“Be careful. He is trouble. Lots.”
Jeffrey Epstein wrote that about Paolo Zampolli on February 15, 2011, in an email the Justice Department released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Fifteen years later, a woman named Victoria Drake put the line in a federal complaint and, beneath it, described what she says the trouble looked like.
Drake filed the suit on the night of September 3 in the Southern District of New York. It runs eleven pages, names one defendant, and asks a jury to find that Zampolli — Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, the man who by his own account introduced Trump to Melania Knauss in 1998 — drugged and raped her in the basement of his townhouse at 119 East 17th Street on October 7, 2023. Judge Ronnie Abrams has the case. Summons went out September 4. Zampolli has not yet answered.
Narativ has spent most of this year on Zampolli. On June 12, Amanda Ungaro — his partner of two decades and the mother of his son — sat with me live and described how ICE took her into custody last June and held her for months until she gave up and left the country. We reported then, in “Melania’s Shadow” and “The Spy at the First Lady’s Side,” on the pattern around him: the modeling agencies, the Epstein-era auction bid for Elite, the 2013 nonprofit with Ghislaine Maxwell, the diplomatic titles handed down by Trump. Drake’s lawyers, Jesse Weinstein and Max Bracero of Arcé Law Group, have now put that same pattern in a court filing, under penalty of Rule 11, with Bates numbers.
That is the new thing. A plaintiff’s complaint is one side of a story. But this one cites the government’s own Epstein documents by page — EFTA00173834, where a correspondent calls Zampolli “sleazy”; EFTA02618736, a list the filing describes as purported “killers” with his name on it; EFTA01836539, the “trouble” email — and it names Ungaro’s deportation, in paragraph 3, as an act of a presidential appointee using his office against the mother of his child. Nobody has sworn to that in a federal pleading before.
The full complaint, all eleven pages, is attached below for paid subscribers. Read it yourself.
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