Melania's Shadow: Who Is Paolo Zampolli?
EXCLUSIVE: We set out to find why Melania Trump let her best friend be deported. What we found was a likely Russian spy cell — run for years inside the United Nations.
For twenty years, Paolo Zampolli has stood just outside the spotlight — scouting models, arranging visas, slipping in and out of the Trump orbit, and holding a diplomatic title that opens doors. He’s the man who brought Melania Knauss to America, the friend she texts “all the time,” and the diplomat who, this spring, used his government credentials to deport the mother of his own son while Melania Trump watched from the White House.
Amanda Ungaro was still in her pajamas when ten uniformed officers barged into her home in Aventura, Florida. They stood the Brazilian model-turned-medical-spa-owner against the wall and photographed her. Her son had already left for school. They took her computer and phone — every device in the house. She says she knew before they finished who orchestrated the raid.
“Right away, I thought, this is Paolo,” she told Narativ.
Paolo Zampolli is a former modeling agent who ran ID Models. He is also Ungaro’s former partner and the father of her child.
Police charged her with practicing medicine without a license at a Miami med spa, then added “fraud” and “conspiracy.” She had the license. She employed a physician assistant and nurses. The mayor of Aventura attended the opening and posed for photos. ICE took her into custody anyway and held her for three and a half months. A prosecutor tried twice to send her to prison. In January, the United States put Amanda Ungaro on a plane to Brazil, the country from which she was recruited as a 13-year-old, and now she is returning as a grown woman.
She is not a cartel boss. She is not the criminal the President talks about deporting. She is the former partner of Paolo Zampolli, United States Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, and the mother of his son. So I keep coming back to one question: why did the United States government need this woman gone — and why did Melania Trump, her best friend of twenty years, let it happen?
We set out to answer that. The trail did not end at a friendship. It ended at the United Nations.
The man who could do it
Paolo Zampolli built an international pipeline for models. He scouted women worldwide, flew them to New York, put them up in apartments he controlled, and sponsored their work visas — sometimes, according to people close to him, securing other kinds of visas as well. He founded ID Models in 1997 and ran that operation for years. From 2004 to 2006, he worked for Donald Trump as Director of International Development. By March of this year, he was sworn in as Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, traveling to the Gulf, Central Asia, and the Vatican, posing alongside heads of state.
Zampolli’s most notable success remains Melania Trump, whom he scouted in Slovenia when her last name was Knauss. He brought her to America the same way he brought dozens of other women — scouted abroad, flown in, housed, sponsored, and papered. “We used whatever she did before to get her a visa,” he told CBS in 2016. That woman is now the First Lady of the United States.
Zampolli claims he introduced Melania to Trump at a Kit Kat Club party in 1998. The Epstein files tell a different story, and they tell it twice.
A former model who worked as Epstein’s assistant sat down with the FBI in West Palm Beach in 2019, under a proffer agreement and the penalty of perjury. She told them Epstein made the introduction. Epstein was at Zampolli’s agency during a casting, she said, going through the model portfolios, and he stopped on a photograph of Melania in only swim bottoms. Zampolli and Epstein were trying to buy Elite Models together.
The second document is an email. On election night, November 9, 2016, a friend wrote to congratulate Epstein (Bates EFTA01062797) and reminded him of an old weekend: “I remember flying back with Donald on his plane the first weekend I went to visit you in Florida was the weekend he met Melania and he kept on coming out of the bedroom saying ‘wow what a hot piece of ass.’” The writer names Melania. The writer places the weekend Trump met her at Jeffrey Epstein’s Florida home. Donald Trump met his future wife inside Epstein’s orbit — not at some chance party — and Zampolli took the credit for it anyway, embedding himself deeper in both circles.
He has stood beside Melania throughout her American life — the man who brought her in, the friend at the family table, and the confidant who followed her into the administration. Officially, he’s a diplomat: an ambassador for Dominica, a Caribbean nation whose government sells real passports to anyone who can pay the fee. He once offered Ghislaine Maxwell “real passports.” He represents a country that sells them.
“He’s not that close to Trump,” Ungaro said. “He’s close to Melania. They are very good friends. They text each other, like, all the time. And there’s something behind, very big there.” For years, through inaugurations and holidays, Ungaro and Zampolli took two of the few seats at the Trump family table. “Melania doesn’t have friends,” someone told Ungaro when she asked why. “She likes us a lot.”
Some people call him her friend. Some call him her former lover. The people who read the Russian names around him call him her handler. Maybe he’s some mix the public has never been allowed to sort out.
What Zampolli could’t imagine was that Amanda would stumble on trove of e-mails Zampolli sent her and which she had never read, until…
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