Amanda Ungaro spent three and a half months in ICE custody before she asked a judge to deport her to Brazil — not because she’d done anything, she says, but because she wanted out of the facilities. On Narativ Live, in her first long on-camera interview, she laid out who she believes put her there: Paolo Zampolli, the man she calls the father of her child, the model scout credited with introducing Melania to Donald Trump, and the president’s longest-running friend.
That is where a custody fight becomes a national-security story.
The setup. Zampolli, by Ungaro’s account, kept her for two decades without easy access to her own passport. When she finally left him, she says, a custody battle over their son turned vicious — and charges followed, including an allegation she’d faked a medical license. She denies it. Zev’s read, laid out on the show: the charges were a pretext to mark her as a criminal so ICE could remove her. Ten officers came in the morning. She lost the custody fight, lost the country, and now sits in Brazil while Zampolli — appointed by Trump to an “ambassador for global partnerships” role — stays close to the First Lady. Ungaro calls him “Melania’s shadow.”
The question Melania won’t answer. Ungaro says she appealed directly to the First Lady, who acted shocked and then did nothing. Zev’s point landed flat and hard: one phone call to Homeland Security from Melania Trump could have ended the detention in minutes. It never came. So either the First Lady let her self-described best friend be deported, or she had a reason to want her gone. Ungaro and Melania traveled the same road — models pulled out of Brazil and Slovakia through the same agency pipeline that Ellie Leonard describes as modeling at the front and something darker behind it.
The Russians in the frame. Zev’s investigation, as he described it, found Zampolli’s orbit thick with Kremlin-linked figures — three people he ties to Russia’s FSB, a woman named Svetlana Pozhidaevawho also worked for Jeffrey Epstein, and Sergei Belyakov , a former Russian deputy economics minister Zev calls Epstein’s “Russian handler,” who signed off on one of their U.S. visas. A sports envoy and a Dominican Republic posting, Zev argued, are thin cover for an intelligence cell parked inside the United Nations, moving people on diplomatic passports. Parnas, who lived inside Trump’s world as the operator sent to “do the dirty work,” said he never heard Zampolli’s name in those rooms — but he remembers the era, the Miami–New York corridor, and the women being moved through it.
The pipeline. Leonard walked through the machinery: Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 agency as a front to bring girls into the country, fake receipts to convince Epstein the agency earned its keep when it never turned a real dollar, and the O-1 “Einstein” visa used to import them — Epstein himself signing off, insisting everyone arrive “legally.” She cited the unredacted Maritza Vasquez deposition naming girls of 13, 14 and 15 out of Brazil, and the people who ran the visa program and, she notes, still work in it. She pointed to a model brought in at 14 though listed as 18, escaped, retrieved, groomed. And she pointed at the money: the JP Morgan litigation in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where investigators found 134 accounts opened for Eastern European girls — funded by Epstein, drained by no one but him. Parnas filled in the period detail that makes it all possible: pre-9/11, he says, a real U.S. passport went for $10,000.
The survivors’ revolt. The night’s second break came from Parnas. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s new book reportedly draws on audio from a secured room — transcripts of JD Vance and the FBI director weighing the Insurrection Act, Parnas says, around the question of how to bury the Epstein files and shield Trump, at the same stretch when Todd Blanche was set to meet Ghislaine Maxwell before her transfer. More than a dozen survivors, led by Lisa Phillips, signed a statement after learning the material had been held for a book rather than handed to investigators. Leonard’s timeline cuts to the bone: if the reporters had the tapes shortly after the meeting, that knowledge existed before Maxwell got her proffer and was moved. “Their trauma is not content,” the survivors wrote. “The truth must come out now.”
Zev kept the frame steady all hour: this is what independent reporting catches that the legacy press sits on — and what it costs the people waiting for the truth. A part two is coming, on Ungaro, on Zampolli, and on the intimidation campaign the three of them say is now running against them on social media.
Editor’s note: The claims about Zampolli, the Trumps, and the figures named above were made by Ungaro, Parnas, Leonard, and in Narativ’s reporting; Narativ has not independently corroborated every one. Melania Trump has publicly denied any relationship with Epstein. Those named have not responded.
Subscribe to Narativ for the rest of this investigation — part two lands next week.
Thank you Dana DuBois, Cat: Poli-Psych, Lyudmila and Daniel, Cheech Previti, Caro Henry, and many others for tuning into my live video with Lev Parnas and Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app.
