to live in the building owned by MC2, the modeling company run by Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel, financed by Epstein beginning in 2003.
Epstein “was the one who said who stays in what apartment,” Maritza Vasquez stated, a bookkeeper for MC2, in a 2010 deposition made public last year.
The details of this woman’s story, how she became engulfed by Epstein’s circle, are downright horrifying. In our earliest communications she was quick to confirm what I’ve always suspected, that everything saw exposed in Maxwell’s trial was only a fraction of a far darker, wide reaching reality.
The the tip of the iceberg, she called it.
She said she was wiling to meet with me because she appreciated that I was still dedicated to unraveling and writing about aspects and key players involved in the trafficking when so many major outlets seemed more than happy to put the story to bed with Maxwell’s conviction.
But as my NY visit inched closer, she had a change of heart. Second thoughts on telling her story, and going public with the traumas she was still attempting to heal from.
In one statement I found online, on a rare instance where she opened up about her abuse, the inner struggles she was battling were obvious:
“I’d like to preface this story with a glimpse of what reality is like daily dealing with the unfathomable amount of pain, suffering and fear from the onset trauma of unfortunate events that came after meeting Jeffrey Epstein. I have become afraid of humankind, expecting that maybe they will be the next person that ruins my life, that they will be the next to take my freedom, that they sense I am vulnerable and are plotting their deceit against me. I spend my days deeply alone, replaying images in my head on repeat, completely incapable of imagining a life where I am truly happy, safe and loved”
Jean-Luc was introduced to Epstein by Ghislaine Maxwell, the pair described “thick as thieves”
All the details involved in this particular victim’s experience in 2013 lined up with previous claims I’d read from models stemming back decades. Of being seduced by agents promising contracts, groomed by industry insiders, drugged and forced into sex work using threats and violence.
What’s worse, is that major alarms were sounded 20 years prior. First, in a 60 minutes episode that aired in 1988, investigating claims of sexual assaults by Jean Luc Brunel while he was head of Karin Models. And again in an undercover BBC documentary exposing the seedy underbelly of the industry, centering on the accusations trailing Brunel's indiscretions.
What hasn’t been as widely discussed amidst the looming sex scandals is Brunel’s close ties to Israel. With head offices in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and long standing rumors of intimate involvement with Israeli intelligence, he, like many in the Maxwell family, was most likely working for higher forces all along.
As one reporter noted “whenever Isabel Maxwell walks into a room in Israel everyone stands for her. The power these people hold is evident on these trips.”
THE DESTROYED KAREN MULDER INTERVIEW
The most disturbing footnote I stumbled upon circles back to Karen Mulder. The supermodel notorious for her regular appearances in Victoria Secret spreads and Chanel catwalks, who tried back in 2002 to tell the world exactly the horrors happening behind the scenes on a French TV set in an episode discussing the documentary on the BBC. A recording that was ultimately destroyed. With all evidence of her claims erased.
On October 31st, 2002, Mulder was a guest on a French program called Tout le Monde en Parle. During the interview she revaled that she has been raped continuously since she was two years old, until the previous month of April. Claiming that both she and other models had suffered systematic sexual exploitation by her agency - the prestigious Elite - and extended her accusations to high profile dignitaries in French society: politicians, policemen, businessmen, Jean-Luc Brunel, Gerald Marie, and even Prince Albert of Monaco, accusing him of having raped her too.
She also told the audience drugs were forced on her, that executives “hypnotized her to abuse her” and coerced her into having sex with various individuals in exchange for securing contracts.
“All those who betrayed me were people I loved very much. Then I realized how far the conspiracy went,” She said on the recording, “People from the government and the police were involved, and used to abuse Elite agency girls using hypnotic tricks.”
"They have tried to kidnap me and poison me," she said at one point. "All the people that my family frequented were pedophiles. Now I realize that there is a whole plot around me, it is huge. These are people in the government and in the police who use girls from modeling agencies, even the best known ... I was a toy that everyone wanted to have. ”
Her revelations on set were dismissed as obvious signs of a faltering mental state.
“After five minutes I realized she was sick," the presenter, Thierry Ardisson, told the Libération newspaper after. "I stopped the interview and we decided not to broadcast it, even if it means being accused of censorship. It would have been super exclusive. Perhaps there were some true things in his testimony, but it was obvious that she was not in her normal state.”
As one staff member recalled: “Between denials, cross-accusations, and discussions of suspicious investigative journalism on a morbid topic in and of itself, there was undoubtedly much to discuss with Karen Mulder at Tout le Monde in Parle, but the result exceeded expectations. In addition to never emitting the fragment in which she launched powerful accusations, the tape was destroyed. However, the program was recorded with a live audience, and although we were instructed to remain silent about what we had witnessed, rumors soon began to circulate on the Internet and emails reached the newsrooms explaining what had just happened.”
When Mulder left the set, she allegedly told one of the reporters "You are also part of the plot."
Three days after the aborted interview, another journalist managed to interview Mulder once again. Where she repeated to him everything she had said on the show. That a member of her family had sexually abused her when she was two years old, and introduced her to others of the same sick nature in their inner circle.
In the end, most media outlets declined to buy the interview, but VSD magazine accepted and the model's words came to light the first week of January 2002 before the scandal was indefinitely squashed.
Days later Mulder was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and sedated for five months in a facility paid for by Gerald Marie, one of the men she had accused of rape, ex-husband to Linda Evangelista, and former Elite Model president featured in the BBC documentary for offering money to a 15-year-old model in exchange for sex.
Mulder's father was quick to blame his daughter's “outburst” on a cocaine addiction combined with poor diet.
Via VOUGUE, 2002
"I'm certain cocaine caused Karen's desperate situation," her father told the Daily Express. "When we visited her in Paris we could see for ourselves. Everywhere there were notebooks full of her tangled thoughts and mad ideas. She was accusing everyone and everything. It was awful to read them. She needs to remain in hospital because she is a danger to herself." Mulder adds that Karen's eating habits must have contributed to her fragile mental state. "It hasn't helped that she has never eaten the way she should do," he goes on. "Even as a child she used to throw the milk she was supposed to drink with her meal away in the plants." But Mulder, who currently commutes with his wife Marijke between their home in Holland and the hospital, hopes that Karen will make a full recovery. "What she's living through now is temporary," he said, explaining that she is no longer confined to bed and has taken up her childhood hobby of painting. "Slowly, she'll come to peace."
When Mulder was released, she retracted all accusations. Even issuing a public apology to Prince Albert.
A year later, she nearly died of a drug overdose.
Her secrets and accusations did die, in the media, anyway. Which seems to be the same standard upheld today, covering up for high profile abusers in log redactions and carefully calculated trial testimonies.
The only difference being, with another cell hanging, Ghislaine Maxwell is now head gatekeeper of them all.
Having been a model in the 90s this doesn’t surprise me. Most times you are treated like objects meant to bend and adapt and do whatever you are told. If you don’t have good, strong family support it’s easy to fall into traps of partying etc. to get close to people who could advance your career. In Milan especially the party promoter scene I saw a lot of girls get in trouble so I can imagine it get even worse for what I didn’t see because I didn’t get involved with all that. You didn’t get work if your booker or agency didn’t like you so pleasing them by showing up to parties, events, dressing a certain way etc is all part of that.
Oh how I can't wait for this all to come crumbling down...