Did a Miami-based modeling agency fuel Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘machine of abuse’?
The yellow sign for MC2 Model Management is still posted in a second-floor window overlooking Lincoln Road. It’s an echo of the modeling mecca years, when South Beach was like walking into a Calvin Klein underwear ad, with head-turning men and women on every corner, and photo crews lined up on the sand.
The office has been locked for at least two years, tenants say, and the parade of aspiring cover girls has ceased.
Here Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel created the boutique firm MC2, years before Epstein’s arrest on charges of sex-trafficking minors. What better pipeline than a modeling agency that would recruit young girls dreaming of a glamorous career and provide a stream of slender bodies, one after the other, as if they were strutting down Epstein’s personal catwalk?
The underage girls from Royal Palm Beach High, shopping malls and trailer parks enticed to Epstein’s waterfront estate to give him massages — massages that turned into sexual assaults — weren’t the Palm Beach multimillionaire’s only victims. He also had an appetite for models, and Brunel fed that appetite.
Brunel launched the careers of famous models for 40 years in Paris, New York and Miami, placing them on Vogue covers and haute couture runways. But he shared Epstein’s obsession for sex with young women, and knew that the men who ran the fashion industry could take advantage of the women and girls whose faces sold the clothes, according to court records, sworn depositions, witness testimony and new interviews by the Miami Herald.
Epstein, who financed Brunel’s MC2 investment with a $1 million line of credit, died at age 66 in his Manhattan jail cell on Aug. 10 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. His death, ruled a suicide by hanging, has led prosecutors to look at others in his orbit who could be considered enablers, which would seem to include Brunel, 72.
“Let me assure you this case will continue on against anyone who was complicit with Epstein. Any co-conspirators should not rest easy,” Attorney General William Barr said in the aftermath of Epstein’s death.
The prominent French agent and “scouting tsunami,” according to his MC2 bio, has gone underground, first in Brazil, one of his favorite hunting grounds for poor, tall 13- and 14-year-olds, and now possibly in Paris, where he has a reputation as a cocaine-snorting playboy who exploited models, accusations he has denied.
In the fashion capital of the world, he is called “le fantome,” the ghost.
Brunel’s whereabouts were also unknown when FBI agents delivered a subpoena seeking his testimony to the MC2 office in Miami in July, agency manager Jeff Fuller said.
“It’s incredible that neither Jean-Luc nor Jeffrey Epstein is in prison,” said Zoë Brock, who was 17 when her home, or “mother” agency in New Zealand sent her to Paris in 1991 to work for Brunel. “They were made for each other. They were united in their perverse needs.’’
When she first met the Frenchman, she said he propositioned her and shoved a mirror lined with cocaine at her, saying: “You know, Zoë, we are going to ‘ave to ‘ave sex one of zeeze days.”
“He was a vile little garden gnome who forced himself on the girls he was supposed to protect,’’ Brock told the Herald.
To Courtney Powell Soerensen, it was inevitable that Brunel and Epstein, whom she never met, would find each other.
“Epstein had to have his slimy peons and Brunel was the ideal person to do the job,” said Soerensen, 50, who was a 19-year-old model building her portfolio in Paris in the late 1980s. She told the Herald Brunel repeatedly demanded sex and touched her inappropriately. When she refused, jobs dried up. “Brunel had access to a network of young women and it was already his proclivity to behave that way. When he connected with Epstein, they realized they could do it together. He is just as guilty if not more so than Epstein. He was promoting and feeding the machine of abuse.”
Among those who knew the inner workings of MC2 was Maritza Vasquez, Brunel’s bookkeeper for a decade. In exclusive interviews, Vasquez, who lives in Miami, said the agency housed girls in Miami Beach and Manhattan apartments who never really worked as models, but were instead transported to parties at Epstein’s Palm Beach and Manhattan mansions. Unlike most agencies, MC2 had no men’s division; only headshots of women adorned its wall. Brunel ordered Vasquez to cook the books to hide the firm’s red numbers, she said.
“The only reason Mr. Epstein was involved was because of the girls, I think, because it was not a profitable business,” Vasquez told the Herald.
Brunel began bringing in girls who could not possibly qualify as top working models, said Joey Hunter, former co-president of Ford Models, who ran Karin Models of America’s New York office with Brunel from 1995 to 1998. He called his partnership with Brunel “the worst mistake of my life.”
“He seemed to lower his standards and was in it for the chase and conquest. If I saw a mediocre girl on the street, I wouldn’t approach her. She’d have to be fabulous. But Jean-Luc would take that girl,” Hunter told the Herald. “He was using the pitch, ‘I’m Jean-Luc the model agent, come join my agency,’ but the girl wasn’t right for professional work. It was like he was scouting for a separate business.”
Scrupulous agencies protected their young clients.
“Let’s call them what they were: Children. Even the most beautiful are self-conscious and insecure. They don’t know who they are by that age,” said Irene Marie, founder of the eponymous agency at 728 Ocean Drive (the Art Deco building used in the “Scarface” chainsaw scene) that helped reincarnate South Beach in the late 1980s. A former model who had fended off aggressive photographers, Marie was brutally honest when coaching her models about the culture of sexual harassment and abuse in the business. She encouraged parents to accompany their daughters to Miami or Paris or Milan. She assigned people to keep an eye on them at night when club owners whisked them through the velvet ropes and Gianni Versace invited them to parties at his palazzo.
Epstein’s victims say he and the charismatic Brunel were masters at conning impressionable girls into thinking they would mold them into the next Heidi Klum, Kate Moss or Victoria’s Secret “Angel.”
“Modeling was the bait,’’ said lawyer Gloria Allred, who represents two of Epstein’s accusers. “They preyed upon the hopes and aspirations of young girls. The modeling world is tough. If someone with connections offers help, that’s a big break. Before they know it, these trusting girls are caught in a carefully constructed spider’s web. Sex trafficking is the ultimate betrayal.”
Brunel has said through his lawyer in Paris that he continues to deny sex-trafficking accusations, is not on the run and would cooperate with investigators, although his lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, Joe Titone, said, “I don’t think that will happen,” when asked if Brunel would be willing to come to the United States to talk to authorities. Titone said he can’t confirm Brunel’s whereabouts and “got tired of asking him because he was traveling all over the place.”
“I strongly deny having participated, either directly nor indirectly, in the actions Mr. Jeffrey Epstein is being accused of,” Brunel said in 2015, in his only public statement. “I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager.”
Fuller, who booked models for an array of clients at MC2, defended Brunel, whom he worked with for two decades, first at Karin Models of America in Miami, which became MC2 in 2005.
“In all those years I never had a model or any individual complain, report, or make any allegation in any way about improper behavior from Mr. Brunel,” Fuller said. “Jean-Luc went out of his way to make sure the models were safe and looked after and he made this a priority.’’
Others who allegedly enabled Epstein’s scheme — and are potential witnesses or even possible subjects of prosecutors’ ongoing probe — have also been elusive: Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s British socialite ex-girlfriend and recruiter of underage girls; Sarah Kellen Vickers, scheduler of Epstein’s twice or thrice-daily sexual encounters and keeper of the vast database of girls she is accused of helping to groom for sex; Nadia Marcinkova from the former Yugoslavia and Adriana Mucinska Ross, an ex-model from Poland who lives in Miami.
Along with Brunel, his retinue flew on Epstein’s private plane, nicknamed the Lolita Express, between his homes in Palm Beach and New York’s Upper East Side, his ranch in New Mexico, his apartment in Paris and his private Little St. James island in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he sought sex with a certain type of victim — 12 to 17 years old, white, non-tattooed, small-breasted and easily manipulated by his promises of a gilded future.
In court papers, many have either denied involvement or invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. None has been charged with any crimes.
What made Epstein’s activities a crime, resulting in his July 6 arrest, was that he used fraud and coercion, two of the key elements of sex trafficking. Lawyer Bradley Edwards, who represents nearly two dozen accusers, explained that neither Epstein nor his recruiters, including Brunel, were ever direct about their goal.
“Epstein never wanted someone who was a prostitute or an escort, because it wasn’t just the sex. It was also that he made somebody engage in acts that they never would have engaged in — it was an innocent person, it was a vulnerable person,” Edwards said.
MC2, which moved its headquarters to a bayfront tower on Biscayne Boulevard, has steadfastly denied any association with Epstein. Yet its name — which no one affiliated with the agency explained — was known to evoke Epstein, a self-styled scientific genius who wanted to populate the world with his DNA, because E=MC squared, which is the Theory of Relativity devised by a bona fide genius, Albert Einstein. MC2 was dissolved Sept. 27. Fuller started a new agency called The Source Models, which is negotiating to buy assets from MC2 like office equipment, an email domain and modeling contracts. He says Brunel has no affiliation.
The French connection
Son of a high-society Parisian real estate executive, Brunel is a short man, dwarfed by his models. He was known for his flamboyant attire, wearing designer clothing by Gucci, Prada, and Dolce & Gabbana, and driving a white Ferrari. He kept reserved tables stocked with champagne and whiskey at popular nightclubs in Paris. His favorite spot was Les Bains-Douche, where the party never stopped.
He became head of the Karin Models agency in Paris in 1978 and expanded to offices in New York and Miami Beach in 1995. He was a minority partner at Next in the 1990s. He claimed he had an uncanny eye for photogenic 14-year-olds — and that he discovered models Christy Turlington, Jerry Hall, Rebecca Romijn and Milla Jovovich — although other agents take credit, too. He spent recent years recruiting girls in the former Soviet Republics and at schoolyards and volleyball courts in farming towns in the southernmost state of Brazil, home of supermodels Gisele Bündchen and Alessandra Ambrosio, whose fame turned the area into a hot spot for scouts.
Brunel tapped into his contacts at mother agencies in Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Rio de Janeiro and went back to his roots as rabatteur, a modeling allusion to the person who beats the bushes during a hunt. He said he even helicoptered into a remote Amazon village in 2006.
Brunel may have seemed an odd match for Epstein, a math whiz from working-class Coney Island with a Brooklyn accent who became a mysteriously successful money manager partial to hoodies and Polo shirts he wore only once before throwing them away. He was a clean freak. He did not drink or do drugs.
Yet they developed a symbiotic relationship that dates back 25 years. Flight logs show Brunel flew on Epstein’s private jet 25 times between 1998 and 2005. He visited Epstein in the Palm Beach County jail in 2008-09 when Epstein was serving a 13-month sentence for soliciting a minor for prostitution.
When in New York, Brunel lived in Epstein’s apartment building at 301 E. 66th St., where the models stayed, too. When in Miami Beach, he stayed at his own house on San Marino Island and later at his penthouse condo on West Avenue but also spent time at Epstein’s Palm Beach compound — in the house with erotic photos on the walls, penis- and vagina-shaped soaps in the bathrooms and, on a bookshelf, “Slave Craft: Road Maps for Erotic Servitude” and “Training With Miss Abernathy: A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners.”
Epstein’s butler, housekeeper and driver said they’d see Brunel cooking in the kitchen, sunning by the pool — where a nude girl might be relaxing in the hot tub or sitting on Epstein’s lap — and chatting with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen and girls there to give “massages” to Epstein on the upstairs massage table.
“[Epstein] explained to me that, in his opinion, he needed to have three orgasms a day. It was biological, like eating,” Johanna Sjoberg said in court papers. She was a Palm Beach Atlantic college student recruited by Maxwell to work in Epstein’s house.
Brunel phoned Epstein regularly. Two 2005 handwritten message pad notes taken by Epstein’s assistants that police found in Epstein’s trash provide a snapshot of their dialogue. In the first, Brunel relayed that he “has a teacher for you to teach you how to speak Russian. She is 2 X 8 years old, not Blonde. Lessons are free and you can have 1st today if you call,” apparently referring to a 16-year-old. In the other, marked by the message taker as from Brunel, he boasted that he “just did a good one — 18 years (She spoke to me and said ‘I love Jeffrey’).”
They had one compulsion in common, according to those who knew them: Coercing young women into sex.
Virginia Giuffre, who was recruited while she was working at future President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa by Maxwell when she was 16 and stayed with Epstein until she was 19, said that Epstein and Brunel made promises to a lot of young foreign girls, primarily from South America and Eastern Europe.
“The modeling agency was the perfect vehicle for Epstein to get more victims,’’ said Giuffre, who claims that she was forced to have sex many times with Brunel.
“Jean-Luc was Jeffrey’s main supplier of girls from other countries,’’ said Giuffre, now 36. “He once sent Jeffrey three 12-year-olds as a birthday present. I was sick about that and Jeffrey just said: ‘Don’t worry, their parents would have been paid very well.’’’
Giuffre has made these allegations in court declarations as well as in interviews.
Brunel, she said, had a dark side, and could be quick to lose his temper. But he could also come across as charming. “He had no trouble walking up to a girl, telling her she was beautiful and promising to hire her as a model. He would obtain temporary work visas for overseas girls, bring them to America on false promises, use them for sex, then send them home at the end of their visas,’’ Giuffre said.
“Most of them didn’t speak any English, and Jeffrey loved that. He always said ‘I don’t even have to speak to them,’ and he told them what to do through body language.’’
Giuffre was present during some photo shoots set up by Brunel on Epstein’s island. The girls were instructed to disrobe and participate in sex with Brunel and with each other. Maxwell, who considered herself a skilled photographer, often took pictures, Giuffre said.
“They would take nude pictures on the beach. They were told it was like a test to see how they looked,’’ Giuffre said.
Epstein occasionally posed as a scout starting in the 1990s for Victoria’s Secret, the retail lingerie chain owned by billionaire Les Wexner, CEO of L Brands, who was for a long time Epstein’s only known client. Epstein lured women on the pretense that he could get them jobs as catalog models or “Angels” in Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. (The brand, in decline because of the Epstein scandal, #MeToo movement and backlash against its image, canceled its famous show this year.)
When Italian model Elisabetta Tai was invited to Epstein’s Manhattan mansion in 2004, she thought she was interviewing with a Victoria’s Secret consultant, she told the New York Post. She barely noticed the massage table in his office. She said she was confused when Epstein got up from his desk, stripped naked, asked her for a massage and handed her a vibrator. Horrified, she threw the vibrator at Epstein’s head and ran out of the room. As she searched for the front door, she said she was confronted by a woman she believes was Maxwell, who yelled after her, “You can’t leave, Mr. Epstein is friends with Bill Clinton!”
Alicia Arden had hopes of landing a Victoria’s Secret contract when Epstein’s secretary told her to meet him during his trip to Los Angeles at a Santa Monica hotel. Warily, she did. After a few questions, he asked her to remove her blouse. Then he grabbed her buttocks from behind, saying, “Let me manhandle you.” Arden wrestled free and fled, according to the 1997 police report. An officer filled in the box next to Weapon: “Hands.”
Epstein, featured as Cosmopolitan’s July 1980 “Bachelor of the Month,” smirking and seeking a “cute Texas girl,” never married but he dated models, including former Miss Sweden Eva Andersson, who is now married to wealthy hedge fund manager Glen Dubin. The couple has been implicated in court filings as being involved with Epstein’s sex trafficking, allegations they have publicly denied.
Brunel married and divorced Swedish model Helen Hogberg and American model Roberta Chirko, 25 years younger and several inches taller.
Epstein enjoyed hanging out backstage at beauty pageants and fashion shows with his Palm Beach and New York neighbor and friend Donald Trump, former models said. He admired Trump’s T Models agency — which represented Slovenian model and future first lady Melania Knauss — and wanted MC2 to be just like it, Vasquez said he told her at MC2’s opening party.
Epstein may have met Brunel at a New York Fashion Week event, agents said. The pair tried to create a new agency with Elite Model Management before they founded MC2. On Brunel’s recommendation, in 2001 Epstein bought an $8 million Paris apartment at 22 Avenue Foch, blocks from Brunel’s ornately decorated flat on Avenue Hoche in the upscale 16th arrondissment, or administrative district, near the Arc de Triomphe. On trips to Paris, Epstein was always accompanied by “jeunes femmes,” and his guests included Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, Steve Bannon and other “crowned heads, diplomats, businessmen and politicians,” Epstein’s Paris butler of 18 years told Radio France in October.
While in Paris, Epstein liked to swim at the Ritz Hotel and escort groups of young girls to the cinema, where they would take turns sitting on his lap. They often left before the movies ended, according to neighbors and the butler, who is still getting paid by the 1953 Trust (Epstein’s birth year) that controls Epstein’s $577 million fortune, the butler’s wife told FranceInfo.
Brunel hosted dinners for wealthy businessmen at his sumptuous apartment and his models were required to attend. Two or three models bunked in the maid’s quarters, where they told each new roommate about the peephole from the kitchen into the tiny bathroom they shared, Brock said.
“We were kids who didn’t speak the language, far from home and totally at the mercy of a man in a position of authority and trust who should have been taking care of us,” Brock said.
When 18-year-old Thysia Huisman arrived from the Netherlands in 1991, the extra room was full so Brunel invited her to sleep in his room. She slept on the floor of the models’ room instead. One morning she said she woke up in his bed, woozy, her bruised thighs covered by an unfamiliar kimono. She is certain Brunel spiked her drink with a blackout drug and raped her, she told French publication Mediapart.
Brunel’s flock was expected to party with him and his pals late into the night, Brock said.
“We were ‘The Models’ who went to the front of the line, showed no ID and got free drinks and drugs because the more of us in a club, the more men would show up and pay for overpriced alcohol,” she said. “Same story in Miami, New York, L.A., Milan.”
Brunel persisted in harassing her, Brock said. She resisted, but worried “I would offend him and he would either attack me or kill my career.” Soon she was relocated to a scruffy apartment with five other models in the Pigalle red-light district. She got no work in Paris so Brock moved on to an agency in Italy, where she later found out Brunel spread rumors that she had a drug problem.
In a 1988 expose on “60 Minutes” called “American Girls in Paris,” models described the deal with the devil they were expected to make with unethical agents — sleep with them or their fleeting chance at a career would be sabotaged as they were blackballed by clients.
The young models told the first #MeToo story, 30 years before its time, said Craig Pyes, a producer of the segment.
Brunel’s friend Claude Haddad liked to climb into bed with girls, they recounted to Diane Sawyer. When Sawyer asked him how many teenagers he had slept with, he stammered, “What do you mean by teenage? Sixteen? Almost never.”
In the same segment, Brunel was depicted as a heavy cocaine user foisting drugs on his models or slipping pills into their drinks. Modeling magnate Eileen Ford, visibly embarrassed, essentially disowned her Paris agent on prime time TV. She, like other agency owners, had sent models to Brunel for prestigious assignments in the Paris market.
Shari Boeltz (now Sutherland), a 17-year-old cheerleader and model from Pompano Beach, appeared on “60 Minutes” despite the risk to her career. Brunel was always decent to her while she stayed in his apartment but she quickly learned in Paris that exploitation of models was “epidemic and systemic.”
“Some girls were desperate to help their poor potato farmer parents, and agents like Jean-Luc could make you or break you,” said Boeltz Sutherland, co-pastor today with her husband at Elevate Miami church after a 28-year modeling career. “It’s a world of half-naked women told to do sensual things on camera. Jean-Luc and Jeffrey Epstein found each other because that was their scene. Powerful men like to be around pretty girls. Power corrupts. So we have men like Epstein who get away with being sexual predators for decades.”
Pyes told the Herald: “The modeling world is not glamorous at all. Brunel was one of many who treated women as currency. He had a black reputation. Yet nothing he did was regarded as a crime. Like Epstein, he was doing it in plain sight but the culture of ‘omerta’ kept it quiet. Those two could have been Siamese twins. Their lives revolved around the pursuit of young girls every night — or in Epstein’s case, three times a day.”
In Michael Gross’ 1995 book “Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women” agent Jerome Bonnouvrier, who died in 2009, said Brunel was a “danger” who liked “silent rape. It excites him.” Elite agency chief John Casablancas, who had his own scandals, said he despised Brunel “for the way he’s cheapened the business.”
“You get laid tonight with a model, is that a crime?” Brunel told Gross. “I’m no saint.”
In the 2002 book “Bad and Beautiful: Inside the Deadly and Dazzling World of Supermodels,” author Ian Halperin wrote about Brunel in his “Model Agents: Princes or Pimps?” chapter, describing him as “notorious” for procuring girls for wealthy men as “dean of the model-dating beat.”
Brunel’s name surfaced again in 2002 when his onetime protege, Elite supermodel Karen Mulder, gave an explosive account to French media of how she and other models had been abused by men in the fashion industry and their cohorts in business, entertainment, government and royalty, with French police complicit. She tried to commit suicide and was found on her apartment floor by boyfriend Jean-Yves Le Fur, a rabatteur for Brunel. She was hospitalized for five months.
Brock believed Mulder. Five years after escaping Brunel, she was accosted by a naked Harvey Weinstein in his Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc room during the Cannes Film Festival; she locked herself in the bathroom and “scolded him” into letting her leave, she said. The next winter she met Trump when she and 25 other models working in Miami Beach were paid to attend a party at Mar-a-Lago. She characterized the event as a “disgusting” experience.
Brock, 45, is in the group of more than 30 women who accused Weinstein of sexual misconduct — “Weinsteined,” she called his M.O. — and reached a tentative $25 million settlement last week with him and his bankrupt film studio.
Epstein’s jet was often filled with young women. The incomplete passenger logs list models Aline Weber, and Letícia and Michele Birkheuer from Brazil, Nina Keita from the Ivory Coast, Zinta Braukis from Los Angeles, Cristalle Wasche and Nadia Bjorlin from New York, Tatiana Kovylina from Russia, Svetlana Griaznova from Lithuania and former U.S. supermodel Christina Estrada. Though not a frequent flier, Naomi Campbell flew to Epstein’s island, where he hosted parties for Victoria’s Secret models.
Brunel and Epstein traveled to an MC2-sponsored “New Generation” runway show in Ecuador in 2006, where young teens from 47 countries “walked with an elegance years more mature than” their actual ages or “just had that elusive, exclusive IT factor,” gushed a Models.com commentator, who also noted “bon vivant extraordinaire” Brunel hugging local celebrities. The girls heard the fairy-tale story of supermodel Natalia Vodianova, who was discovered at age 15, dirt poor, selling fruit by a vodka factory in Gorky, Russia. The winner of an MC2 contract was baby-faced Ginta Lapina of Latvia, a 14-year-old with frosted-glass skin who has since walked in all the premier designers’ shows.
During the 2004 MC2 show, won by Weber, Vasquez said she heard from an MC2 scout that Brunel was in his hotel room with one of the 14-year-old contestants.
Brunel occasionally confided in Vasquez that he had a desire for young girls, but she has no proof that he ever acted on it.
“You know, as a mother I always told him that they were underage girls,” Vasquez said. “And he was saying, ‘Oh, I’m the father.’”
Vasquez, who named Brunel godfather of her oldest son, said he could be sweet and generous. Fuller said Brunel took Weber to Paris on Epstein’s plane and paid for treatment of a skin condition. Brunel’s sister took care of Weber at her house for two months.
“The girls loved him because he took them to the dermatologist, to get their nails done,” she said. “He gave them spending money. He cared about them. I never saw him treating them badly.”
Brunel had an unlikable streak, Vasquez said. He ripped off models, overcharged them for rent, and didn’t pay mother agencies the fees they were owed. She said Brunel arranged for a Brazilian agency to fly “high-end hookers” to Epstein’s house for a party. Epstein thought they were models.
“It’s unfortunate Jean-Luc was involved with Mr. Epstein, but Jeffrey had helped him when he was in need over the years and this was his way of paying him back,” she said. “Jean-Luc did take girls to Mr. Epstein’s house but he brought them back, too. Even if it’s all true, nobody put a gun to the girls’ heads. They did what they wanted to do. It’s just the mentality of rich older men that if they are surrounded by girls they feel like a superstar.”
Juliana Barbosa, then 15, was recruited by Brunel in her small hometown in Brazil while she was playing soccer 15 years ago. Her father had just died and Brunel told her mother he would pay funeral expenses while assuring both he would take care of Barbosa in the United States. She worked at MC2 in Miami Beach and New York for a couple years and returned to Brazil, where she’s now a singer and DJ.
Brunel never mistreated her and she didn’t meet Epstein, she said.
She did get taken to nightclubs while underage, and got kicked out of one. Vasquez brought her to her home for a few weeks.
Vasquez said the girls were left mostly unsupervised by Brunel, who was constantly on the road, so she took them under her wing, warning them to refuse clients who pressured them to do things that made them uncomfortable.
“Don’t take off your clothes, unwrap your brain, is what I told them,” she said. “These girls would go crazy and start smoking and drinking. The ones who didn’t get jobs would go to the beach and do nothing or find trouble.”
Vasquez was fired from MC2 in 2006 and convicted of embezzling money from the firm. She was placed on probation.
The Epstein headlines stemming from his prostitution case scared away clients, including nine retail chains. Brunel and MC2 sued Epstein in 2015 for damages resulting from “notoriety and bad publicity” and “false stories” that linked him to Epstein and caused a “tremendous loss of business.” Despite Epstein’s original $1 million line of bank credit, the firm was worthless. Brunel, “emotionally destroyed,” attached a photo of his Prozac prescription to the suit, which was dismissed.
“The only time I spoke to Epstein was when we filed the lawsuit,” Titone said. “He was a little miffed about it because he had been friends with Brunel for 20 years and said he’d helped him out in many ways.”
He also sued a website that posted links to MC2 as “the most popular grown-up girl escort” service in Florida. Brunel said he was not a pimp and the damage to his reputation had cost him “a significant loss of revenue.”
Brunel came under fire in a 2016 class-action suit by nine models accusing MC2 and other top firms in the unregulated modeling business of financial fraud. One Miami-based model, Marcelle Almonte, said that in 2005 MC2 offered her a spot in a “model apartment” for $1,850 per month — crammed in with eight other girls, some sleeping on the floor. At that rate, MC2 was pocketing $16,650 compared to the $2,900 rent charged for other two-bedroom apartments in the same building. The women were required to serve wealthy men at “model dinners” where they were paid in leftover food, which they often couldn’t eat because they were on strict diets. They were pressured to take runway jobs for “trade” — free clothes that didn’t necessarily fit. They weren’t paid on time and agencies subtracted large percentages.
“If they were like good girls that could make money, they were living in an expensive place. If they were like regular girls they were living in shitty places,” Vasquez said of the apartments where Brunel housed them.
Brunel was last seen in public the night before Epstein was arrested July 6 at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey upon his return from a three-week stay in Paris. Brunel, dressed in white, partied at the Paris Country Club’s annual Soiree Blanche.
Since then, three women in France have filed complaints against Brunel. Innocence en Danger, a French advocacy group, has submitted letters from victims and campaigned for French investigators to pursue cases against Epstein and Brunel and improve the nation’s poor track record for prosecuting alleged sex offenders like “Rosemary’s Baby” director Roman Polanski, a fugitive from justice since 1978 after he was accused of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl in California. It took French police seven weeks to search Epstein’s house and Brunel’s office after Epstein was arrested.
A police source told Mediapart on Thursday that an investigation of l’affaire Epstein is proceeding slowly, but that they have “a body of clues that [Epstein and Brunel] are very linked to each other and have the same type of appetites.” Police hope to interview Brunel by the end of the year.
Marlene Schiappa, France’s minister of equality, has proposed turning Epstein’s spacious apartment into a shelter for trafficked children.
Miami Herald reporter Tess Riski and Mediapart reporter Laureen Ortiz contributed to this story.
This story was originally published December 20, 2019 at 7:00 AM.
