The Model, the Envoy, and the Plane
Leaked emails tie Trump’s Special Envoy to Ghislaine Maxwell — and to a modeling world that doubled as a spying and blackmail operation
New York in the 1990s belonged to the men who owned the models. Not the photographers, not the designers — the agents and their financiers, a small set of middle-aged men who ran the agencies by day and hunted their own rosters by night. John Casablancas of Elite Models judged teenage contestants at Donald Trump’s Plaza Hotel, represented Ivanka at 15, and married a 17-year-old Look of the Year finalist. Jean-Luc Brunel of Karin Models had already been the subject of a 1997 “60 Minutes” report on drugging and raping the young women he scouted. Trump founded his own agency in 1999. Jeffrey Epstein financed Brunel’s next one — MC2, $1 million, offices in New York, Miami, and Tel Aviv. An industry insider decoded the name for Page Six in 2007: “E equals MC squared… E equals Epstein. He just thinks everyone is too dumb to figure it out.”
These men were not businessmen who happened to employ beautiful women. They were a playboy set who built the business so the women would have to come to them. The agencies supplied the visas, the apartments, the castings, the parties — and the owners worked the supply. Elite executives allegedly kept a scoreboard: younger scored higher, virgins scored bonus points. The girls came from Brazil, from the former Soviet republics, from anywhere a 13-year-old could be promised a runway and put on a plane.
The agencies served a second function the runway never showed. They were collection operations. A model on an agency visa could be moved across any border, placed in any room, seated beside any billionaire or minister — and what happened in that room could be recorded. Epstein monetized exactly that, and his recruiters came off the same rosters: Adriana Ross from Zampolli’s ID Models, who told the FBI she was recruited to Epstein’s operation through the agency itself; Kira Dikhtyar, an Epstein victim turned recruiter who trained as a gymnast under Alina Kabaeva, Vladimir Putin’s companion, before Zampolli installed her at the United Nations. An email in the released Epstein files, sender redacted, describes Zampolli flatly as an associate of Russian oligarchs and Russian recruiters.
One of those planes was Epstein’s Boeing 727. In June 2002, a 16-year-old Brazilian model boarded it beside her agent, Jean-Luc Brunel — the man who had recruited her out of Brazil at 13 and who would die in a Paris jail cell twenty years later, awaiting trial for the rape of minors, under the same circumstances as Epstein himself. The Department of Justice released that flight log in 2021. The girl’s name is Amanda Ungaro.
The fourth man in the set was Paolo Zampolli, an Italian agent mentored by Casablancas from the age of 15, who sold his late father’s toy company to Silvio Berlusconi and moved to New York in 1995 to found ID Models. Zampolli introduced Melania Knauss to Trump in 1998 — by his own telling — and has been in business with Trump ever since. Today he is the United States Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. He travels with JD Vance. He sits inside the administration that controls the Epstein files.
Last June, Amanda Ungaro — by then the mother of Zampolli’s son, after a 20-year relationship she says began when she was a minor — was arrested in Miami, held in ICE custody for three and a half months, and deported to Brazil, the country she was trafficked out of as a teenager. She was deported without trial, days before a Florida court was expected to grant her full custody of their child. Zampolli, she says, was conveniently in her neighborhood when the arrest happened, ready to take the boy. The cell phone she was arrested with in Florida now pings at Zampolli’s diplomatic residence in New York.
Zampolli has denied wrongdoing. He has not been charged with any crime. But the paper trail Ungaro left behind has started to surface — and it contradicts him on the record.
What follows is what the emails show.
PAID SUBSCRIBERS CAN ACCESS A DEEPER DIVE BELOW THE PAYWALL
