Amanda Ungaro spent twenty years inside the world the Epstein files only sketch. On Narativ Live, in her first live interview since the Trump administration deported her, she walked Zev through it — the plane, the agencies, the United Nations passport trade, and a First Lady she says watched it all happen.
The Plane
Ungaro was 16, a working model recruited out of Brazil at 13, when her agent Jean-Luc Brunel told her they’d catch “a friend’s plane” to a New York job. She boarded Epstein’s 727 and counted close to thirty girls — 14, 15, 16 years old, sitting on laps, worked by Ghislaine Maxwell “like best friends.” “They don’t look like models,” she told Brunel. “They look like students.” When they landed in New Jersey, Brunel tossed her a small bag and told her to put it in her purse. She realized it was drugs and threw it back. He threw it again. She threw it back again. She never saw Epstein after that day — but her name was on the manifest the DOJ released in 2021, beside Brunel’s.
The Agreement
The interview’s most consequential thread ran through the East Wing. Zampolli’s claim to fame — that he introduced Melania to Donald Trump in 1998 — is, Ungaro said, a story he maintains by arrangement. “The investigators, they have proof it was Jeffrey Epstein” who made the introduction, she said. Zampolli’s reward for keeping the official version alive: access. He is close to Melania, not Trump — “they text each other all the time.” He asked the First Lady for an ambassadorship — Paris, London, or Rome — but, as Ungaro put it, a man like Zampolli could never pass a security clearance. The consolation prize was Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, a title with no apparent duties beyond travel and photographs with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. When Melania made her extraordinary unprompted statement in April denying any relationship with Epstein, Ungaro believes the First Lady was preempting her — responding to a post Ungaro had put online days earlier.
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