There is no shorter route to power than through the genitals of male leaders. This principle guided the Lolita Gambit, played by the Mossad through its "Agent" Jeffrey Epstein
The Trump Administration Just Deported an Epstein Victim. Amanda Ungaro was on Jeffrey's plane at 17. She shares a child with a man working in the current administration. She has been sitting in ICE custody since June. Weeks ago she was deported. by bekah day Oct 16, 2025 https://bekahdayyy.substack.com/p/the-t ... irect=true
UPDATE: On Monday, January 5th 2026, I was able to connect with Amanda Ungaro via the power of the Internet. The updated information that she has given me permission to share will be at the end of the article before the Photo Gallery.
Overview:
In July of this year, while immersed in Epstein’s never ending rabbit hole — I stumbled upon Paolo Zampolli.
Paolo is the former modeling agent who brought Melania to the United States in the late 90’s to meet Donald Trump.
Paolo owned ID Models in NYC, and worked closely with Donald Trump’s Trump Models, Jean-Luc Brunel, John Casablancas, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Clinton, and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump judged talent agent Casablancas's 1991 Elite "Look of the Year" model contest at the Plaza Hotel. Later renamed Elite Model Look, it promised a $150,000 contract to its winner, but The Guardian alleged in 2020 that the pageant had allowed Casablancas and others involved in the competition to proposition and even rape young contestants.
Paolo went from working as a modeling agent, to now being a part of Trump’s current administration, a board member of the Kennedy Center, and United Nation diplomat.
Paolo is currently in a messy custody battle with his common-law wife, Amanda Ungaro, who came to the United States from Brazil as a young teenager to pursue modeling.
She was signed to Paolo’s ID Models, and within two years, she was on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane with Jean-Luc Brunel at just 17 years old.
She and Paolo share a child together, and Amanda is the United Nations Ambassador to Grenada.
Shockingly, despite being UN Diplomat and the wife of a figure in this current administration, Amanda was arrested under very strange circumstances in June of 2025 (right when the Epstein conversation flooded mainstream media) in Miami and deported… without her child.
Now her mother, Tania, is filing for custody of Paolo and Amanda’s child and seeking a restraining order against him. I’m going to walk you through what I have discovered about Paolo Zampolli over the past few months, and why I think this situation really needs to be looked at under a microscope.
Who is Amanda Ungaro?:
Amanda Ungaro was born in February of 1985 in Brazil. As a young teenager (14-15) she came to the United States to pursue modeling.
She was signed to Paolo Zampolli’s (New York City based) ID Models after arriving in the United States.
Representing Agencies: ID MODEL MANAGEMENTS, NY FASHION MODEL MANAGEMENT, MILAN OKAY MODELS, HAMBURG CAL-CARRIES MODELS, HONG KONG CAL-CARRIES MODELS, SINGAPORE
It is unknown at this time how Amanda came from Brazil to the United States, but it is very well known that Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Paolo Zampolli, and Jean-Luc Brunel often utilized Brazil (amongst other countries) to hunt for girls, presenting themselves as “modeling/talent scouts”.
It is also known that Jean-Luc Brunel and Ghislaine Maxwell spent time “laying low” in Brazil after Jeffrey Epstein’s arrest. The ties between Brazil and the co-conspirators of this case are extensive and well documented.
Nonetheless, a few years after being signed to Paolo Zampolli’s ID Models, Amanda Ungaro’s name would appear on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express flight logs in June of 2002.
Amanda Ungaro would have been just 17 years old at the time she flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s Lolita Express. She was accompanied by Jean-Luc Brunel (amongst others) — the French modeling agent whose legacy included a decades long friendship and love of predation that he shared with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Jeffrey and Ghislaine utilized Jean-Luc Brunel and his position as a modeling agent to lure in young girls for Jeffrey and his friends to abuse. Jean-Luc Brunel’s actions stooped as low as flying three 12 year old girls to the United States from France to be harmed by Jeffrey… as a birthday gift.
Around 19-20 years old, Amanda Ungaro began a “romantic” relationship with her modeling agent, Paolo Zampolli. They have a son together, and are currently in a very messy custody battle over him in New York. Amanda was also appointed as the United Nations Diplomat of Grenada after son was born.
In 2018, Amanda attempted to leave Paolo, but Paolo wouldn’t allow it. When she wanted to split up and travel back to her home country of Brazil, Paolo called upon his connections within in the court system and at Homeland Security to ensure everything played out in his favor.
Paolo even admitted to having Amanda’s name flagged through Homeland Security, which would alert him if she tried to leave the country and ultimately stop her from traveling outside of the United States.
In September of 2024, she filed again for custody of their child along with child support, and has since been embroiled in a very aggressive legal battle with Paolo that is still active.
In June of 2025, Amanda was arrested in Miami after an anonymous tip was made through CrimeStoppers resulting in a sting operation was conducted at Amanda’s place of work.
At the time of her arrest, Amanda was working as a receptionist/assistant at what is reported to be an “illegal medical facility”. At this business, cosmetic procedures including laser treatments, botox, and lip fillers were conducted regularly and operated with a staff of nearly 15 people consisting of assistants, doctors, techs, and nurses.
Amanda and another doctor (who received his education and physicians license in Brazil, but did not have a MD in the US) were the only two arrested in this sting operation. Curiously, they were both native to Brazil.
Upon Amanda’s arrest, she was immediately placed Immigration Hold. From June-late September/early October, Amanda has been sitting in ICE Custody in, presumably in Florida.
The day after her arrest, Paolo and his attorneys began filing motions aggressively to undo the work that Amanda had put in to be given legal custody of their child.
Within the last two weeks (at the time of publishing this article), Amanda was deported back to Brazil without due process, trial, attorney representation, nor the ability to contact her friends or family. She was completely isolated and her human rights have been violated at an extraordinary level.
On September 5th of 2025, Amanda’s mother, Tania, filed for custody of her grandchild and requested a restraining order against Paolo Zampolli.
TANIA SOARES FELIZARDO v. PAOLO ZAMPOLLI et al, New York County Supreme Court, Index #161870/2025, JUDGE MICHAEL L. KATZ
The circumstances of Amanda Ungaro’s arrest are extremely strange. We don’t know why a (current or former) United Nations diplomat who is in a common-law marriage with a member of the current administration was working at a med-spa to begin with.
We don’t know any evidence that was used to arrest or deport her, as there have been no updates in the court docket to address the charges she was arrested for. It is notable that Amanda was arrested right around the time when the conversation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein became a topic in mainstream media once again.
The United States factually deported a woman (without due process) who was on Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs at 17 years old, and shares a child with a member of this administration.
This is a blatant act of silencing a victim, or even potential witness of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators. The United States MUST take responsibility for this.
I have spoken with a figure who is very close to Amanda who confirmed to me that she recently arrived back in Brazil, and is living in fear. If any harm is to come to her, it will weigh solely on the United States and will be a (yet another) stain on our history that will never be forgotten.
I'm [DELETE] to Amanda and Paolo made her life a living hell Yes she out [DELETE]. She was stuck in jail for 3.5 months [DELETE]. She was in immigration jail. She had no business being there so someone obviously pulled some strings... [DELETE] she's scared because things have not been easy
Who is Paolo Zampolli?:
Paolo Zampolli was born on March 5th of 1970. He was born in Italy and comes from a wealthy family who made a fortune selling Star Wars toys throughout Europe.
In the 1990’s, Paolo met and began representing Melania Knauss (now Melania Trump), as a independent modeling agent, and would get her a visa to come to the United States.
Melania would model for Paolo Zampolli’s ID Models shortly after her arrival to the United States. Not long after Melania’s arrival, Paolo introduced her to his friend, Donald Trump, at the Kit Kat Club in New York City in 1998.
The night Melania was introduced to Donald Trump, he was on a date with his girlfriend at the time, Celina Midelfart.
Celina Midelfart is the Norwegian ex-girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein who can be seen in photos with both Jeffrey and Donald partying at Mar a Lago in her early 20’s. She is one of the many girls/women that Jeffrey and Donald “shared” throughout their friend. Others include: Anouska De Georgiou (model), Anna Molova (Miss Russia 1998), and “Katie Johnson” (13 year old girl who was raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein circa 1994).
Epstein & Midelfart at Mar-a-Lago View of American socialite Jeffrey Epstein (1953-2019) and Norwegian college student (and future businesswoman) Celina Midelfart during a recption (related to a charity ProAm tennis tournament) at the Mar-a-Lago estate, Palm Beach, Florida, February 22, 1997. (Photo by Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
Donald Trump founded Trump Models in 1999, two years after Paolo Zampolli founded ID Models. The two followed one another’s business blueprint so closely that they have been in stride for nearly 30 years.
Donald Trump utilized The Trump Organization to build his real estate empire, and Paolo Zampolli worked for the Trump Organization briefly while managing ID Models.
Paolo has admitted on the news that his close friend Donald Trump came to him and told him in the early 2000’s that he was “too good for the modeling industry”, and encouraged him to get into real estate.
This prompted Paolo Zampolli to found The Paramount Group (with the help of Donald Trump).
Paolo’s business model included using his other company, ID Models, to show and sell expensive and luxurious homes. Paolo believed he would sell more properties using beautiful women (who he had a plethora of access to) than he would using older women or male real estate agents.
Despite raking in tons of cash from both of their modeling agencies and their real estate adventures (which often had crossover) Paolo Zampolli and Donald Trump were constantly facing lawsuits due to various forms of mistreatment towards their models.
Models would also be expected to regularly socialize with wealthy and powerful friends of Paolo and Donald (under the guise of it being an opportunity to advance their career).
In 2001, Paolo Zampolli's agency ID Models installed a live feed camera in a SoHo model apartment, broadcasting to the web as a promotional tool. The goal was to showcase agency life -- but it stirred controversy over privacy and propriety.
From 2003-2005, dozens of models brought at least two class action lawsuits against New York based modeling agencies, including Trump Models, ID Models, Elite Models, MC2 Models, Karrin Models, Jean Luc-Brunel, and John Casablancas, just to name a few figures and organizations accused of wrongdoing.
These models accused their agents and agencies of exploitation (on many levels), encouraging them to use substances, normalizing sexual favors for career advancement, secretly recording them in their model-housing (provided primarily by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein), and bringing them to the United States illegally making them unable to work for anyone other than their modeling agents.
Opinion of the New York Supreme Court Shelton v. Elite Model Management, Inc.
SHELTON v. ELITE MODEL MANAGEMENT INC LLC MFME ID IMG LLC USA (2005) Supreme Court, New York County, New York. Angela SHELTON, Tiffany Connor, Carolyn Fears, Sheila Johnson, Rachel Shea, and Maryanne Fletcher on their own behalf and on behalf of the classes of similarly situated persons, Plaintiffs, v. ELITE MODEL MANAGEMENT, INC.; Elite Model Management S.A.; Elite Group S.A. (a/k/a Elite S.A.); Gerald Marie; John Casablancas; Alain Kittler; Monique Pillard; 1 Model Management; Scott Lipps; Ford Models, Inc.; Gerard W. Ford (a/k/a Gerry Ford); Eileen Ford; Mary Katherine Ford (a/k/a Katie Ford); Marion Smith; Joseph Hunter; Wilhelmina International, Ltd.; Wilhelmina Models, Inc.; Lorex A.G.; Dieter Esch; Natasha Esch; Ana-Gaby Esch; Robert Kreusler; Creation Management LLC; Brad Krassner; The Krassner Family Foundation; Boss Models, Inc.; David Bosman; Click Model Management, Inc.; Joseph Grill; Frances Grill; Allan Mindel; Company Models; Michael Flutie; Robert Flutie; MFME Model Management Company Ltd.; ID Model Management; Paolo Zampolli; George Gallier; Images Management; Heinz Vollenweider; IMG Models, Inc.; International Management Group, Inc.; Karin Models LLC; Jean-Luc Brunel; Marilyn Model Management Inc. d/b/a Marilyn Agency; Marilyn Gauthier; Metropolitan Model Agency USA, Inc.; Thomas Zeumer; Metropolitan Models Paris; Michel Levaton; New York Models a/k/a New York Model Management; Next Management Corp; Faith Kates; Wilcor Group; Claxon Inc.; Partnership Holding; Joel Wilkenfeld; Douglas Asch; Q Model Management, a/k/a Que Model Management; Diva Entertainment; T Management; Women Model Management, a/k/a Men/Women Model Management; Paul Rowland; and Barbara Lantz; Advertex Communications, Inc.; Macy's East, Inc.; and Federated Group Inc., Defendants.
Decided: September 06, 2005 Salans, New York City (Lee P. Whidden, J. Noah Hagey and Peter Gallagher of counsel), for Monique Pillard and others, defendants. Dowd & Marotta LLC, New York City (Raymond J. Dowd of counsel), for ID Model Management and others, defendants. Aaron Richard Golub, New York City (Nehemiah S. Glanc and Mark Moody of counsel), for Click Model Management, Inc. and others, defendants. Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel LLP, New York City (Kenneth H. Eckstein, Jack Hazen and Robert T. Schmidt of counsel), for Elite Model Management Corp., defendant. Pachulski, Stang, Ziehl, Young, Jones & Weintraub, New York City (Robert J. Feinstein of counsel), for Elite Model Management, S.A. and another, defendants. Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, New York City (Kenneth R. Logan and Justin S. Stern of counsel), for Ford Models, Inc. and others, defendants. David Bosman, defendant pro se. Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky & Popeo P.C., New York City (Jerome Gotkin of counsel), for Next Management Corp. and others, defendants. Kornstein Veisz Wexler & Pollard, LLP, New York City (Daniel J. Kornstein of counsel), for Images Management and others, defendants. Frankel & Abrams, New York City (Sandor Frankel of counsel), for Wilhelmina Models, Inc. and others, defendants. Hoguet Newman & Regal, LLP, New York City (Joshua Rievman of counsel), for Alain Kittler and another, defendants. Hantman & Associates, New York city (Robert J. Hantman of counsel), for New York Models, defendant. Wilson, Elser, Moskowitz, Edelman & Dicker LLP, White Plains (Richard S. Oelsner of counsel), for International Management Group, Inc., and another, defendants. Winget, Spadafora & Schwartzberg, LLP, New York City (Luigi Spadafora of counsel), for T Model Management, defendant.Seward & Kissel LLP, New York City (Bruce C. Paulsen of counsel), for MFME Management Company, Ltd. and another, defendants. McCue, Sussmane & Zapfel, P.C., New York City (Kenneth Sussmane of counsel), for One Model Management and another, defendants. William J. Rita, New York City, for Karin Models and another, defendants. McLaughlin & Stern, LLP, New York City (David Blasband of counsel), for Barbara Lantz, defendant. Michael Flutie, defendant pro se. Douglas Asch, defendant pro se. Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP (Andrew W. Hayes and Olav A. Haazen, Armonk, and Paul R. Verkuil and Christina M. Lewicky, New York City, of counsel), and Johnson & Rishwain LLP, Los Angeles, California (Brian A. Rishwain of counsel), for plaintiffs.
CHARLES EDWARD RAMOS, J.
In motion 3, dated October 8, 2003, defendant Monique Pillard moves pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(1)(2)(4)(5),(7), and (8) to dismiss the action.
In motion 4, dated October 26, 2003, defendant John Casablancas moves pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(1),(2),(4),(5) and (7) to dismiss the action.
In motion designated 5, dated November 25, 2003, defendants ID Model Management and Paolo Zampolli, move pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(7) and (8) to dismiss the complaint.
In motion 6, dated December 5, 2003, defendant Click Model Management, Inc. moves by order to show cause to extend time to answer, move or otherwise respond to plaintiffs' amended complaint. Click moves on behalf of Elite Model Management, Inc.; 1 Ford Model's Inc.; Boss Models Inc.; Next Management Corp.; Q Model Management a/k/a Que Model Management; Women Model Management; Wilhelmina Models, Inc.; Marilyn Model Management, Inc.; Joseph Grill; Frances Grill; John Casablancas; Monique Pillard; Gerald Marie; Gerry Ford; Eileen Ford; Katie Ford; Joel Wilkenfeld; Faith Kates; Marilyn Gauthier; Dieter Esch; Natasha Esch; Ana-Gaby Esch; and Paul Rowland. The request for an extension of time was granted and the parties agreed to a briefing schedule for defendants' Joint Motion to Dismiss, which was submitted as motion 8.
In motion 7, dated December 14, 2003 defendants N.Y. Model Management, Cory Bautista and Heinz Holba move pursuant to CPLR 3211(a) for dismissal of the complaint.2 By letter from Robert J. Hantman, dated May 24, 2004, who submitted motion 7, the Court was informed that defendant George Gallier joined motion 7.
In motion 8, dated March 12, 2004, Ford Models, Inc., Gerard Ford, Eileen Ford, Mary Katherine Ford, Marion Smith, and Joseph Hunter move pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(1)(2)(4)(5) and (7) to dismiss the action. Defendants' “Joint Motion to Dismiss” was filed on behalf of the following defendants as well: Boss Models, Inc., David Bosman, Click Model Management, Inc., Joseph Grill, Frances Grill, Allan Mindel, John Casablancas, Robert Flutie, Images Management, Heinz Vollenweider, Q Model Management, Diva Entertainment, ID Model Management, Paolo Zampolli, International Management Group, Inc., IMG Models, Inc., Barbara Lantz, Gerald Marie, New York Models, Cory Bautista, Heinz Holba, Next Management Co., Partnership Holding, Claxon, Inc., Wilcor Group, Faith Kates, Joel Wilkenfeld, One Model Management, Scott Lipps, Paul Rowland, Men/Women N.Y. Model Management Inc., T Model Management, Wilhelmina Models, Inc., Wilhelmina International Ltd., Lorex A.G., Dieter Esch, Ana-Gaby Esch, Natasha Esch, Robert Kreusler, Creations Management LLC, Brad Krassner, The Krassner Family Foundation, Marilyn Model Management, Inc., Marilyn Gauthier. Counsel for Lorex A.G. submitted a reply affirmation dated May 14, 2004 in which Lorex joined the Joint Motion to Dismiss.3 By letter dated October 22, 2004, the Court was informed that defendants Gerald Marie and Alain Kittler had joined the Joint Motion to Dismiss. In a letter dated November 30, 2004, Pro Se defendant Douglas Asch stated that he wished to join the March 12, 2004 Joint Motion to Dismiss.
The Shelton action was initiated in April 2003. Plaintiffs lodge very serious accusations in their fifty-eight page amended complaint dated November 3, 2003 including: undisclosed kickbacks to modeling agencies(¶ 4); circumventing the employment agency law by using “captive” affiliates to book Screen Actors' Guild and AFTRA jobs, both of which require bookings only through licensed agents(¶ 4); price gouging of models (¶ 7); resigning their Department of Consumer Affairs licenses in the early 1970s (¶ 154), then denying to the models and DCA the modeling agencies' legal status as employment agencies in order to avoid the 10% limit on such fees(¶ 92 and 103); double-dipping by charging models 20% and model employers 20% resulting in the agency collecting one-third of the amount paid plus reimbursement for expenses and without disclosing their full compensation to their client models (¶ 137); collusion among model agencies to set fees (¶ 138); and collusion of agencies in not advising models to seek DCA assistance when another model agency, notorious for not paying models even after it had been paid, failed to pay the models (¶ 154 and 155).
The complaint sets forth four classes of plaintiffs: (1) the “Model Agency Class” who are all current and former professional models who booked work through any of the defendant agencies from 1971 to the present; (2) the “Elite Class” who are current and former professional models who are or were represented by any of the Elite Defendants from 1977 to the present; (3) the “Wilhelmina Class” who are current and former professional models represented by Wilhelmina Models, Inc. from 1989 to the present; and (4) the “Ford Class” who are current and former professional models represented by Ford Models, Inc. from 1989 to the present. The Shelton complaint consists of nine causes of action: (1) by the Model Agency Class against the Model Agency Defendants for injunctive relief and damages under GBL § 349 for false statements made to aspiring models and regulators; (2) by the Model Agency Class against all defendants for damages arising from violations of GBL Article 11 and New York State common law; (3) by the Elite Class against the Elite Defendants for breach of fiduciary duty and misrepresentation; (4) by the Elite Class against the Elite Defendants for fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and violations of and conspiracy to violate GBL § 170 to 190; (5) by the Wilhelmina Class against the Wilhelmina defendants for breach of fiduciary duty and misrepresentation; (6) by the Wilhelmina Class against the Wilhelmina Defendants for fraud, breach of fiduciary duty and violations of and conspiracy to violate GBL § 170 to 190; (7) by the Ford Class against the Ford Defendants for breach of fiduciary duty and misrepresentation; (8) 4 by the Wilhelmina Class against the Wilhelmina defendants 5 for fraud, breach of fiduciary duty based on violations of and conspiracy to violate GBL § 170 to 190; and (9) by the individual plaintiffs Shelton, Shea, Johnson, and Connor against the Elite defendants for a declaratory judgment that their contracts are void and unenforceable under GBL Article 11.
The allegations in the Fletcher action are even more shocking: Fletcher's first booker allegedly offered her drugs and once tried to force himself on her and when she complained, he was transferred to prey upon other models(¶ 18); when Fletcher challenged Elite about expenses deducted from her earnings, it somehow lost her portfolio (¶ 23); billing models without documentation for expenses (¶ 29); allocating overhead administrative expenses to models (¶ 29); receiving payments for jobs, but denying payment by hiding payment in off-shore accounts (¶ 30-34). Fletcher's January 12, 2004 complaint includes five causes of action for: conversion violation of Section 51 of the N.Y. Civil Rights law, breach of fiduciary duty, misrepresentation, violation of GBL Article 11, and violation of GBL 349.
A related federal class action is pending before Judge Harold Baer in the Southern District of New York, Index No. 02 Civ. 4911(HB), entitled Fears, et al v. Wilhelmina Model Agency, Inc., originally filed as Masters v. Wilhelmina Model Agency, Inc. In his decision addressing defendants' motion to dismiss, Judge Baer described the antitrust action with pendant state claims as follows:
Plaintiffs, consisting of models who work or have worked at some point over the past three decades for New York modeling agencies, bring this lawsuit as a class action against the modeling agencies for allegedly violating federal antitrust and New York state laws by, inter alia, (1) conspiring to set the fees charged to models and to fix other terms and conditions of the plaintiffs' contracts; (2) knowingly charging plaintiffs fees in excess of the maximum amount permitted by New York law; and (3) deliberately breaching their fiduciary duties through various unlawful practices, including earning undisclosed profits from third parties, billing models for phony expenses, and making profits on services which were agree to be provided at cost.
2003 WL 145556 (Jan. 17, 2003). According to plaintiffs, the only plaintiffs in this action, but not in the federal action are Shelton, who was disqualified as a class representative in the federal action, Shea and Johnson.
Plaintiffs filed and served an amended complaint dated November 2003. The action was transferred to this Court from Justice Gammerman on December 16, 2003. On September 30, 2004, Judge DeGrasse consolidated the Fletcher action 6 with this action.7
On February 17, 2004, the Court was advised that Elite Model Management Corp., Monique Pillard and Company Models had filed for bankruptcy, automatically staying this action against them. On December 7, 2004, Bankruptcy Judge Drain considered a motion by plaintiffs' counsel in this action for relief from the automatic bankruptcy stay. Judge Drain indicated on the record, Transcript at 122-126, though he did not issue an order, that the stay might apply to Mr. Casablancas, Mr. Marie and Mr. Kittler as officers of Elite. Hayes letter dated December 9, 2004.
The motions to dismiss were argued on May 20, 2004. On July 16, 2004, the Court was advised that a settlement had been reached in the related Federal action. As part of that settlement, plaintiffs agreed to dismiss 33 defendants in this action,8 leaving 27 non-bankrupt defendants. According to a November 8, 2004 letter from plaintiffs' Mr. Haazan and the settling defendants, the settlement would result in dismissal of counts 5 to 8 of the complaint because they involve only settling defendants and count 9 is dismissed to the extent that it involves settling defendants. By letter dated November 23, 2004, Casablancas challenged whether any settlement had been reached. On March 18, 2005, the Court received a phone message that the “Elite defendants” 9 were settling, which was confirmed by letter on May 13, 2005.
Due to the constant state of flux in the action, the Court delayed decision on the motions waiting for activities to settle down and for clarity with regard to which parties remained, which causes of action remained and which motions remained. The parties' papers added to the confusion when, for example, plaintiffs stated in their January 20, 2004 brief that only counts one and two of the complaint applied to N.Y. Models, but, in the same brief, plaintiffs addressed breach of fiduciary duty claims against N.Y. Models in counts three through eight. The Court made several requests to the parties to clarify these outstanding issues. Instead of clarity, the Court's requests yielded inappropriate letters rearguing the motions and even more motions for sanctions and contempt. By letter dated April 14, 2005, the non-settling defendants advised the Court that the only remaining claims against them were counts I and II and that they awaited a decision on their joint motion to dismiss.10 Finally, the Court received a letter from plaintiffs, dated June 20, 2005,11 setting forth the remaining defendants in this action: Joseph Hunter; Marion Smith; Company Models; Michael Flutie; Robert Flutie; ID Model Management; Paolo Zampolli; George Gallier; Karin Models LLC; Jean-Luc Brunel; Metropolitan Model Agency, Inc.; Metropolitan Models Paris; Thomas Zeumer; Michel Levaton; New York Models a/k/a New York Model Management; Diva Entertainment; T Model Management; Women Model Management; and Paul Rowland.12 However, plaintiff did not address which claims remained, nor did plaintiffs dispute defendants' contention that only the first and second causes of action remained.
Though the settlement has yet to be approved by this Court, as a result of the proposed settlement, motions 3 and 4 shall be denied as moot with leave to renew upon 5 days notice. Accordingly, motions 5, 6, 7 and 8 are undecided as to the remaining defendants and as to counts one and two only.
Defendants jointly move to dismiss this action. They argue that count 2, for violations of GBL Article 11, should be dismissed because there is no private right of action under Article 11. Count 1, for violation of GBL § 349, should be dismissed because it is impermissibly derivative of plaintiffs' Article 11 claim. Defendants also argue that plaintiffs have failed to state a claim under GBL § 349 for a variety of reasons, that defendants' alleged misrepresentations to the DCA are constitutionally protected and claims by non-New York plaintiffs who received services outside of New York are outside the scope of GBL § 349's protection. According to defendants, plaintiffs lack standing to bring Article 11 and GBL § 349 claims against defendants with whom plaintiffs have no contractual relationship. Finally, defendants argue that plaintiffs' first and second causes of action are time barred. Since the Court grants defendants' joint motion to dismiss, it is unnecessary to address the remaining individual defendants' motions.
General Business Law Article 11 governs employment agencies. GBL § 170. Employment agencies must be licensed, GBL § 172; their fees are limited, GBL § 185; they may not charge employees for incidental services such as the cost of advertising, GBL § 187(10); they must file a $5,000 bond (§ 177) upon which a damaged person may sue (§ 178) and their contracts must include the provisions of GBL §§ 185 and 187, GBL § 181(1). Violation of GBL § 172, the licensing requirement, is a misdemeanor subjecting the guilty person to a fine of not more than $1,000 or imprisonment of not more than one year. GBL § 190. An “employment agency” is defined as:
2. a. “Employment agency” means any person (as hereinafter defined) who, for a fee, procures or attempts to procure:
(1) employment or engagements for persons seeking employment or engagements, or
(2) employees for employers seeking the services of employees.
b. “Employment agency” shall include any person engaged in the practice of law who regularly and as part of a pattern of conduct, directly or indirectly, recruits, supplies, or attempts or offers to recruit or supply, an employee who resides outside the continental United States (as defined in section one hundred eighty-four-a of this article) for employment in this state and who receives a fee in connection with the arrangement for the admission into this country of such workers for employment.
c. “Employment agency” shall include any person who, for a fee, renders vocational guidance or counseling services and who directly or indirectly:
(1) procures or attempts to procure or represents that he can procure employment or engagements for persons seeking employment or engagements;
(2) represents that he has access, or has the capacity to gain access, to jobs not otherwise available to those not purchasing his services; or
(3) provides information or service of any kind purporting to promote, lead to or result in employment for the applicant with any employer other than himself.
d. “Employment agency” shall include any nurses' registry and any theatrical employment agency (as hereinafter defined).
e. “Employment agency” shall not include: (1) any employment bureau conducted by a duly incorporated bar association, hospital, association of registered professional nurses, registered medical institution, or by a duly incorporated association or society of professional engineers, or by a duly incorporated association or society of land surveyors, or by a duly incorporated association or society of registered architects; (2) any speakers' bureau as defined in subdivision eleven hereof; (3) any organization operated by or under the exclusive control of a bonafide nonprofit educational, religious, charitable or eleemosynary institution[;] (4) any person, firm, corporation or organization defined and regulated by sections one hundred ninety-one through one hundred [fig 1] ninety-three of this chapter.
A theatrical employment agency is defined in GBL 171(8) as:
“Theatrical employment agency” means any person (as defined in subdivision seven of this section) who procures or attempts to procure employment or engagements for circus, vaudeville, the variety field, the legitimate theater, motion pictures, radio, television, phonograph recordings, transcriptions, opera, concert, ballet, modeling or other entertainments or exhibitions or performances, but such term does not include the business of managing such entertainments, exhibitions or performances, or the artists or attractions constituting the same, where such business only incidentally involves the seeking of employment therefor. (Emphasis added).
In his January 17, 2003 decision, Judge Baer determined that GBL Article 11 does not explicitly provide for a private right of action so he thoroughly analyzed whether a private right of action could be implied in GBL Article 11. As he stated, while plaintiffs are members of the class to be protected by GBL Article 11 and a private right of action would promote the legislative purpose of protecting working people such as models from unscrupulous employment agencies, a private right of action would be inconsistent with the legislative scheme. He held plaintiffs had no implied private right of action and dismissed plaintiffs' Article 11 claims and non-Article 11 claims because they were impermissibly premised on violation of Article 11.
Judge Baer's decision is not binding on this Court under theories of res judicata or collateral estoppel to the extent that the parties here are different. Rather, a fundamental underpinning of both res judicata and collateral estoppel is that every person is entitled to his day in court. Gramatan Home Investors Corp. v. Lopez, 46 N.Y.2d 481, 485, 414 N.Y.S.2d 308, 386 N.E.2d 1328 (1979). Therefore, the action must be dismissed as to any plaintiffs who were plaintiffs in the federal action. Shelton, Shea and Johnson were not parties to the federal action, however, and they are entitled to their day in court.
Although we find Judge Baer's reasoning for finding that there is no implicit private right of action under GBL Article 11 to be sound, we disagree that it is necessary to engage in the analysis at all. We find that GBL's Article 11 explicitly provides for a private right of action, disposing of any need to look for an implicit right.
GBL § 177 provides that licensed modeling agencies shall file a $10,000 bond. Since 1904, GBL § 178 has provided that “[a]ll claims or suits in any court against any licensed person may be brought in the name of the person damaged upon the bond deposited by such licensed person.” In 1975, the legislature added to GBL § 178 as part of its comprehensive overhaul of Article 11 that “the commissioner may institute a suit against the bond on behalf of any person damaged.” Judge Baer relies on the fact that the legislature failed to add a private right of action in 1975. It was unnecessary since GBL § 178 already provided for one, albeit limited. In 1904, the statute also provided that
“If any person shall be aggrieved by the misconduct of any licensed person, and shall recover judgment against him therefor, such person may, after the return unsatisfied, either in whole or in part, of any execution issued upon said judgment, maintain an action in his own name upon the bond of said employment agency.”
Today, the same section reads
“The bond ․ shall be conditioned that the person applying for the license will comply with this article and shall pay all damages occasioned to any person by reason of any misstatement, misrepresentation, fraud or deceit, or any unlawful act or omission of any licensed person ․ or caused by any other violation of this article in carrying on the business for which such license is granted.”
Clearly, then, as to licensed employment agencies, there is a private right of action.
An explicit private right of action complements the DCA's enforcement powers. Under § 189(5), for example, following a hearing, DCA may revoke a license or levy a fine against a licensed employment agency of $500 for each violation. Neither remedy benefits the victimized employee.
This raises the question of whether the private right of action would allow an employee to bring an action against a non-licensed employment agency as well. The answer is yes. The Court need only look to Article 11 itself. For example, § 186 requires a refund for excessive fees within 7 days of demand. However, it fails to state who must make the demand upon the employment agency and is not limited to licensed employment agencies. Indeed, Section 186 has been successfully used defensively by defendant/employees against unlicensed employment agencies in the agencies' breach of contract actions to collect fees. Dorrell Associates v. Urb Products Corp., 67 Misc.2d 716, 324 N.Y.S.2d 507 (Civ. Ct., N.Y. County 1971)(contract void and unenforceable by unlicensed employment agency); Pine v. Laine, 36 A.D.2d 924, 321 N.Y.S.2d 303 (1st Dept.1971)(defense based on plaintiff's lack of a license successful in action where employment agency could not come within exception since performer already had a personal manager), affirmed, 31 N.Y.2d 988, 341 N.Y.S.2d 448, 293 N.E.2d 824 (1973); Allen v. Brice, 165 Misc. 181, 300 N.Y.S. 640 (Sup. Ct., N.Y. County 1937) (plaintiff/manager's complaint which stated that he was engaged to secure employment but failed to state he was licensed was thus dismissed). In one case, an employee successfully brought an action using GBL § 186 affirmatively to escape his obligation to an unlicensed employment agency. Friedkin v. Harry Walker, Inc., 90 Misc.2d 680, 395 N.Y.S.2d 611 (Civ. Ct., N.Y. County 1977)(contract with unlicensed booking agent who secures lectures held unenforceable).
The legislative history is not inconsistent with this conclusion. Rather, it is silent on the issue of any kind of private right of action. The divide between the governor and legislators as to whether the state or local authorities should license and regulate employment agencies has been misinterpreted by defendants as precluding a private right of action. They are not mutually exclusive. In his January 1958 message to the legislature, the Governor called for statewide control of employment agencies. NYS Legislative Annual, p. 357. See also, Legislative Annual 1963, Governor's Memoranda on Bill's Approved, p. 451. “A study by the N.Y. State Department of Labor demonstrated that some local authorities have done nothing to enforce the law.” 1958 Legislative Annual p. 484. Later that year maintaining this objection, the Governor signed the bill slightly modifying the employment agency law but rejecting his call for a major overhaul and effective regulation. New York State Legislative Annual, Governor's Memoranda on bill's Approved, p. 484. See also, 1958 Amendment, Memorandum to Hon. Daniel Gutman Counsel to the Governor; 1958 Amendment, Commerce and Industry Association of New York, Inc.; 1958 Amendment, memorandum for the Governor prepared by the Department of Law; Budget Report on Bills. It was not until 1975 that the Governor's objection was addressed when the New York State Industrial Commissioner was authorized to enforce the statute outside of New York City. 1975 Amendment, July 3, 1975 letter from Senator Joseph Pisani to counsel to the governor. This dispute had nothing to do with a private right of action; nor could it. An individual cannot license or regulate. Therefore, plaintiffs have a private right of action against a modeling agency which should be licensed as an employment agency.
The next issue is whether defendants are employment agencies subject to the licensing requirement. Defendants contend that they fit within Article 11's “incidental booking exception” which applies when finding employment for models is only incidental to their agreements with the models. GBL 171(8). Plaintiffs counter that the only service provided by defendants is to secure employment, thus the exception is inapplicable. Therefore, plaintiffs conclude that modeling agencies are employment agencies, must be licensed, and having failed to do so are liable for compensatory damages.
In addition to the parties' positions on this issue, another recent event informs this decision on whether modeling agencies should be licensed under the employment agency law. The answer to this question should soon be compelled by the New York Legislature's recent bill A8381A/S5602, which was overwhelmingly passed by both houses, but vetoed by the Governor on August 19, 2005. It provides that it is “[a]n act to amend the general business law, in relation to regulation of theatrical employment agencies,” the purpose of which, according to the Sponsor's memo is “to clarify the difference between a ‘personal manager’ and ‘theatrical employment agency.’ ” Its sponsor explains that it is intended to help the modeling industry which has been involved in time consuming, distracting and costly litigations all arising from the definition of the term “model management” and whether they differ from employment agencies. According to the Assembly's sponsor, they differ. Governor Pataki stated that he was “constrained” to veto the bill based on the objections of the New York State Consumer Protection Board and the Screen Actor's Guild which were concerned about unscrupulous employment agencies using the proposed definition of “personal manager” to provide employment services, but outside of the protection of the law. The Governor was sympathetic to the modeling industry's woes. However, the law has not changed yet and therefore the Court is compelled to continue its analysis.
Whether the incidental booking exception applies in this case is not an issue that can be resolved on a motion to dismiss. In some cases, this determination can be made from the contracts themselves, but that is not true here. Mandel v. Liebman, 303 N.Y. 88, 100 N.E.2d 149 (1951); Friedkin v. Harry Walker, Inc., 90 Misc.2d 680, 395 N.Y.S.2d 611 (Civ. Ct., N.Y. County 1977); Gervis v. Knapp, 182 Misc. 311, 43 N.Y.S.2d 849 (Sup. Ct., N.Y. County 1943)(defendant/singer's motion for summary judgment denied because contract established that plaintiff was primarily a manager, thus not subject to GBL). Here, the complaint alleges that defendants specifically disavowed in their contract that they were employment agencies and deny that they are subject to Article 11. Rather, the circumstances of each modeling agency defendant must be considered by a trier of fact. Hyde v. Vinolas, 234 A.D. 364, 254 N.Y.S. 687 (1st Dept.1932); Greenfield v. Tripp, 10 A.D.2d 638, 196 N.Y.S.2d 902 (2d Dept.1960), rehearing and appeal denied, 10 A.D.2d 850, 201 N.Y.S.2d 494 (2d Dept.1960); Pawlowski v. Woodruff, 122 Misc. 695, 203 N.Y.S. 819 (Sup. Ct., App. Term, 1st Dept.1924), affirmed, 212 A.D. 871, 208 N.Y.S. 912 (1st Dept.1925); Lustig v. Schoonover, 51 N.Y.S.2d 156, NOC (Sup. Ct., N.Y. County 1944), affirmed 269 A.D. 830, 56 N.Y.S.2d 415 (1st Dept.1945); Farnum v. O'Neill, 141 Misc. 555, 252 N.Y.S. 900 (Municipal Ct., Borough of Manhattan 1931). Nonetheless, for the purposes of a motion to dismiss, plaintiffs have stated a cause of action under Article 11.
Next defendants argue that the action is time barred. A three year statute of limitations applies to GBL § 349 claims under CPLR 214(2). Gaidon v. Guardian Life Ins. Co., 96 N.Y.2d 201, 727 N.Y.S.2d 30, 750 N.E.2d 1078 (2001). A cause of action accrues under GBL § 349(h) when a plaintiff has been injured by a deceptive act or practice. Defendants assert that the claims accrued when plaintiffs executed contracts: Shelton by IMG from 1989 to 1993; Connor by Wilhelmina beginning in 1988; Fears by Ford from 1989; Johnson by Elite from 1979; Shea by Elite since 2000 and Fletcher by Elite from 1998 to 2000. Plaintiffs claim the injury occurred in 2002 when plaintiffs discovered, as a result of their investigations for the Fears action, defendants' bad acts. The critical question is when was plaintiff injured by the alleged deceptive act. Soskel v. Handler, 189 Misc.2d 795, 736 N.Y.S.2d 853 (Sup. Ct., Nassau County 2001).
Plaintiffs' claims cannot be equitably tolled by the date of discovery rule. Plaintiffs repeatedly allege in the amended complaint that until investigative efforts were undertaken in the Fears action, plaintiffs had no factual basis to allege claims. ¶ 103, 124, 135. However, plaintiffs undermine themselves when they simultaneously allege that as early as 1980, the standard model contract disavowed that the manager would seek employment for the person being managed yet models were required to refer all inquiries for their employment to their agencies and the agency had the exclusive right to book the model. ¶ 149 and 160. Indeed, the contract's denial of employment services prompted a model to so challenge that which plaintiffs say they could not until the Fears discovery. ¶ 150. “Mere ignorance or lack of discovery of the wrong is not sufficient to toll the Statute of Limitations.” General Stencils, Inc. v. Chiappa, 18 N.Y.2d 125, 127, 272 N.Y.S.2d 337, 219 N.E.2d 169 (1966). Moreover, if models were unaware of DCA licensing requirements, then the modeling agencies themselves gave the models a clue when the standard contract was changed to explicitly deny the agency's obligation to be licensed. ¶ 161.
However, plaintiffs can rely on a continuing violation theory to toll the running of the Statute of Limitations. Plaintiffs argue that defendants' misrepresentations concerning their status as employment agencies in violation of the GBL continue today. The doctrine will toll the limitations period to the date of the commission of the last wrongful act where there is a series of continuing wrongs. Neufeld v. Neufeld, 910 F.Supp. 977, 982 (S.D.N.Y.1996). “[I]t may only be predicated on continuing unlawful acts and not on the continuing effects of earlier unlawful conduct.” Selkirk v. State, 249 A.D.2d 818, 671 N.Y.S.2d 824 (3d Dept.1998)(doctrine did not apply to State's seizure of plaintiff's property; court rejected plaintiff/taxpayer's argument that she continued to suffer effects of property seizure). Under the doctrine a continuing violation occurred each time a landlord collected an illegal rent, 78/79 York Assocs. v. Rand, 175 Misc.2d 960, 672 N.Y.S.2d 619 (Civ. Ct., N.Y. County 1998), affirmed, 180 Misc.2d 316, 691 N.Y.S.2d 875 (N.Y. App. Term, 1st Dept.1999) and each time a debtor defaulted on the loan, where creditor failed to accelerate loan. Phoenix Acquisition Corp. v. Campcore, Inc., 81 N.Y.2d 138, 596 N.Y.S.2d 752, 612 N.E.2d 1219 (1993). Likewise, here each time plaintiffs paid defendants more than the statutory 10% fee, defendants would be in violation of Article 11.
For the same reasons, the Article 11 claim in the second cause of action is not time-barred.
Finally, however, the Court is constrained to dismiss the action because none of the remaining named plaintiffs allege a relationship with any of the remaining non-settling defendants. Plaintiffs may not rely on unidentified class members. Tegnazian v. Consol. Edison, Inc., 189 Misc.2d 152, 156, 730 N.Y.S.2d 183 (Sup. Ct., N.Y. County 2000), appeal withdrawn, 283 A.D.2d 1034, 728 N.Y.S.2d 114 (1st Dept.2001). By plaintiffs' failure to address this issue, the Court can only infer that plaintiffs concede it.
Therefore, the defendants' joint motion to dismiss is granted and the action is dismissed against: Joseph Hunter; Marion Smith; Company Models; Michael Flutie; Robert Flutie; ID Model Management; Paolo Zampolli; George Gallier; New York Models a/k/a New York Model Management; Diva Entertainment; T Model Management; Women Model Management; Paul Rowland; and Q Model Management a/k/a Que Model Management, the non-settling defendants who participated in the joint motion to dismiss. It is unnecessary to address the remaining defendants' individual motions to dismiss. The action continues against: Karin Models LLC; Jean-Luc Brunel; Metropolitan Model Agency, Inc.; Metropolitan Models Paris; Thomas Zeumer; Michel Levaton who have not settled and have not moved to dismiss.
Afterword
A jury is not likely to ever hear the important issues of whether defendants are “employment agencies,” and thus subject to the GBL Article 11, as plaintiffs assert, or are subject to the “incidental booking exception,” as defendants contend. The legislature and Governor take issue with litigation expenses incurred by modeling agencies in this and the Federal action initiated by models against modeling agencies for allegedly taking advantage of the models. They focus on the confusion over the term “personal manager,” and overlook the serious allegations of institutional predation made by the models against the modeling agencies. Article 11 is simply intended to protect vulnerable employees from more powerful and unscrupulous employers; a protection which has been afforded New York's employees since 1904. It is a “one-size” fits all statute which does not apparently fit the modeling industry. However, the proposed bill creates opportunities for abuse in other areas of the entertainment business, as recognized by Governor Pataki's veto.
Perhaps the solution is not to modify the “employment agency” statute by exempting modeling agencies and thus leaving models unprotected, but to enact a modeling agency statute which prohibits the abuses which are abhorred by all, especially the reputable modeling agencies which according to IMG's memorandum in support of A8381A/S5602 generate $250 million in business annually in NYC. With his veto, Governor Pataki directs his staff to work with drafters and the industry to find alternatives to the flawed proposed bill. Drafters would be wise to look to the settlement in the Fears Federal action wherein the settling modeling agencies agree to (1) disclose all compensation received by it on all bookings including service charges, mother agent fees, gross fee received for booking and any other charges or deduction; (2) use clear contracts which disclose all compensation terms and practices; and (3) use contracts that are not automatically renewable. Fears v. Wilhelmina Model Agency, Inc., 2005 U.S. Dist. Lexis 7961 (S.D.N.Y.2005) at page 8/25. Finally, Article 11, as well as any statute enacted to address the modeling industry, should clearly indicate that an employee may seek a refund under GBL § 186 without requesting the assistance from the DCA. In these times of significant budgetary constraints on government agencies, it seems obvious that just as an individual may rely on Article 11 defensively, an individual ought to be able to recover an excessive fee from either a licensed or unlicensed employment agency.
Accordingly, it is
ORDERED, that motion 3 and 4 are denied as moot without prejudice to renewal on 5 days notice; and it is further
ORDERED, that motion 5, dated November 25, 2003, by defendants ID Model Management and Paolo Zampolli, to dismiss the complaint is granted; and it is further
ORDERED, that motion 6, brought by order to show cause, dated December 5, 2003 to extend time to answer, move or otherwise respond to plaintiffs' amended complaint is granted and defendants' Joint Motion to Dismiss submitted as motion 8; and it is further
ORDERED, that motion 7, dated December 14, 2003, by defendants N.Y. Model Management, Cory Bautista and Heinz Holba for dismissal of the complaint is granted; and it is further
ORDERED, that the Clerk is directed to correct the caption by adding Cory Bautista and Heinz Holba; and it is further
ORDERED, that defendants' motion 8, the Joint Motion, is granted and the action is dismissed; and it is further
ORDERED, that the Clerk is directed to remove Elite Model Management Inc. from the caption and replace it with Elite Model Management Corp., and it is further
ORDERED, that motion 7 in the Fletcher action is permitted to be withdrawn; and it is further
ORDERED, that the Clerk is directed to enter judgment accordingly.
FOOTNOTES
1. Elite Model Management Inc. (“EMM Inc.”) is listed in the caption of the amended complaint, but Elite Model Management Corp. (“EMM Corp.”), is not. EMM Corp. is described as a defendant in paragraph 15 of the complaint, but EMM Inc. is not mentioned in the complaint. The settlement agreement in the federal action was signed by Elite Model Management SA. However, the Judgment in the federal action releases claims against Elite SA and EMM Corp. The proposed judgment in this action lists EMM Corp. as a released party, but not EMM Inc. As EMM Corp. does not challenge jurisdiction, the clerk shall be directed to correct the caption by substituting Elite Model Management Corp. for Elite Model Management Inc.
2. The Court notes that neither Bautista nor Holba are named as defendants in the caption of the amended complaint. Likewise, Cathy Geraghty and Catherine Pelgat are described in the amended complaint as defendants, but are not listed in the caption. As Holba and Bautista move to dismiss the complaint, but do not challenge jurisdiction or service, the Court will direct the Clerk to correct the caption as to them. As to Geraghty and Pelgat, plaintiff must move to amend the caption.
3. Lorex's request for permission to supplement the pending motion to object to defective service is denied without prejudice to filing a proper motion.
4. The eighth cause of action appears on page 53 of the amended complaint and is incorrectly designated as the “sixth” cause of action.
5. In addition to being misnumbered, the eighth cause of action lists the defendants as the Ford Defendants, while the parenthetical states that the claim is against the Wilhelmina defendants and is brought by the Wilhelmina plaintiffs.
6. Fletcher v. Elite Model Management Corp.; Elite Model Management S.A. Elite Premier; Gerald Marie; John Casablancas; Alain Kittler; Monique Pillard; Advertex Communications, Inc. Macy's East, Inc. and Federated Group Inc., Index No. 100459/04. According to plaintiffs' counsel, Olav Haazan's October 11, 2004 affidavit, as part of the Fears' settlement, Fletcher dismissed without prejudice her claims against Advertex, Macy's East and Federated.
7. In motion 7 in the Fletcher action, on August 16, 2004, defendants Gerald Marie and Alain Kittler move (1) pursuant to CPLR 3211(a)(8) for improper service; (2) to stay the action based on the bankruptcy Code and the filing of bankruptcy by Elite and (3) to stay the action for the same reasons argued by Casablancas. According to the court's computer, and consistent with a December 9, 2004 letter from counsel for Kittler and Marie, this motion was withdrawn on December 10, 2004. Nonetheless, the motion appears in the Court's computer system as undecided. Accordingly, that motion is hereby permitted to be withdrawn and the Clerk of the Court is directed to mark the Court's records accordingly.
8. The 33 settling defendants are: Boss Models, Inc.; David Bosman; Click Model Management, Inc.; Joseph Grill; Frances Grill; Allan Mindel; Ford Models, Inc.; Gerard W. Ford; Eileen Ford; Mary Katherine Ford; Images Management; Heinz Vollenweider; IMG Models, Inc.; IMG Worldwide, Inc. (sued here as International Management Group Inc.); Next Management Co. (sued here as Next Management Corp.); Wilcor Group; Claxon Inc.; Partnership Holding; Faith Kates; Joel Wilkenfeld; Wilhelmina International Ltd.; Wilhelmina Models Inc.; Marilyn Model Management Inc.; Marilyn Gauthier; Robert Kreusler; Creation Management LLC; Brad Krassner; Krassner Family Investments Limited Partnership (sued here as the Krassner Family Foundation); and Barbara Lantz. Plaintiffs also agreed not to pursue their claims against Marion Smith and Joseph Hunter in this matter for their conduct during their employment at Ford. However, their claims continue against Smith and Hunter as president of New York Models and owner of Karin Models respectively. In the June 21, 2004 letter, plaintiffs informed the Court they would be moving to sever or stay this matter, but no such motion has ever been filed. Plaintiffs also advised the court by letter that they were withdrawing their claims against defendants Company Models and MFME Model Management Company Ltd.
9. According to plaintiff's June 20, 2005 letter, they include: Elite Model Management S.A.; Elite Group S.A.; Gerald Marie; John Casablancas; Alain Kittler; 1 Model Management; Scott Lipps, Monique Pillard Mary Ann D'Angelico; Christian Larpin; and Douglas Asch. The Court notes that neither D'Angelico nor Larpin are defendants in this action.
10. The letter was signed by defendants Men/Women N.Y. Model Management, Inc., Paul Rowland, 1 Model Management LLC, Scott Lipps, ID Model Management, Paolo Zampolli, Robert Flutie, T Management, Q Management, Inc., New York Models Management, Heinz Holba, Cory Bautista, Marion Smith and George P. Gallier. By letter dated April 25, 2005, Joseph Hunter joined the April 14, 2005 letter.
11. Plaintiffs' first letter dated June 15, 2005 contained a different list of remaining defendants.
12. In addition, the Court has not received any notice of settlement regarding: Elite Model Management Inc., Lorex A.G., Dieter Esch, Natasha Esch, Ana-Gaby Esch and Jean-Luc Brunel. Q Model Management a/k/a Que Model Management does not appear on plaintiffs' list of remaining non-settling defendants, but Q signed defendants' April 14, 2005 letter. Q also joined in defendants' Joint Motion to Dismiss, motion 8.
CHARLES EDWARD RAMOS, J.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
CAROLYN FEARS, et al.,
Plaintiffs,
against
WILHELMINA MODEL AGENCY, INC., et al.,
Defendants.
02 Civ. 4911 (HB)
OPINION AND ORDER
Hon. HAROLD BAER, JR., District Judge:
Plaintiffs, by and through Lead Plaintiffs' Counsel Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, as well as Hayes & Hardy LLP and Berger & Montague, P.C., request that I raise this Court's prior award of attorneys' fees and expenses, as well as adjust this Court's distribution of residual settlement funds, following the Second Circuit's remand of this litigation to this Court. See Masters v. Wilhelmina Model Agency, Inc., 473 F.3d 423 (2d Cir. Jan. 4, 2007).
For the following reasons articulated below, Plaintiffs' requests are granted in part and denied in part.1
I also found this article from the mid 2000’s in the Gawker Archive where Paolo Zampolli insinuated that his models are “working girls” (amongst other things), but the name of one of his ID Models in particular caught my eye.
If you happen to be an avid reader of The Australian -- and why aren't you, really -- you'd have been treated this weekend to a profile of Paramount Group, a Soho broker that specializes in sending hot chicks on property visits. Rather than a bored suit or icy matron, why not enjoy the informed company of a professional model who's moonlighting in the real estate game? It’s a sweet arrangement, as Paramount co-chairman Paolo Zampolli also runs ID Models, from which the realty hotties come. That model hive has quite an interesting track record -- a quick check of their "About" page shows one of the infamous gossip-inducing pics of ID model Cinthia Moura taken with Bill Clinton back in 2001. And look, its Sante D'Orazio! and ID Model Adriana Mucinska also spent time as arm candy for alleged masseuse fan Jeffrey Epstein. This seems like a good time to note, once more, that there are only superficial similarities and many differences between Epstein and would-be media mogullionaire Ron Burkle. But just coincidentally, here's something else you should know about Paramount/ID's Palo Zampolli:
His clients include Ron Burkle, the Beverly Hills supermarket billionaire, for whom he has been trying to find a New York residence.
"I tried to buy Soho House (the private members' club) for him but they wouldn't sell," he says.
To put it another way, they wouldn't "put out." For our part, we couldn't think of a better use for Soho House than to serve as Burkle's personal harem storage locker. Keeps 'em off the streets at least.
This article talks about Paolo’s Paramount Group and his exploitative pyramid of corruption (inspired by Donald Trump), and names figures within Paolo’s inner circle, including Donald Trump, Ron Burkle, and Bill Clinton.
Shockingly, there is an ID Model signed to Paolo named in this article named Adriana Mucinska. It is detailed within this article that she had been spending a lot of time with Jeffrey Epstein – “massage connoisseur”.
Getty Images has multiple photographs of Jeffrey Epstein and Adriana together, but this article couldn’t predict at the time of publication that Adriana Mucinska was a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s “Core Four”.
Jeffrey Epstein’s “Core Four” included: Sarah Kellen, Adriana Mucinska (sometimes known as Adriana Ross) Lesley Groff, and Nadia Marcinkova (sometimes known as Nadia Marcinko). These are the women were Ghislaine Maxwell’s protégés who actively lured young girls and women into Jeffrey Epstein’s crosshairs for profit.
At 18 years, Adriana was flown from Poland to Palm Beach, Florida to work for Jeffrey Epstein while modeling for Paolo Zampolli at ID Models. She was placed into the role of a scheduler and manager of Jeffrey’s “appointments” and would recruit other young girls for Jeffrey and his friends, as well.
In Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 Sweetheart Deal, all the women apart of Jeffrey’s Core Four were named as co-conspirators and given immunity, along with all the unnamed co-conspirators.
Adriana Mucinska, like the other members of the Core Four, plead the fifth when deposed for Virginia Giuffre’s defamation lawsuit and Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial.
She went on Jeffrey’s plane multiple times, often accompanied alongside Bill Clinton, Glenn and Eva Dubin, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Naomi Campbell (just to name a few figures).
Through Paolo’s real estate company, he sold many properties to high profile individuals, including Qatari government officials.
In 2011, Paolo was named Minister-Counsellor to the Permanent Mission of the Commonwealth of Dominica at the United Nations.
In October 2013, Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit appointed Zampolli as United Nations Ambassador and Ambassador for Oceans and Seas for the Commonwealth of Dominica.
In June 2014, Keith Mitchell, Prime Minister of Grenada, appointed Zampolli’s common law wife, Amanda Ungaro as United Nations Ambassador in charge of Post-15th Agendas and responsible of the second committee with United Nations Ambassador Ranking.
Amanda Ungaro has also worked under the 69th United Nations Vice President of the UN General Assembly for the Blue Economy.
Meaning, both Paolo Zampolli and Amanda Ungaro areUnited Nations diplomats in their own regards.
On December 22, 2020, Paolo was announced as an appointee member of the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by Donald Trump.
In January 2021, Paolo was appointed to the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness & Nutrition, joining prominent members such as: Herschel Walker, Bill Belichick, Johnny Damon, Natalie Gulbis, Misty May-Treanor, Urban Meyer, and Mariano Rivera.
Since March 2025, Paolo has served as the United States Special Representative for Global Partnerships.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump I am pleased to announce that I am appointing Paolo Zampolli as Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. With his extensive experience working with the United nations, the Kennedy Center, and various international initiatives, Paolo will help us advance America's interests on the Global stage. Congratulations Paolo!
Mar 11, 2025, 2:42 PM
Paolo Zampolli often hosts UN Meetings/after parties at one of his New York properties on East 17th Street.
An anonymous source who has reached out to me, has shared that she was sexually assaulted at this property (pictured above) by Paolo Zampolli in 2023 after a UN event. This anonymous source is a friend of and connected to Donald Trump’s grandchildren and has spent many evenings at Mar-a-Lago, as can be observed on her social media.
I HAVE INFO ABOUT PAOLO ZAMPOLLI. Idk if you'll see this but my best friend was drugged and sa'd by him in October 2023 in NYC at a UN event and took her to his penthouse. And she tried to sue and couldn't. I have texts from 2023 as proof. This guy is TERRIBLE. I fully think your theory is spot on.
Originally, a friend of the aforementioned victim reached out to me after seeing my research on Paolo Zampolli. She connected me with the victim, who told me firsthand exactly what happened to her, when it happened, where it happened, the circumstances leading up to it happening, and was able to provide messages from Paolo Zampolli where he admits to what he did.
This is a victim who is actively pursing justice and exhausting her legal options, so I will only share what I have been given permission to share about her trauma at this time.
Here are some photos she has given me permission to share from the night of her assault and the following day:
Paolo's Elevator. She woke up with no pants or underwear, confused, and being watched by security cameras.
Bruising on her thigh from being assaulted by Paolo Zampolli.
A photo she took on the night of her assault. Further proof she was inside Paolo's home.
Paulo's "Red Room" that he has dubbed the "Situation Room"
She is one of multiple women who have reached out with similar allegations of being drugged and raped in Paolo Zampolli’s NYC property.
A warning stating that Paolo Zampolli's E. 17 Street building is a "dioplomatic residence" greets visitors at the fron door. (Photo by Mary Reinholz)
If we meander over to Google Maps, we can see that back in November 2016 sits the flag of Grenada, a United Nations flag, and a We Are The Oceans (WATO) flag.
There is also a We Are The Oceans (WATO) sign on the front of his property.
WATO is an organization that Paolo Zampolli represents within his work for the United Nations. WATO is the same organization that partnered with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein’s “oceanic non-profit organization”, TerraMar, beginning in 2013.
“We are the ocean” was also a coined phrase that Ghislaine Maxwell used when talking about TerraMar’s mission and goals for “oceanic environmental ownership”. We Are The Ocean and TerraMar had virtually the same listed goals of oceanic environmental protection/ownership.
The phrase "We are the ocean" was used by Ghislaine Maxwell in the context of her TerraMar Project, a non-profit organization focused on ocean conservation and raising awareness about marine issues. She used this phrase to express the idea that humanity is interconnected with the oceans and has a responsibility to protect them. TerraMar aimed to create a global community to conserve and protect the oceans, raise awareness about ocean-related Sustainable Development Goals, and advocate for ocean protection at the United Nations, according to UN Press Releases.
Now, if we go forward to 2021, we can see that the sign is still there…
…but by August 2022, it was taken off his building. Coincidentally, Ghislaine Maxwell was sentenced less than 2 months before Google Maps captured a still showing the sign had been taken down.
I have also looked this property up on the NYC Department of Buildings database, where we can see any and all complaints that locals have made about Paolo’s property.
This property has a long list of complaints made by neighbors who have accused Paolo of constantly having people in and out of the property at all hours of the night. Some neighbors have speculated he was running an illegal Air B and B or hotel, due to the volume of people entering and exiting the property.
NYC Department of Buildings Overview for Complaint #: 1633904 = RESOLVED Complaint at: 119 EAST 17 STREET BIN: 1017841 Borough: MANHATTAN ZIP: 10003 Re: ILLEGAL HOTEL Category Code: 4A ILLEGAL HOTEL ROOMS IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS Assigned to: SPECIAL OPERATIONS Priority: B Received: 04/12/2023 15:00 Block: 873 Lot: 14 Community Board: 105 Owner: 1701 CALEDONIA CORP. Last Inspection: 04/12/2023 - - BY BADGE # 3057 Disposition: 04/12/2023 - A8 - ECB VIOLATION SERVED 041223CMTFRF01 041223CMTFRF02 041223CMTFRF03 041223CMTFRF04-05 DOB Violation #: ECB Violation #: 35669017Z 35669018K 35669019M 35669020J 35669021L Comments: PENTHOUSE CONVERTED TO TRANSIENT WITHOUT THE REQUIRED MEANS OF EGRESS AND FIRE ALARM SYSTEM. OBSTRUCTION OF EGRESS
Despite neighbors constantly reporting the shady ongoings of this property, Paolo continues to host prominent members with The United Nations body, foreign politicians, domestic politicians, celebrities and models.
The reporter was prompted to look into the diplomat's unusual parking setup after spotting this "thin blue line" police flag outside his residence in August. (Photo by Mary Reinholz)
Notice the floor is the same from the photo shared by Paolo's victim from 2023.
In 2021, an article from Politico was released about Paolo Zampolli. There are two points of interest that stood out to me. The first point is the revelation that Paolo was having an affair and cheating on the mother of his son, Amanda Ungaro.
Text messages were released between Paolo and the woman whom he had an affair with, in which Paolo warns her to stay away from his family, and that the whole city knew she was nothing more than a “working girl that he had to pay from the beginning”.
This woman denied being a “working girl” (aka a sex worker) and trading her affection for financial gain, and claimed the two were in a consensual relationship until she had found out that he was dishonest about the nature of his relationship with Amanda Ungaro.
According to her, when she found out that Amanda was his common-law wife who was loyal to him (and she was NOT aware of the affair between her and Paolo), he verbally berated her and threatened to destroy her reputation if she spoke out.
Thus far, we have having complaints made about a revolving door of people, more than one allegation of drugging and rape occurring in this building by Paolo, frequent parties with powerful and well connected figures, neighbors stating that it seems that he’s running an illegal hotel out of his home, and when he is accused of having an affair his first retort is to call the woman nothing more than a working girl.
When we put all of these things together, in my opinion, it seems something very nefarious is operating behind closed doors.
Steve Witkoff:
Before we finish this article up, I wanted to further dive into another friend of Paolo’s who is deeply intertwined with powerful and predatory men.
One of Paolo’s closest friends is Giuseppe Cipriani Jr., the CEO of Cipriani’s, the restaurant and how it has been used as a hunting ground for young women by very powerful men from Harvey Weinstein to Jeffrey Epstein.
GIUSEPPE CIPRIANI PAOLO ZAMPOLLI SPECIAL ENVOY OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS
Paolo has multiple photos on his social media of him at various Cipriani’s locations surrounded by very young women.
Throughout the 80’s to the early 2010’s was when the Cipriani’s restaurant brand was rapidly and constantly expanding.
In this era they would open Cipriani’s Downtown and Cipriani’s Wall Street. In 1997 Giuseppe Cipriani Jr. and his father purchased 55 Wall Street in New York, but there was a legal fiasco causing them to sell the property.
(L-R) A guest, Aline Roth and Amanda Ungaro attend the opening of the 2005 Wall Street Concert Series at Cipriani Wall Street. (Photo by Fairchild Archive/Penske Media via Getty Images). ID Model Amanda Ungaro (future mother of Paolo's child) at Cipriani's in 2005. Three years after appearing on Jeffrey's flight logs.
In 2005-2006, they were successful in repurchasing 55 Wall Street with the help of an real estate attorney named Steve Witkoff.
Steve Witkoff is an attorney, the founder of the Witkoff Group which is a real estate firm, and he was appointed to work under Donald Trump’s first administration as a member of the Great American Revival Industry Group. (Which sounds like a made up job to me personally.)
Steve Witkoff is appointed under the current administration as special envoy to the Middle East where he already has extensive business and real estate ties.
Steve Witkoff and war criminal Benjamin Netanyahu
Steve Witkoff is who the United States has sent in to handle a large majority of negotiations between Israel and Gaza. I’m using the word “negations” loosely because here we are two years into this non-stop devastation of Gaza, and Steve Witkoff has done nothing but blame the Palestinians.
Steve Witkoff is also Donald Trump’s main channel of communication between himself and Vladimir Putin. Steve Witkoff has said on the record he thinks of Putin as a close friend, and thinks “he’s a brilliant and great guy.”
He fully believes every piece of Russian propaganda and Israeli propaganda that is fed to him, and has proven to be not only ineffective but a liability to human life.
Steve’s son, Zach Witkoff is the founder of World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company that this administration is obsessed with.
There are multiple Cipriani-owned buildings in New York City. Some are event spaces, some are restaurants and bars, some are private membership hotels, but all virtually used for the same purpose — to host wealthy and famous individuals.
For example, Harvey Weinstein was a regular and a close friend of Giuseppe Cipriani Jr. Most of his film premieres, parties, and fundraisers were hosted at either Cipriani’s 42nd street and Cipriani’s Wall Street. He also regularly dined at Cipriani’s and had easy access to young models and celebrities.
He would utilize the rooftop suits attached to many of these locations to take his victims and harm them. It was an open secret that Harvey Weinstein utilized Cipriani’s as a hunting ground, as Giuseppe Cipriani Jr. allowed it.
Giuseppe Cipriani Jr. is also in Jeffrey and Ghislaine’s little black book and were photographed together at different Cipriani’s venues on multiple occasions.
NEW YORK CITY, NY - MARCH 15: Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell attend de Grisogono Sponsors The 2005 Wall Street Concert Series Benefitting Wall Street Rising, with a Performance by Rod Stewart at Cipriani Wall Street on March 15, 2005 in New York City. (Photo by Joe Schildhorn/Patric McMullan via Getty Images)
Bill and Hillary Clinton often hosted their Clinton Foundation Fundraisers at a Cipriani Venue and have connections to Giuseppe Cipriani Jr.
Bill Clinton has long been a regular, as has Hillary, both separately and together. They were at the Wall Street venue with Huma Abedin, disgraced Anthony Weiner's estranged wife, for billionaire Marc Lasry daughter Sophie's wedding.
K22162: 6/12/01 PAOLO ZAMPOLLI, PRESIDENT OF ID MODEL MGT., INTRODUCES HIS NEW GUESS MODEL DANA THOMPSON TO BILL CLINTON AT THE AMERICAN INDIA FOUNDATION FUNDRAISER AT THE REGENT WALL STREET HOTEL. PHOTO BY MARIA GARNIER/GLOBE PHOTOS, INC.
Rudy Giuliani is a regular at Cipriani’s as was Andrew Cuomo, Donald Trump, and Michael Bloomberg.
In fact one of Donald and Melania’s first official dates back in 1998 after they met, was dinner at Cipriani’s. They were even photographed on this night with Giuseppe Cipriani Jr.
Pestova, Trump, & Knauss At Cipriani Wall Street Hotel Portrait of, from left, fashion moden Daniela Pestova, real estate developer Donald Trump, and fashion model (and future spouse of Trump) Melania Knauss as they attend a performance in the Cipriani Wall Street hotel's 'Dinner and Concert' series, New York, New York, September 1998. (Photo bby Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images).
11/18/98 NEW YORK CITY CIPRIANI CONCERT AND DINNER SERIES WITH A PERFORMANCE BY WHITNEY HOUSTON, GIUSEPPE CIPRIANI, TOMASO BUTI, KEVIN COSTNER, DONALD TRUMP, AN DMELANIA KNAUS. PHOTO: ARNADO MAGNANI/GAMMA LIAISON
Giuseppe is also friends with figures like: Russell Simmons, Clive Davis, Sarah Ferguson, Naomi Campbell, David Copperfeild, and P. Diddy. There is a lot of overlap between Jeffrey’s associates and Giuseppe Cipriani Jr.’s associates.
If we already knew that Ciprani’s was being used as a hunting ground, allowed by the owner, for figures like Harvey Weinstein, we have no reason to believe that behavior has ever stopped as the same person who was in charge then, is in charge now, and Cipriani’s constantly finds themselves embroiled in legal battles and scandals pertaining to similar allegations.
Paolo Zampolli is not just a friend of Giuseppe Cipriani Jr., he has also been on The Board of Cipriani’s (The Cipriani Group) for almost 30 years so he has been there for just about every major scandal, including Harvey Weinstein. He was also on the board when Steve Witkoff worked as Giuseppe Cipriani Jr.’s real estate attorney in 2005-2006. Now, both Paolo Zampolli and Steve Witkoff curiously work in our current administration.
Amb Paolo Zampolli is at Cipriani Downtown (New York). September 18, 2024 New York, NY Celebrating 26 incredible years with the Cipriani Group, a bond that has transcended friendship and become family. Over the years I've been blessed to share in countless moments of laughter, success, and unforgettable energy every time I walked through their doors. So many friendships were formed, and so many great businesses were sparked, all thanks to the warmth and authenticity of Cipriani's unmatched atmosphere. Here's to the memories, the stories, and the lifelong connection
Conclusion:
There is a woman who flew on Jeffrey’s plane at 17 years old who has been deported without due process, coincidentally, as soon as the conversation surrounding Jeffrey Epstein became relevant in mainstream media.
Paolo Zampolli is a known co-conspirator of Jeffrey Epstein and has maintained a very close friendship with Donald Trump throughout his relationship with Jeffrey and after.
Yet, the Oversight Committee, Republicans in Congress, and mainstream media, are not seeing what is right in front of them.
If these threads are not pulled, nothing will be unraveled. If I, a private citizen who is a stay at home mother of two, was able to discover this information — the people who can make change can discover it, too.
There is a lot more to Paolo Zampolli’s connections, but this is the best way I could compile a relevant timeline. For more information, you can check my “Paolo Zampolli” Playlist on TikTok, or my YouTube which has all of my research compiled in one long form video. (@bekahdayyy for both TikTok and YouTube)
UPDATED INFO:
On January 5th, 2026, Amanda and I were able to connect on TikTok, where I have been posting the bulk of my investigation into this situation.
Through chatting with Amanda, I learned that we were correct in the information we shared in this initial article — but never in a million years could I imagine the depth of evil we would be dealing with here.
I am going to share in this update only what I have been given permission to share thus far, as there are many things happening behind the scenes that need to occur in silence (for now).
Something Amanda has given me permission to share is that at just 13 years old she met John Casablancas and was quickly catapulted into the modeling industry where around age 15 she would meet Paolo Zampolli.
"Everyone think the Paolo is involved in this to know these people, scoffed Zampolli. "No--I knew them before. I was friends with Patrick Demarchelier 10 years ago, I had John Casablancas spending the summer with me when I was a kid ..." That was on Ibiza, where Zampolli's family owns one of the biggest houses on the island. They also have a castle (the Castle Zampolli) in Varese, outisde Milan. The family fortune on his mother's side--the Ventura Gregorinis--is from steel; they built Italy's railways. Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat and Ferrari tycoon, is a relative ("an uncle of my cousin"), and there's a Pope in the family (Palo VI) and two saints. Zampolli's mother, Luisa, is a distinguished heart specialist who teaches at the University of Milan. Valentino made her wedding dress.
Paolo began perusing Amanda when she was just 15 years old, despite the fact that he is about 16 years older than Amanda.
Paolo continued to pursue Amanda throughout her teens. He would send her gifts, offer her big modeling jobs, and after years of this going on, Paolo and Amanda would eventually get together “romantically” by the time she was 17. (Right around the time that she flew on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane.)
This is the behavior of a child predator grooming his prey.
Amanda also shared with me that Paolo Zampolli abused her throughout their relationship, and she has evidence to prove it.
Here are just some examples of the bruises Paolo Zampolli left of the mother of his child:
This is now evidence from a second woman we have seen that Paolo Zampolli has physically assaulted.
Amanda has also shared the “arrest” details surrounding her and the doctor she worked for (Dr. Joao Araujo, a globally respected plastic surgeon of 30 years). While I cannot share all the details at this moment, I can confirm that neither Amanda nor Dr. Joao Araujo were given due process before being detained by ICE for nearly four months.
An exceptional chance to broaden your knowledge Dr. Joao Araujo Plastic Surgeon, Brazil and USA 25+ years experience
I can confirm that after their initial arrests, criminal charges were never brought against them — they were simply arrested, detained for a prolonged period, and deported.
Amanda’s case number (shared above) doesn’t even show any updates to her case whatsoever. Charges were never brought properly against Amanda or Dr. Joao Araujo, as the arrest was provably and undeniably orchestrated.
I will be able to share more details and receipts on this arrest in the near future, as it perfectly highlights the disturbing abuses of our legal system.
That’s the little information I can share at this time, but will have more for you all soon.
-B
Photo Gallery:
KEVIN RUDD, AUSTRALIA FR.PRIME MINISTER AMBASSADOR UNGARO AMBASSADOR ZAMPOLLI
The Honorable ERIC ADAMS Mayor of New York City
His Excellency VLADIMIR I. VORONKOV Under Secretary General, UN Counter-Terrorism - Ambassador Paolo Zampolli
HENRY KISSINGER Former United States Secretary of State
The Honorable MATT GAETZ AMBASSADOR PAOLO ZAMPOLLI
The Honorable STEPHEN MILLER White House Deputy Chief of Staff - Ambassador Paolo Zampolli
HOMELAND SECURITY
His Excellency HOWARD LUTNICK United States Secretary of Commerce - Ambassadoro Paolo Zampolli
The Honourable BENJAMIN NETANYAHU Prime Minister of Israel
IDF RED BOOTS
The Honourable BENJAMIN NETANYAHU Prime Minister of Israel - Ambassador Amanda Ungar - Ambassador Paolo Zampolli
The Honorable PETE HEGSETH United States Secretary of Defense
Emily Ratajkowski, Paolo Zampolli
ALINA HABBA Counselor to the President of the United State PAOLO ZAMPOLLI SPECIAL ENVOY OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR GLOBAL PARTNERSHIPS
UNOPS
OUR PLANET POWERED BY AI
Ana Hickmann, Lina V, Paris Hilton
CASA ZAMPOLLI EDIT MOLNAR ROBERTO CAVALLI CAMILLA OLSSON MELANIA E DONALD TRUMP
Cross-posted by American Freakshow "American Freakshow" - Mitali Modi
[x] Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Last week, we interviewed Amanda Ungaro, the deported former model haunting Melania Trump. RAI, the Italian broadcast network, has since broadcast a lengthy interview in which Ungaro shares more harrowing details of her longtime partnership with Melania’s former modeling agent – Trump’s current “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” – Paolo Zampolli.
Ungaro’s is a voice from the Trumpworld demimonde: a familiar saga of youthful beauty defiled by early grooming, followed by an adult life lived in semi-servitude and physical fear, the glossy veneer of high fashion masking the dark truth.
Domestic violence was already on my mind when I watched Ungaro’s interview on Sunday. The Washington Post had, that morning, published a police bodycam image of Texas Rep. Cory Mills, a MAGA Republican, taken after his visibly bruised girlfriend called DC police. Mills is seen casually lounging, blaming the woman’s “easily bruised” skin and a fall for her injuries. The spectacle of relaxed posture, entitled impunity and a cop standing by listening without intervening is the quintessential image of the domestic abuser, re-enacted daily all over the country and probably the world.
In the RAI interview, Ungaro accuses Zampolli of drug use – specifically cocaine – and domestic violence.
He would beat me constantly, and if I didn’t want to have sex with him, he’d punch me. Once he smashed my laptop over my head. The last physical assault was between 2017 and 2018, when we separated. Paolo came home completely out of his mind, and I said to him: ‘Paolo, you’re wasted — go to sleep, I have to go to work tomorrow.’ But he kept coming at me. So I pushed him off and tried to lock myself in the bathroom. I tried to close the door, but he came in and started hitting me everywhere. Here, here — I have all the photos. My arms, my face, down here too. For a second I couldn’t feel anything at all...
When shown images of her bruises, Zampolli denied, and speaking his native Italian to the broadcaster, was dismissive, suggesting they were the result of her sportiness. “On her legs – she did kickboxing … She had a bruise here – this one did kickboxing every day.”
When the interviewer corrected him – “She did CrossFit, not kickboxing” – Zampolli changed course and went on the attack. “So these abuses – she made them up. I’ve never laid a finger on a woman.”
His attacks then devolved into a stream of racist and misogynist remarks, blaming Brazilians, Latin soap opera upbringing, Amanda’s background, and even her friends.
“It’s the Brazilian woman” – someone named Lidia – who he said tried to “cause trouble … this Brazilian whore. This one’s crazy. Brazilian bastard [breeds], they’re all the same. Oh, that one’s a nice piece of ass, we were together, we were getting to know each other. What a nut job she is. These models–”
These models. Fun to frolic with but mamma-mia, what a pain in the ass!
Zampolli once almost bought a modeling agency with Jeffrey Epstein, but the deal fell through. Like his buddy Donald, Zampolli says he was never pals with the Coney Island conman. “I knew he had the girls,” Zampolli told RAI. “I knew. But they weren’t mine, because they weren’t even models. They were young girls, minors, masseuses. The models were a cover-up for this Epstein.”
But like Jeff and Donald, Paolo really likes pretty girls and he too likes them young – if not illegal. His Instagram feed is a skein of selfies with dozens of gorgeous young women at Cipriani restaurants all over the world (He is pals with Giuseppe Cipriani).
The images of this haggard Lothario surrounded by sylphs brings to mind a scene in Loro, Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Silvio Berlusconi. A flabby old man with dyed black hair and immense worldly power is surrounded by dozens of young beauties on the lawn of a Sardinian palazzo. In a concupiscent tableau straight out of Nero’s court, they preen and dance for him. But when he finally lures the youngest of the beauties to his bedroom and tries to kiss her, she recoils, saying, “Your breath smells like my grandpa’s.”
I met Zampolli when I was writing my book on the Trump women, at his townhouse on 17th Street, which he had managed to designate a “diplomatic residence.” He had persuaded officials of the small Caribbean nation of Dominica that he was enough of a New York macher to prove useful as their UN “Ambassador.” He used that connection to, among other things, engage in the island’s Citizen by Investment industry, in which people with shady pasts, or from countries on no-fly lists, pay six figures to get a passport with easy entry to the Schengen Area or the USA. Zampolli participated in a passport-sale-financed deal with Dubai-based developers, and later went to court to extract a $7 million finders fee commission from them.
His sketchy business history includes founding an ocean conservation project “We Are The Oceans” (WATO) that in timing, topic and method almost exactly matched Ghislaine Maxwell’s “Terra Mar” – the latter literally a do-nothing front cooked up by crisis PR experts to try to salvage her reputation as things were going south for her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.
Zampolli is reportedly in the process of eluding a 2023 roofie rape charge reported to the NYPD by a woman named Victoria Clarke, who says she was 23 when he lured her to his townhouse after a UN party. The sordid details appear in a disturbing report by Bekah Day, titled “Someone Was Always Watching.” Apparently, Zampolli shares the Epstein habit of wiring his residences with cameras. A rape kit confirmed rape and drugging, but the NYPD never carried the case forward reportedly because of his “diplomatic” status. Day claims she has heard from other women with similar stories. (Zampolli has called it extortion.)
Zampolli has since left little Dominica behind, now adding Trumpian impunity to the perk of diplomatic immunity.
Trump always kept the man who “discovered” his lovely wife close, but in Trump 2.0, he is locked in a bear hug. Cameras caught his perma-tanned mug next to Vice President JD Vance, striding across a tarmac in Hungary to a meeting with the soon-to-be electorally defenestrated Viktor Orbán a few weeks ago.
Last week, the Financial Times published a story about Zampolli’s work as Trump’s envoy. His catchy personal pitch these days is “$20 billion in 20 minutes,” referring to a “deal” he brokered with the government of Uzbekistan to buy Boeing jets. He also tried to sell nuclear energy in Hungary and talked the Romanians into opening a Donald J. Trump Park.
Yesterday, he posted a photo of himself in the backseat of a car, dashing through Belgrade, pointing to the flashing lights in his motorcade. The FT described him as an example of Trump’s “transactional” governing style. “Zampolli’s evolution from New York socialite and former modeling agent to globetrotting Trump envoy offers a window into how … loyalists are deployed as intermediaries in a system where access, relationships and deals often blur into one.”
But there is another darker way of looking at it. Ungaro told RAI:
I started asking myself: how is it that before, you weren’t that close to Trump, and now you’re best friends? Behind all of this, there’s a deal he made with Melania. Because he isn’t close to Trump – he’s close to Melania. Plain and simple. His relationship with Trump goes through Melania. [He says to Melania:] ‘Melania, I want to be the ambassador to Italy. Melania, you have to give me a position, a title.’ But I ask – how can Trump appoint as US ambassador someone who does drugs, someone who isn’t even American, but an immigrant? So it’s Melania who’s supporting him; it’s Melania who’s pushing him.
The FT is a proper British paper. It would never describe what Trump is doing with Zampolli in the language and with references to the social structure Mario Puzo understood, but we will: Keep your friends close and your mysterious wife’s old friends even closer.
*****************
Melania Epstein DENIAL BACKFIRES as Insider SPEAKS OUT?!? Legal AF Apr 21, 2026 Court of History
Sidney Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz talk with Nina Burleigh, investigative reporter, to disclose why Melania gave her weird press statement that she had no relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the tawdry story of her modeling agent Paolo Zampolli and his common law wife Amanda Ungaro, who he had jailed and deported in a custody battle using his Trump influence, and what Ungaro told Nina Burleigh is the true story.
Transcript
Welcome to the Court of History. I'm Sydney Blumenthal. I'm here with my co-host, uh, Sean Wentz. This is part two of our conversation with Nina Burley, investigative reporter, uh, author, historian, uh, who for years has delved deeply into the Jeffrey Epstein, Glenn Maxwell, Donald Trump scandal and cases. Um, she was the executive producer of a three-part documentary about it. She's the author of the Trump Women. She's former national correspondent for Newsweek and covered the White House in the 90s for Time magazine. Her Substack, American Freak Show, covers the Trump dystopia. In part one, we discussed Todd Blanch, the acting attorney general. And now in part two, Sean, let us discuss the can of worms that Melania Trump opened up with her unprompted press conference in which she said, and I quote, "I never been friends with Epstein." Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach. To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice Maxwell. Well, what's why is she so scared? I mean, that's the only question I have. I mean, why would she do such a thing? The Epstein files have been off. He's been running. He's blown up the Middle East in order to avoid the Epstein files. And here is Melania Trump coming out in the middle of nowhere saying, "I had nothing to do with it in the way that you described." Um, something's something's bugging her. She knows that something's coming. Obviously, something must be coming or she wouldn't have done this. She's scared. As as as as Scaramucci said the other day, these people are essentially about self-preservation at all costs all of the time. every moment of the day they're thinking about how can I avoid getting nailed and and and and so this is you know she's coming out obviously think she's going to get nailed who's going to do it where is it about that's not altogether clear but but maybe it is getting moved yeah it's a kind of reverse Joe Balace you know in instead of singing she's clamming up it's it's like the scene in the Godfather with you know Frankie five angels pantangeli yeah I know of no mafia you know, I don't know. I never heard of it. Um, welcome, Nina. Um, I think you might have something to say about Melania saying, "I never been friends with Epstein." Are there any other individuals that refute that that might have prompted Melania to say this? Yeah. Well, I mean, just as preface, I want to say in the reading the files, the Epstein files, and understanding the the the breadth and depth of his uh Eastern European woman trafficking operation in this period when Melania arrived also in New York, it had occurred to me on occasion that it's possible that she was in fact more vulnerable than her husband in this in these revelations, partly because Trump's predatoriness towards women is already baked in. his people are fine as long as it's even if a 13-year-old I mean if they had a video of him raping a 13 maybe but basically you're not going to get him on that I don't think but she's vulnerable and there's a weak link she's the weak link in the coverup and the there's a weak link that Melania is the weak link in the coverup and so is her agent Paulo Zoli who in the you know who's now Trump's um you know Trump like the Godfather keeps the people who know the most about him he you know very very close and this guy is as close as you can get. I mean Melania is saying you know so anyway who what was she responding to? She was responding to Paulo Zoli's wife ex-wife it's not clear that they were married or not. I think they were but he denies it. uh was a model that he brought in when she into this country under circumstances of the the way that he also brought Melania into this country which was sketchy visa situation. He brought this woman in, Amanda Angaro from Brazil, a willowy beauty when she was 17 years old and became her her her consort for 20 years and they have a child together. And of course, a couple years ago, it breaks up and they start fighting over the child and she gets remarried or has a boyfriend down in Florida. And Paulo Zampoli hears that she has some legal trouble down there. So, he picks up the phone and calls ICE and has her ICE goes and gets her because he knows what her visa situation is, which is it's she's not a citizen yet. He he had they they deport her. They've put her in a concentration camp or something for three months. And they have a they have a child together. They have a child together. This is all about child custody. If you go on Paulo Zampoli's ex Twitter account, you can see him constantly using the kid as like, you know, me Javanni and I went to meet the Pope and Javanni and I just went to the White House. And so the kid's 15. He's not going to see his mother. She's been banished back to Brazil and she's fulminating and she's she'd been sat there with nothing, the clothes on her back or prison garb. And uh and this is a woman who sat at the Trump table at both of the inaugurations, who spent Christmases and New Years and holidays and spent, you know, knew Melania's Slovenian family, hung out with them 20 years, and she's now living down there and can't even get her kid back. So, she apparently tried to call Melania and say, "Can you please help me?" Melania, according to Amanda, who we have now communicated with, and you'll see it on our Substack later today, um, and on Courier News uh, Substack, we will uh, we'll be revealing all that that she's told us. Um, but she basically Melania just didn't give her the time a day. And so she started threatening her and she gave an interview to the Brazilian news and then she gave an interview to a Spanish newspaper. And I believe in the Spanish newspaper, El Pis, she did talk to them about Melania before this Melania statement came. And I think El Pais called the White House. There's nothing in the public piece that is has Melania in it. But according to Amanda, she talked to them about Melania. So I think that phone call from the media instigated the mysterious six minute statement, which by the way, totally written by lawyers. that is not she can't pronounce some of those words. You can hear her mispronouncing words and she's stumbling over the words and if you read them closely it is 100% legal. It's a legal threat to whoever is going to speak out and and that person is Amanda and that person is Amanda and Amanda uh is you know it's basically Paulo Zampoli the weak link he knows everything about this demom that out of which they come he was a participant in it with John Luke Brunell he was in business with Epstein according to Amanda which we are going to ask him to respond it's well known that let's explain who Paul Zampali is he was he was um sort of at the lowest level of the modeling industry, a hangar on um uh an heir to a an Italian toy fortune uh and uh set up his own modeling company uh bringing in not not models, not fashion models, but model u models on uh and not on work visas to begin with, but on um uh tourist visas like Melania. Uh she came into the country illegally. If if Steven Miller's rules were applied to her, she would be deported today. Um and uh Zali uh was uh a close associate of Donald Trump's. He was a close associate of Jean Luke Brunell who died in a Paris prison cell and hanged himself charged with rape and human trafficking and a close associate of Jeffrey Epstein with whom he was a business partner trying to buy a modeling firm among other things. Um, I just want to read some of the deleted uh uh messages that Amanda Angaro has posted um threatening Melania Trump. Um, and then get you to comment and tell us a little bit more. Nina, these are posted where, Sydney, where did she post these? She posted these on X and they have been deleted, but they were captured. One says, "I have nothing left to lose in my life. I will tear down the entire system. Be careful with me, bitch." That is directed to Melania. Then she goes on in another one and she says, "I will tear down your corrupt system. Even if it's the last thing I do in my life, I will go all the way. I am not afraid. Maybe you should be afraid of what I know of who you are and who your husband is. And there are more. So Nina, what does Amanda know and when did she know it? Well, she arrived here after Melania. So Melania had been here for a while. She's younger than Melania by about five or 10 years. And uh but they but but her husband was already inshed with Melania and with Trump when she got here. And what does she know? She knows according to her, she claims she claimed to me again today and we're going to publish the interview that um quote Melania uh quote you um Paulo did not introduce Melania to Donald Trump and everybody knows it. That's one of her statements to us. Um and Paulo must have she must have learned that either from Paulo or Melania herself. I don't know. We we haven't been able to actually. This is a written interview process. She's ve she's very um ky and scared. She she claims that Zoli is threatening her with constant phone calls night and day and offering money. Um you know he's under a lot of pressure because there's also a young woman who has put her name behind a rape allegation, a roofy rape allegation that he took to the NYPD involving Zampoli. the Zampoli as the perp and and she took it to the NYPD and uh apparently he skated from it because he has diplomatic or he has this diplomatic passport that he got from uh a being a representative of of this island of Dominica to the UN which is kind of a you know this little island that needs a fixer in New York. So they've got and he talked them into being you know I'm the guy who can help you and I and so they have had he been on that passport for quite a while. So there's some kind of diplomat I mean the whole you know the whole sort of Zoli story if you take it together like what he's managed to do with this woman moving using ICE to send her down there and then this this immunity thing which again the the rape has been reported is all over Substack and the and the accuser is putting her name behind it so she's not even like hiding um their documents and then you see him in Islamabading standing next to JD Vance at these negotiations. He's picture he's he's at that level of closeness to Donald Trump that he's he's engaging in these international um discussions and and you look at and taken together the level of impunity that's going on here is just beyond belief. like you can't it it it just defies language and and so you know here's here's where we are and and you know people like this are I mean and and Amanda did also give us some very disgusting details about his personal behavior towards her and towards other women which will be in the article later today. Um, so not a friend to women, um, but certainly a friend to to Donald. And he comes out again to say to say this again, he comes out of the demanded in which Melania encounters Donald Trump for the first time and becomes his consort. Yeah. So we should say just as some background about Paulo Zali, he was Melania's modeling agent. He claims to have uh introduced her to Trump. Others say that's untrue, including Amanda. Um Paulo is uh elevated by Trump to the board of the Kennedy Center, which will soon be defunct. He has been appointed a special envoy and travels around the world making business deals. Um uh he is profiled in the Financial Times this week as saying $20 billion in for a deal um um for Boeing for Boeing. Um uh we don't know the nature of these deals uh or what he's really doing or or whether he gets binders fee. Yeah. Said anything either and Boeing says nothing. So we don't know. There is a lack of oversight to say the least in all of this. And he has sent his common law wife um to prison and then deported her and separated her from her child. And she knows a great deal uh having been part of the intimate uh Trump um social circle and been very close to Melania. Does that seem like a fair summary? That is a perfect summary, Sydney. Yeah. So, um Melania um then said something about the Epstein victims as well. She said that um they should give public testimony. That seemed to me to be a way to um cover herself on the issue because um their depositions are being suppressed by the Department of Justice by Todd Blanch now, the acting attorney general um in the three million uh documents that he's suppressing. Uh that and the depositions with other names have not been made public. Um, but she somehow wants them to come forward publicly to subject themselves to humiliation. Well, I mean, my instinct also was the same as yours. It's it's a sop to the to the women or, you know, to the to look like she's a sister, you know, in the sisterhood or something. when in fact the problem with that is it's not up to the women to get accountability for what's happened here. It's up to the law of the United States and the Justice Department and the prosecutors and the and the government. It's not their job to prosecute and to get up in front of the public and and say state their claims. the the government knows what happened and other countries governments and legal systems are responding and ours is not and but this leads to a wholly different angle though on the Todd Blanch story it seems to me because people have been covering it as Todd Blanch she didn't do enough retribution Pam Bondi she he well he wanted somebody to go after somebody after his people and she just didn't come through and she wasn't so great on the Epstein files etc now there's a whole other angle to this, is there not? I mean, that now there's this new threat that's coming and he really wants to have somebody like Todd Lanch, not a semicompetent like Pam Bondi to help him on this front, you know, that that he's got to stop this from happening because it's not going to blow up Melania, but Alani, as you said in your what you were saying before and your in your Substack, Melania is the weak link in the whole business and if she goes down, the whole thing goes down. But now he's got to try to prevent this from coming out. And Todd Blanch would be the person to do that, too. Just a coincidence. And maybe it's just a coincidence, but but it seems to me as if it fits very very nicely. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that. The timing certainly is um you know, it's there. I mean, history is never quite so so neat and simple, but but it is something that I've noticed as we've been talking about this. It's it's it's hard to ignore. Well, to follow up what Sean said at the end of part one of our conversation in which he said asked you, Nina, what questions the Congress should ask um Todd Blanch? The question now is what should the House Oversight Committee dealing with the Epstein files do about um this whole Melania, Paulo Zali, Amanda Angaro situation? It seems to me that Zali and Angaro and Melania have not been questioned. Well, I mean certainly they have not been questioned. um you know but this is an oversight committee that would call in Hillary Clinton but not Melania who actually knew Epstein so that with that but I you know both Zoli and Amanda Angoro have gone on the record at least she just did today and I know Zoli's on the record saying call me in I want to talk to the oversight committee I'll tell you everything I know so uh yeah they they can be brought in Zoli can tell his side of the story whether it's true or not you can decide and Amanda may get get her chance to say what she wants to say. Um I doubt very much that they'll be able to drag Melania in there. Um but I don't know it clearly the um the administration is happy to blow up subpoenas from Congress. So, well, let me just say that um during the uh Clinton administration, Ken Starr did not hesitate to issue a subpoena to first lady Hillary Clinton and summon her before grand juries and she went well and testified. She was had there was no wrongdoing. There is no grand jury although she was accused of it by Ken Star who was obsessed with her. But um in in there is nothing that would prohibit um Melania Trump from testifying nor do these matters necessarily have anything to do with Donald Trump's presidential official duties. This is about the Epstein files. Uh yeah, I mean but the difference is Sydney that you know a grand jury is a different subpoena than a congressional subpoena. I understand congressional subpoenas are blown off all the time. I mean the Bush W administration blew off the subpoenas to explain the Iraq war to Patrick Ley and they ran out the clock. They didn't they didn't they just didn't bother at all. And you know Bannon blows off a subpoena. I mean, he did end up having to do jail time, but he's back. Yeah. Well, let's um we will watch what happens now. But um I think we've torn the cover off the mysterious Melania statement and we've seen what's underneath it. And there we've lifted the rock. There are a lot of worms and insects crawling around here that need to be examined. 21 minutesSo, thank you for that. Um, Nina Burley. Uh, and, uh, on behalf of my co-host, Sean Walens, this session of the Court of History is adjourned. Thank you. Please subscribe to Legal AF, by the way. And some people have written in the comments section that they're filled up with uh subscriptions, but this is free to you if you subscribe. Thank you.
The Company That Built Jeffrey Epstein's 33,000 Square-Foot Ranch House Builds Nuclear Weapons Facilities and Government Installations, Not Single Residences. So Why Did It Build His? Bradbury Stamm Construction has built classified facilities at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base for decades. Epstein was a rare private residential client. by Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez The Pugilist with Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez Apr 23, 2026 https://alisav.substack.com/p/the-compa ... y-epsteins
Not that you’d want to, and I’m certainly not suggesting you should, but you could infer a lot of about child sex trafficker to the rich and famous, Jeffrey Epstein, by looking at his relationship with the company he hired to build the massive main house for him at his remote New Mexico ranch.
You know, the pinche filthy rotten ranch ese. El Zorro Ranch, which my Cuban dad pronounces “Sorrow Ranch” and he’s not wrong, really. The supposed ranch realtor.com later called a farm, where nothing was ever grown, least of all the victims. The ranch with the idiotic name, owned by a smarmy smirky man from Manhattan who might have had difficulty telling a cow from a horse. That ranch. The 7,600-acre Hacienda of Horrors that went unsearched and uninvestigated by anyone and everyone in New Mexico for more than three decades, despite reports to the FBI of child sex trafficking and the secret burial of two girls who were raped to death there.
I found the name of Epstein’s general contractor, the company that built the 33,339 square-foot main house at Zorro Ranch, in Epstein’s personal address book, which is in the DOJ file dump. And I found it totally by mistake, like most of what I’m finding about this place.
See, there’s a whole section in the book for New Mexico contacts. Among them is Jeffrey Epstein’s own name, with “Zorro Ranch” beneath it, followed by 52 phone numbers. I’ve put the redacted version above, though there is an unredacted version in the files, too. The numbers are mostly for the staff at the ranch, and for various guest houses, buildings and rooms at the ranch. There are also numbers for car phones associated with the ranch - and, yes, that insufferable prick had a Hummer (and a Mercedes with two phones, one for the front seat and one for the back.) There’s a number for the stables. There’s the number for the ranch manager. And then, tucked into the middle of all of this mundane ranch mess, is a name that scared the crap out of me: Bradbury Stamm.
If you’re not from around here, you might not think twice about seeing “Bradbury Stamm” tucked in there, between the car phones and greenhouses of Zorro Ranch. Hell, you might even imagine it’s the name of some rough-and-tumble ranch hand who came up as a bronc rider — Ladies and cowboys, let’s all give it up for lil’ ole Bradbury Staaaaammmmmm.
But it you ARE from around here — here being New Mexico, where my family set down roots in 1598 — then you might, as I did, see “Bradbury Stamm” listed as though it were just another low-wage staffer at the ranch and you’d say “What the everloving fuck?” loud enough to wake your dog in the other room. And she’s deaf, and 15 years old.
Folks, Bradbury Stamm is not a person. Nor is it a car, stable, building or room at Zorro Ranch. Rather, Bradbury Stamm is the largest industrial commercial building contractor in the state of New Mexico, according to Albuquerque Business First magazine.
And most importantly, Bradbury Stamm does not build individual private homes.
Bradbury Stamm, under the ownership of Jim King since 1979 and currently run by him and his two daughters, specializes in large-scale military, industrial, and government contract construction. The company was founded in 1923 by O.G. Bradbury, a small Albuquerque contractor. After World War II, Bradbury's son-in-law Robert Stamm joined the firm. Stamm had served with the United States Army Corps of Engineers when it was constructing the Manhattan Project's facilities, including the laboratories at Los Alamos, New Mexico, where America's first nuclear weapons were designed and built.
Bradbury Stamm holds classified construction contracts at the New Mexico nuclear weapons labs that Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, penetrated with backdoored spy software on behalf of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-1980s, per publicly available FBI files and the testimony of Rafael Eitan, the Mossad operations chief who ran Maxwell as an asset. Bradbury Stamm brings in hundreds of millions each year in contracts.
(Incidentally, Zorro Ranch’s new owners, Trump loyalists from Texas who purchased the property from Epstein’s estate in 2023, four years after Epstein died in prison, renamed the ranch “Rancho San Rafael.”)
When Bradbury Stamm does take on residential projects, those projects are large apartment complexes — not individual private residences. Their best-known works include things like courthouses, public works buildings, solar arrays, waste treament plants, hospitals and sports arenas. They also build prisons.
A 2017 profile of Bradbury Stamm in ENR Southwest, the construction industry’s authoritative trade publication, noted the classified nature of their most significant work projects explained the firm’s deliberately “subdued national and international profile.”
Meaning they build lots of things the government and private military contractors do not want widely discussed.
This is who Jeffrey Epstein hired to build his ranch house. I know. Weird.
But it’s only weird if you think about the Epstein-New Mexico story the way most people still do — which is to say as a vacation property owned by an eccentric, depraved financier who could do awful things there with impunity. Would a prolific pedophile who, say, wanted to build a prison-like outbuilding with sally ports, bunk beds and bars on the windows “for his girls,” at a ranch with cameras in nearly every room, choose a contractor with close ties to military and government intelligence operations? Not if he didn’t want to get caught, right?
But when you allow for a different possibility, that Zorro Ranch was instead a deliberately positioned military intelligence infrastructure node located at a geographic midpoint equidistant between the two most sensitive nuclear weapons laboratories in the United States, labs from which Ghislaine’s dad was helping to procure top secret information for a foreign government while the U.S. government appeared to look the other way to allow it to happen, and that Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring and financial sponsorship/donation/bribery network was already known to, protected by, and possibly of benefit not just to Israel but perhaps also to agencies like the NSA and CIA — and… well.
The choice of Bradbury Stamm to build Jeffrey Epstein’s Haunted House stops seeming odd entirely.
It starts looking more like exactly the right call.
I was able to figure out Bradbury Stamm was the general contractor of record for Zorro Ranch’s main house from their own documents, email communications by Epstein’s staff, and financial records in the DOJ files. All of these had been included in two separate federal cases, one against Epstein and the other against Ghislaine Maxwell. Everything I’m talking about here is public record. I’m just putting it together and trying to see patterns, coming up with a hypothesis.
In 2013, Epstein’s New York property management firm HBRK Associates commissioned Beaudin Ganze Consulting Engineers — a Colorado-based firm with an Albuquerque office — to assess the failing pool and natatorium system at Zorro Ranch. As part of that assessment, Beaudin Ganze reviewed whatever construction documentation existed for the property. What they found were hand-annotated supplemental sketches produced by Bradbury Stamm in March 1999. The title block on every one reads: Bradbury Stamm Construction — Zorro Ranch, Stanley, New Mexico — Date: 3-8-99. The boilerplate printed on each drawing states: “This set of drawings labeled ‘SUP,’ for supplemental, is prepared by the General Contractor as a summary of verbal information, directives and sketches provided by the owner and his design consultants.”
Those supplemental sketches — hand-annotated summaries of verbal instructions rather than formal architectural drawings — were the primary documentation Beaudin Ganze found when they arrived on site fourteen years after construction. Their report, federal document EFTA01083777, records what the engineers encountered in the Existing Conditions section: “The pool area appears to be an upgrade from the original spa room design. There is little documentation related to the alterations made between the spa room to the present pool room.”
The significance of that finding becomes clear when you understand what kind of company Bradbury Stamm is. Construction firms are contractually required to maintain exhaustive documentation of every material, subcontractor, structural decision, and change order. Yet an independent engineering firm arriving at Zorro Ranch, fourteen years after Bradbury Stamm built it, reported finding almost no documentation of the alterations made. This is likely a significant departure from Bradbury Stamm’s standard professional practice.
When repairs were eventually needed at the ranch, the sparse paper trail created a specific problem: only the people who had built it knew what was there. Local contractors tried and failed to match the original stucco work in 2007-2008. Two more companies were approached in 2009-2010 — one declined the scope entirely, the other couldn’t guarantee a color match. Federal document EFTA00686274, a May 2012 email chain sent by ranch manager Brice Gordon to Epstein’s property managers and copied directly to Jeffrey Epstein at his personal Gmail account — [email protected] — documents what happened next. For the period 2010-2011, Gordon’s written summary records: “Jeffey directed that i contact Bradbury Stamm, ABQ who where the original project company.”
FedEx billing records confirm this was an ongoing relationship long before the 2010 stucco repairs. Federal documents EFTA00219551 and EFTA01315004 are Epstein’s FedEx invoices from February and May of 2001 — two years after construction was nominally complete. In both billing cycles, a sender identified as “BELLA” in Epstein’s office at 457 Madison Avenue sent FedEx Priority Overnight packages to named Bradbury Stamm employees. In May 2001 the recipient was “Arice Fortenbury” at Bradbury Stamm. In February 2001 the package went to Bradbury & Stamm and was signed for by K. Veretto — the same K. Veretto who signed for the May delivery as well.
A closed construction project ends with a final payment and a handshake. What these records document is something different: routine overnight correspondence between Epstein’s personal office and specific named Bradbury Stamm employees, across multiple billing periods, years after the building was done.
One of these invoices — EFTA01315004 — carries SDNY CONFIDENTIAL stamps and SDNY_GM document numbers throughout. It is the copy entered into the Ghislaine Maxwell prosecution record by the Southern District of New York. Federal prosecutors in the Maxwell sex trafficking case made a specific determination that this billing record — the one showing routine correspondence between Epstein’s office and Bradbury Stamm — belonged in their evidentiary file.
I should tell you all, unrelatedly (I think?), Bradbury Stamm has been in the local news lately, because someone impersonating Bradbury Stamm’s Chief Financial Officer Andy Auger was able to convince the Valencia County, New Mexico, finance director, Michelle Hueston-Green, to wire $2,021,099.19 to a fraudulent Chase Bank account.
The money has since disappeared.
Bradbury Stamm is currently the general contractor for Valencia County's new hospital — situated in a booming new tech corridor in the city of Los Lunas, New Mexico, in Valencia County, that now contains a $3.3 billion Meta AI data center campus and an Amazon fulfillment center. The corridor is also home to Pacific Fusion, a nuclear fusion energy company building a $1 billion research and manufacturing campus at Mesa del Sol in Albuquerque — the same master-planned development built by Forest City Covington, whose founding Ratner family maintained documented contact with Epstein's inner circle through at least 2016, according to the Epstein Files Transparency Act dataset. Pacific Fusion draws its core technology directly from innovations developed at Sandia National Laboratories — the same federal nuclear installation that Robert Maxwell penetrated with backdoored surveillance software in the mid-1980s, and that Bradbury Stamm has built classified facilities within for decades.
As reported in the Valencia County News-Bulletin, beginning in April 2025, the impersonator, using Bradbury Stamm’s internal email convention, and in possession of detailed insider knowledge of the hospital contract’s billing cycle, began a nine-month email correspondence with Valencia County’s finance department. It was a targeted, patient social engineering campaign that walked the county’s finance director through every verification protocol she required, including W-9 forms, voided checks, and dated bank letters. Every fraudulent document was reviewed and approved.
On December 30-31, 2025, the county’s finance director, Hueston-Green, transferred the enormous sum to what she has said she thought was Bradbury Stamm. But Bradbury Stamm contacted Valencia County in January to say they never got the money. Hueston-Green has since resigned.
Wire fraud of this nature is typically investigated by the FBI.
But when a Los Lunas resident named Brianne Roybal filed a request under the New Mexico Inspection of Public Records Act in March 2026, trying, she said, to find out where our tax money went, she was stunned to not only NOT get the records, but to instead get an intimidating phone call from a United States Secret Service Special Agent named Mary-Mitchell Sanders.
The New Mexico Foundation for Open Government said publicly that this behavior by the government was totally abnormal. NMFOG Executive Director Christine Barber confirmed as much when Roybal contacted her. NMFOG posted: “As citizens, they have every right to ask for this information and to receive it. And frankly, after a public entity loses millions in taxpayer money, it’s information everyone should know.”
When the News-Bulletin subsequently sought comment from Agent Sanders, the agent said any further communication from the newspaper would need to go through Secret Service headquarters in Washington, D.C. You know. Trump’s guys. Trump, who says journalists are the enemy of the state.
Sanders added that she would be notifying the US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Mexico about the newspaper’s inquiry.
It should be noted that Ryan Ellison was appointed the US Attorney for the District of New Mexico by then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in April 2025, replacing Alexander Uballez who was asked to resign by the Trump administration. In January 2026 a federal judge ruled that Ellison's appointment as "acting" US Attorney was legally invalid because he was never confirmed by the Senate. The judge ruled there is effectively no US Attorney for New Mexico, but that Ellison will assume those responsibilities as First Assistant US Attorney.
So. A local newspaper asking about a $2 million fraud in its own community, and trying to find out why a citizen who merely wondered where her tax money went was harassed by Secret Service, was directed to Washington Secret Service and warned that federal prosecutors would be in touch.
And the name of Bradbury Stamm is in the middle of it all.
So. The recap: The Pugilist has established from the documentary record:
• Bradbury Stamm Construction built Zorro Ranch as its general contractor. • Jeffrey Epstein had the company listed with his Zorro Ranch employees in his address book, something he did not do for any other contractors. • The relationship remained active for at least thirteen years by Epstein’s own direction. • The company’s name appears in federal evidence entered into both the DOJ Epstein investigation and the SDNY Maxwell sex trafficking prosecution • Bradbury Stamm holds classified construction contracts at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Kirtland Air Force Base, the same two bases Ghislaine Maxwell’s own father, Robert Maxwell, penetrated with backdoored spy software on behalf of Israeli military intelligence in the mid-1980s, per publicly available FBI files • Bradbury Stamm specializes in military, industrial, and government construction and does not usually build individual private residences. • James King ran the company throughout the entire Epstein period. His daughters run it now. • The below-grade levels of the main house were built by Bradbury Stamm with minimal documentation. • Someone with inside knowledge of Bradbury Stamm’s billing cycle and processes was able to run a 9-month scam that bilked Valencia County of more than $2 million meant to go towards building a new hospital. • A citizen who requested documents in the fraud was met instead with a call from a Secret Service agent. • A reporter who followed up with that agent for a story in the Valencia County News Bulletin was told to go through Secret Service in Washington DC, and told she would be reported to the US Attorney for the District of New Mexico, a man who was installed by the Trump Dept. of Justice without senate approval.
But moving right along.
I did, and do, wonder whether James King of Bradbury Stamm is a member of the extended King ranching family of Stanley. I tried to find out, but no one would answer me other than the receptionist at Bradbury Stamm, who said, simply, “He has nothing to do with those people.”
“Those people” are Bruce King, who was the sitting Governor of New Mexico when he sold the Zorro Ranch property to Epstein in 1993, and his son Gary King, who was party to the sale, and went on to become New Mexico Attorney General, never opening any investigation into Epstein. Gary King rode on Epstein’s plane and took large campaign donations from the convicted sex offender after his conviction, and worked with Epstein’s lawyers to hide donations to his failed run for governor. They hid the donations behind a shell company because they didn’t want to press to realize Gary, who was running on a platform of ending child sex trafficking, had agreed to a $50,000 campaign donation from the world’s most famous child sex trafficker.
I asked to speak to Bradbury Stamm’s communications or public relations contact to learn more about the company’s relationship with Epstein and Zorro Ranch. The receptionist said the company has no such person. She referred me instead to the Vice President of Marketing, Michelle Vering, who is one of Jim King’s daughters. I got Vering’s voicemail. So I called the receptionist back and asked for an email for Vering so I could put the questions in writing. The receptionist said: “Uh uh. No way, ma’am. I am NOT giving you THAT.”
So I left a message.
My call was never returned.
Like so many other things about Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, the silence is its own kind of statement.
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Former model who 'fought off' Jeffrey Epstein with sex toy reported missing Model Elisabetta Tai Ferretto, 50, an early accuser who said Jeffrey Epstein exposed himself during a supposed professional meeting, has reportedly been missing since last month By Andrea Oldereide 19:30, 05 May 2026 Updated 22:39, 05 May 2026 https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest ... f-37114159
A model who was among the first women to accuse paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein of sexual assault has not been heard from since last month. Elisabetta Tai Ferretto, 50, seemingly vanished on April 22, with her worried family reporting her missing after their daily calls abruptly stopped.
Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files. The president’s top advisers gathered in a series of Situation Room meetings as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump himself. by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan June 10, 2026 https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/maga ... bled=false
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Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, White House reporters for The Times, are the authors of the forthcoming “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” This article is drawn from reporting done for that book.
Credit...Photo illustration by Alex Merto
On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.
Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.
And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t.
Vice President JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the Situation Room complex. “This is a huge problem,” he told the group. Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.
The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.
Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.
Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily — including whatever material existed about the president — it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.
Vice President JD Vance appeared panicked to President Trump’s other top advisers about the way the subject of Jeffrey Epstein was dividing the MAGA coalition. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Even the unsubstantiated allegations and anecdotes about Trump should go out, Vance argued. They were going to surface regardless, and if the administration published them first, it would demonstrate good faith and take the oxygen out of the conspiracy theories. His arguments fell on skeptical ears, but some advisers thought it would be a good idea to have Justice Department officials call a news conference to explain their position on the Epstein affair — going beyond the memo that precipitated the crisis.
At this point in the meeting, Blair spoke up. “With all due respect,” he said, “the communications strategy of this group got us here. I don’t know that it’s going to get us out. And if you’re going to go in front of the press, you’ve got a lot of work to do.” He began to ask pointed mock questions, demonstrating how difficult a news conference might be.
As the president’s former defense attorney, Blanche had a unique vantage point in the discussion. He was better equipped than anyone else in the room to weigh the ideas being discussed against Trump’s personal and political interests. Blanche laid out what he saw as their best options.
Option 1 was to petition Federal District Courts in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury testimonies — the secret transcripts of prosecutors’ presentations of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in past Epstein-related cases. As those were almost certain to contain no significant new information, everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because a release was unlikely to damage the president.
Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the secrecy of grand jury materials is regarded by most federal judges as almost always inviolate, and the bar for any release is exceptionally high. If the courts refused to unseal them — as Blanche predicted — they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges. And all the better if the judges had been appointed by Democratic presidents. Blanche’s suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released, when it was almost certain not to happen.
Option 2 was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript — a twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance. Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself.
“What if we got her to talk to Congress?” Vance suggested.
Blanche raised the possibility that Maxwell’s lawyer might expect something in return for her candor.
Warrington, the White House counsel, responded by laying out the available choices, without advocating any of them. Maxwell could be given a pardon, he said, or she could have her sentence reduced.
At that, several around the table spoke up to register their strong disapproval.
“Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge P.R. problem,” Cheung said. He predicted that in the wake of a pardon, the Epstein accusers would be fanning out on TV, telling their stories and ripping the administration to shreds.
Blair was also adamantly opposed to a pardon. “We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything,” he said. “A, I don’t know why we would. And B, if we give Ghislaine Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us, or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it will undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That will feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there’s nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn’t have to offer her anything.”
The consensus was that calling for the release of the grand jury material was the best course of action. Wiles told the group she would discuss the matter with Trump and ask if he would send a Truth Social post calling for the release of the sealed grand jury documents.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and her deputy, James Blair, were key members of Trump’s team discussing the crisis. “The communications strategy of this group got us here,” Blair told the others. “I don’t know that it’s going to get us out.” Credit...Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times
Just then, The Wall Street Journal article they had been trying to kill was published online. Cellphones are forbidden in the Situation Room, so a staff member brought in printed copies of the explosive report, which detailed how Trump, and many others, had created birthday cards and letters to be assembled by Maxwell into a special birthday book for Epstein in 2003. The birthday card attributed to Trump depicted a nude woman, hand-drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a “wonderful secret.” The drawing was signed with what appeared to be Trump’s distinctive jagged Sharpie signature in place of the woman’s pubic hair.
In the days before publication, Trump, in the effort to quash the story, had called News Corp.’s chief executive, Robert Thomson; News Corp.’s owner, Rupert Murdoch; and The Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. Practically shouting, the president told Tucker, who is British, that she must “hate America.” He told her he would file a lawsuit.
But none of his bullying had worked, and now, as the group sat quietly reading the full story in the Situation Room, Wiles readied a public denial for the president, which he soon posted on social media.
Shortly after this, the president posted again. He was going along with the plan his advisers had hashed out in the Situation Room, though it was clear he didn’t like having to do it: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, repeated Trump’s claims that he was innocent in all Epstein-related matters, adding that “by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
[i]Authors’ note: This article is adapted from reporting for our book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The bulk of the reporting took place from the spring of 2023 to the spring of 2026. During that time, we conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a wide range of people close to President Trump, including campaign officials, White House staff members, officials serving in government departments and agencies, former aides, donors, lawmakers, friends and business associates. Many of our interviews were conducted on the journalistic ground rule of “deep background,” agreed to in advance, which meant we could use the information but not identify who gave it to us. Throughout the reporting process, we made extensive efforts to contact the individuals named and give them ample opportunity to offer their perspective. When we use direct quotes, those quotes came either from the person speaking, from someone who heard that person directly or from contemporaneous notes, recordings or transcripts. When we paraphrase, it’s because witnesses or participants in the dialogue could not recall the precise wording but were confident about the thrust of the message expressed. Where there were discrepancies between the accounts of participants in meetings, we generally erred on the side of removing the disagreed-upon material; in some instances, we relied on our own judgment of various sources’ reliability, based on our long histories of covering Trump and his inner circle. Over the course of these past three years, during our daily reporting for The New York Times, each of us has spoken to Donald Trump multiple times, and the president sat for an hourlong interview with us on March 16, 2026.Authors’ note: This article is adapted from reporting for our book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” The bulk of the reporting took place from the spring of 2023 to the spring of 2026. During that time, we conducted more than 1,000 interviews with a wide range of people close to President Trump, including campaign officials, White House staff members, officials serving in government departments and agencies, former aides, donors, lawmakers, friends and business associates. Many of our interviews were conducted on the journalistic ground rule of “deep background,” agreed to in advance, which meant we could use the information but not identify who gave it to us. Throughout the reporting process, we made extensive efforts to contact the individuals named and give them ample opportunity to offer their perspective. When we use direct quotes, those quotes came either from the person speaking, from someone who heard that person directly or from contemporaneous notes, recordings or transcripts. When we paraphrase, it’s because witnesses or participants in the dialogue could not recall the precise wording but were confident about the thrust of the message expressed. Where there were discrepancies between the accounts of participants in meetings, we generally erred on the side of removing the disagreed-upon material; in some instances, we relied on our own judgment of various sources’ reliability, based on our long histories of covering Trump and his inner circle. Over the course of these past three years, during our daily reporting for The New York Times, each of us has spoken to Donald Trump multiple times, and the president sat for an hourlong interview with us on March 16, 2026. [/i]
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At the start of last summer, as far as outside observers could see, Trump appeared to be at the pinnacle of his power. He had just bombed nuclear sites in Iran; completed a blitz of executive orders to reshape the immigration system; and rammed through Congress his signature piece of domestic legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill. He was using the levers of the government to go after his enemies, and out of fear and desperation, America’s corporate titans were falling over themselves to genuflect.
But behind the scenes, the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the Trump administration to a far greater extent than the public knew. In their public statements, Trump’s advisers were full of bravado, dismissing the crisis. In reality, it was consuming the highest ranks of the administration as no issue had for the president’s team since the Russia investigation in his first term. His aides were determined to keep their rising sense of panic out of public view.
The Justice Department had struggled with just how to dispose of the Epstein matter since the beginning of Trump’s second term. The issue was all-consuming for the president’s political base, but also potentially compromising for the president himself in ways that officials in the new administration didn’t fully understand. Any path forward would be fraught.
Some of that complexity was self-inflicted. In the engine room of the MAGA movement, the Epstein files were potent fuel. Elon Musk had used his social media platform to repeatedly question why a client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance had invoked the Epstein files as a broader campaign message to argue that “powerful people” were hiding the truth from Americans. Tucker Carlson and the young conservative leader Charlie Kirk had each insisted that the government should release the documents and each floated the idea that there was an expansive cover-up in progress.
Trump himself had been cagey. On the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in September 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, “I’d certainly take a look at it,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.” The list “probably will be” made public, he said, but he sounded less than enthusiastic. In private, Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was “fake news” designed to harm him politically.
But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters. Throughout 2024, Greene had made it her mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Presler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of a “deep state” capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.
Patel — a National Security Council director for counterterrorism and Defense Department chief of staff in the first Trump administration — had repeatedly claimed in podcast interviews that the government was hiding Epstein’s “black book” or client list, and he frequently asserted that the F.B.I. was deliberately withholding names to protect the powerful. Patel promised that a second Trump administration would release “everything” to restore public trust.
On “The Dan Bongino Show,” Bongino’s background as a Secret Service agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover-up. “What the hell are they hiding with Jeffrey Epstein?” he’d asked his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would “rock the political world,” he predicted. The “Washington swamp” was “not telling you the truth.”
And so as they took office in 2025, Trump’s advisers were subject to intense pressures of their own making. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly made things much worse.
First, in a Fox News interview on Feb. 21, she appeared to confirm the existence of an Epstein client list, something that the MAGA base had believed was sitting in the files, hidden — and hinted that its release was imminent. Asked whether the Justice Department might release the names, she responded, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
But many viewed what came six days later as an even more egregious misstep.
On Feb. 27, the White House Communications Office scheduled a lineup of cabinet officials to brief popular right-wing influencers in the Roosevelt Room. The session began with Vice President Vance, followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, walking the influencers through the administration’s agenda. In attendance was a who’s who of online MAGA: Mike Cernovich, Liz Wheeler, Collin Rugg, DC Draino. The president himself brought them to the Oval Office and gave them custom-designed challenge coins as a token of his appreciation. Before everything went wrong, one of them would remark, “It was the best day of my life.”
Then the attorney general and her team walked into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes. Bondi had brought binders as handouts for the influencers; her aides would later tell colleagues that the F.B.I. had prepared them, with the assurance that they contained revelatory details. Someone on her staff said: “Watch this. This is cool. This is going to be epic.”
But as Bondi’s staff started distributing the binders, the blood pressure of other officials in the room skyrocketed. They had no idea what was in the handouts. The attorney general was distributing something she was calling “the Epstein files” that had not been vetted by anyone in the White House. One official, opening the binder, began flipping through pages to see if Trump’s name was mentioned anywhere. A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was.
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, was at the White House that day. If news broke that the Epstein files had been released before the president was to meet the press with the prime minister, that would be all the journalists would want to talk about. And Trump would be blindsided.
Right-wing influencers were invited to the White House, where Attorney General Pam Bondi’s team gave them binders filled with Epstein-related material that turned out to have been previously released.Credit...Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
One of Trump’s aides hastily steered the influencers out of the White House, telling them that the content of the binders was embargoed until after the president’s news conference with Starmer but that the communications office would be more than happy to talk about the files afterward. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House holding their binders, quickly posting the pictures on social media. They had now created a new shock wave of anticipation for what might be in them.
Like some others in the White House, Bondi had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for information about Epstein. Her binders contained information about him and his activities — flight logs, contact lists, summaries of items taken from his residences after his 2019 arrest and other material — but nearly all of it had been previously released. Bondi had somehow simultaneously oversold and trivialized the Epstein files, and now the influencers were made to feel like dupes.
In the Roosevelt Room, Bondi had told the influencers that this was just the first tranche of files. There would be more coming, she assured them. But that story would change, too.
Justice Department officials were reviewing the Epstein material, but months would pass before the department or any of Trump’s closest advisers knew just how many documents there were — more than three million pages of files related to Epstein, and potentially as many as six million. In the early months, officials were focused on going through a trove of what are known as 302 forms — records of F.B.I. agents’ interview notes with witnesses, some of whom were victims of Epstein. These were raw records, often containing unverified information. Trump was mentioned numerous times, as were other prominent men.
In June, four months after the circus in the Roosevelt Room with the influencers, Bondi and Blanche briefed the president on the status of the Epstein review. “We’ve gone through the files,” Blanche told Trump. “There’s not a lot there. A lot of child pornography — obviously we can’t put any of that out. There are some mentions of you, but nothing substantive.” Most of Trump’s advisers had rejected out of hand the idea of releasing the F.B.I.’s raw interview notes. More important, they wanted to avoid putting out anything that could damage the president.
With full transparency a nonstarter, a small group of White House and Justice Department officials decided to draft a memo that would explain why the department was not releasing any further information about Epstein. But even the process of composing the memo was fraught, in part because no one wanted their name on it and in part because of deep concerns within the leadership of the F.B.I.
For weeks, Patel and Bongino, the deputy F.B.I. director, had grown more infuriated as they realized the scale of the mess for which they were now being blamed. They repeatedly raised alarms internally that the Epstein crisis was gathering momentum with Trump’s supporters. Bongino wanted to convey something definitive to the MAGA base, and he and Patel pushed for the immediate release of the surveillance footage from the federal facility where Epstein was found dead in his cell.
Bongino hated the Justice Department’s nothing-to-see-here memo being drawn up for public release. He told Patel this would in no way align with their promises of transparency after taking over the F.B.I., and he objected to putting the F.B.I. seal on the letterhead. But he was overruled.
Patel privately shared many of Bongino’s concerns. But in an internal email on July 2, the F.B.I. director gave his support for the memo.
Before the 2024 election, Kash Patel, who would become Trump’s F.B.I. director, promised that a second Trump administration would release “everything” in the Epstein files to restore public trust. Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times
Thanks for the edits, and I still believe this is the correct vehicle forward,” Patel wrote, with the occasional typo, to a small group of colleagues, including Blanche. “I’m happy to add any additional sentences to compete the short fall. But I do think we addressed specifically why more can’t be released as it relates to specific topics ie court order, csam” — child sexual abuse material — “victim protections etc.”
Bondi rarely used her Justice Department email and was not on the chain where the group worked on the memo. She was aware of both the memo and the release of the prison video but was not involved in editing the document.
Inside the White House, Trump had no interest in releasing anything. And senior officials, including Wiles and Blair, were initially unconvinced about the reach of the Epstein crisis. They told colleagues that Republican voters didn’t care, and they had early data from Trump’s chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, to demonstrate it. The Epstein brouhaha, in their view, was driven by fringe conspiracy theorists and amplified by noisy online influencers who didn’t represent a meaningful bloc of voters. If the White House engaged, it would only pump it up — putting an official stamp on the matter.
Wiles, Blair and others around Trump had seen him weather every storm imaginable for years. And in their view, this wasn’t a storm — it was passing clouds at most.
Bongino told anyone who would listen that this was a grave miscalculation.
“It’s not an online story,” he told White House advisers. “You don’t understand.”
On July 7, the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. released the memo. It was brief, an unsigned one-and-a-half-page statement explaining that after an exhaustive search of “its databases, hard drives, and network drives as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored” and a corresponding review of more than 300 gigabytes of evidence, the department concluded that there was no evidence Epstein had maintained a client list.
The memo also reaffirmed the official finding that Epstein’s death in 2019 had been a suicide. The memo was accompanied by the release of video footage from the federal jail in Manhattan where Epstein died, footage that officials said supported the conclusion of suicide. And with that, the memo indicated, the Trump administration would not be releasing further information regarding the Epstein case and no further investigation of uncharged third parties was warranted.
Less than five months after Bondi had referred to a secret client list of high-profile predators, the case was closed. Or so it seemed.
In a Fox News interview, Bondi seemed to confirm the existence of an Epstein client list, which the MAGA base believed was hidden in the files. But no such list was found. Credit...Evan Vucci/Associated Press
If the administration expected that the memo would be the last word on the Epstein case, and that the president’s most ardent supporters would accept the purported conclusions of the Department of Justice simply because the department and its investigative agencies were now controlled by Donald Trump, they were sorely mistaken. The memo was an earthquake, and it was received by a part of the MAGA base as an outright betrayal. It amounted to an abrupt disavowal of the sinister conspiracy theories that some of Trump’s closest confidants had hyped during the Biden presidency and that they had promised to expose once Trump was returned to power.
The release of the surveillance video, which Bongino and Patel had intended as a gesture of transparency, further fueled the fire. The Department of Justice ended up releasing roughly 11 hours of prison video, intended to show that nothing nefarious occurred. But the footage was missing a minute — a visible time-stamp jump from 11:58:58 p.m. to midnight. Bondi initially attributed this to a nightly system reset. (The footage was later restored and released.) To many of Trump’s followers, however, this was yet more evidence of a cover-up. White House officials complained privately that they hadn’t been told about the gap before the release. Social media lit up with blame — not just for Bondi, but for Patel and Bongino, too.
None of the three had ever experienced anger at this volume from Trump’s conservative base. It was disorienting, especially for Patel and Bongino, whose power and influence had been built online. The movement that had treated them as heroes was suddenly turning on them. The two men were now tightly connected to a memo that stated, in black and white, that while information in the government’s possession showed ample evidence of Epstein’s own wrongdoing, there was no evidence of a wider conspiracy.
The day the memo was released, Bongino showed up to a daily Justice Department meeting with the F.B.I. staff and the attorney general. He was in a volcanic mood. As soon as he entered the room, he erupted at Bondi, shouting at her.
“You fucked this thing up from the start,” Bongino yelled. “The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”
Patel and Bongino both subsequently told a White House official that Bondi needed to resign.
Two days later, on July 9, the two men were summoned to a meeting with Wiles and Bondi in the Situation Room complex. They were the last to enter the small, wood-paneled room. Seated around the table were Bondi, Wiles, Blanche and Taylor Budowich, one of Wiles’s deputies. The moment Bongino sat down, Wiles told him that she had been informed he leaked a sensitive story about Epstein and Trump to ABC News.
“I’ll tell you what,” Bongino replied. “I’ll give you $100,000 cash right now. I’m not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit I leaked it. A hundred thousand dollars.”
Wiles snapped back, “Well, we all got ourselves into this —— ”
Bongino cut her off.
“No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me. And exactly what I said was going to happen happened. And now you’re pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this.”
Bongino’s aggressive response to Wiles startled the others; she was the White House chief of staff, essentially a stand-in for the president. Wiles put Bongino on the spot. “Going forward,” she said, “we’re all in. We’re all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not?”
“No, I’m not,” Bongino said. “This is not my plan. I’m not part of this going forward. Forget it. I’m out of here.” He stormed out of the Situation Room and onto West Executive Avenue, where he climbed into the back of Patel’s armored S.U.V. and directed the driver to take him to F.B.I. headquarters.
Some of Bongino’s close friends hoped he would resign right then — an act of protest that would have made him a MAGA martyr and only increased his following. But White House advisers intervened, urging him to stay. If he quit over Epstein and went public, it could severely damage the president. Bongino told associates he would remain for Trump’s sake and keep pushing for more Epstein information to be released.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I., erupted at Bondi and Wiles as the political backlash grew, telling them, “I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me.” Credit... Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
Privately, he seethed. In conversations with confidants, he lamented what the job had cost him: millions of dollars in podcast revenue, family time, his audience. He was getting torn apart over a strategy he had opposed from the start.
The relationships at the top of the Justice Department were by now beyond dysfunctional. At another July meeting, in Wiles’s office, Bongino and Patel told the chief of staff they suspected that Bondi had leaked negative stories about them.
“Blondie fucked this whole thing up,” Bongino later told a confidant, echoing Loomer’s derisive nickname for the attorney general. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything.” Bongino complained that he had given up his high-rated show and millions of dollars, “and now it’s all disappeared, because people think we screwed something up with Epstein.”
Bongino paused.
“This is going to be President Trump’s Iran-contra.”
On July 12, the president took to Truth Social to defend Bondi against criticism and to urge his “boys” and “gals” to stop wasting “Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” Trump told aides he was very unhappy with some of his most influential supporters, including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom were publicly urging the administration to come clean. Kirk had held a Turning Point USA event the previous day that turned into an Epstein grievance fest, with one speaker after another bashing Bondi over her handling of the situation. Trump had called Kirk and scolded him.
Nobody in Trump’s orbit had a better feel for the younger part of the MAGA base than Kirk, who saw that the Epstein cover-up, as it was now viewed, was capturing attention to an alarming extent. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance — both of whom spent considerable time on X and were tapped into the same younger and hyper-online portion of the base — were also worried. They urged the White House to change course and force the Justice Department to release more of the files.
Vance made clear to colleagues that he feared losing some of the so-called low-propensity voters, the young men who were not traditional Republicans but who had voted for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. This was an audience tuned in to the “manosphere” podcasters like Joe Rogan, and it was worrisome that the podcast hosts themselves were now rebelling.
But there was one major obstacle in the path of a solution: The president himself still had no interest in transparency. He wanted the whole Epstein issue buried, and he was snapping at anyone who mentioned it. His staff largely avoided the subject in their conversations with him, forced to worry among themselves.
Finally, on July 16, in an exasperated Truth Social post, seemingly desperate to make his case in language that might resonate with his base, Trump somewhat nonsensically called the Epstein case a “hoax” by Democrats and then proceeded to heap abuse on members of his party and his base, disavowing their support, calling them “PAST supporters” and “weaklings” who had “bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.”
As the president was trying to redirect everyone away from Epstein on social media, members of both parties began to push the other way. Many Democrats embraced the growing Epstein scandal as a top focus in their messaging and as a weapon against Trump. They were joined by a few renegade Republicans, which added to the political pressure on the president’s team. Representatives Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, filed H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, in the House, and although they did not yet have the votes for the bill, it would become the next battleground as the president dug in against releasing information.
Word reached the White House in late July, meanwhile, that a subpoena would soon be coming from the House Oversight Committee, led by James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky. It had been pushed by committee Democrats, with the help of some Republicans, and it compelled the release of files the Justice Department had on Epstein.
On the day the Trump team learned about the looming subpoena, another Epstein crisis meeting was convened in the Situation Room to discuss the pressure coming from Congress. It included most of the same group: Wiles and Vance, Blanche, Warrington, Patel, Bondi, Blair, Cheung, Budowich and Leavitt.
Blair told the group that they would try to make sure they were cooperating fully with the House subpoena, but that the priority was to release information that demonstrated Trump was not involved in Epstein’s crimes.
Blanche gave an assessment of the Epstein material he had personally reviewed or been briefed on, including a volume of child pornography. The conversation turned to how these files should be released to the public. The idea already in the works was to put all Epstein-related material on a website. That way, they could overwhelm the MAGAsphere with far-greater volumes of real information — in the form of a huge database.
After Todd Blanche, then the deputy attorney general, interviewed Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, she was quietly moved to a minimum-security federal prison camp, which only deepened the public outrage. Credit...Colin Hackley/Associated Press
The website had been easy to build, and they were looking at potentially going live within a week. They had already accumulated a mountain of material that Blanche had been scrolling through, and it included piles of documents from both civil and criminal cases. They planned to release it all. Blanche could then appear on Rogan’s podcast to promote the transparency from the White House.
But as it turned out, this searchable website would not go live on their initial timetable. And the version of the site they originally conceived would never be released to the public.
By late summer, it was plainly apparent to the president’s top aides that the Epstein saga was not the same as the countless other crises they had weathered during their service to Trump. To their great surprise — and growing disquiet — Trump’s old tricks of deflection and denial weren’t working.
In late July, as the Trump team had discussed in their crisis meetings, it was Blanche who interviewed Maxwell. Over two days, she told him she had witnessed no troubling behavior by Trump and didn’t recall him sending the birthday card drawn in the shape of a nude woman. Soon after, she was quietly moved to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas — a transfer left unexplained at first, which only deepened the public outrage. Blanche said nearly five months later that Maxwell had faced “numerous threats against her life.”
As the calls for transparency grew louder, the top ranks of the Trump administration spent even more time in the bunker. By now, the Situation Room itself had become inseparable from the crisis — a guarded space where Trump’s inner circle worked to steer the president around a scandal that would soon taint or consume careers at the highest levels of business, science and politics.
On Aug. 13, Trump’s team met again in the secure complex at 6 p.m. for two hours to refine the Epstein defense strategy. Again, the group included Wiles, Bondi, Blanche, Patel, Blair, Budowich, Cheung and Leavitt. Vance phoned in from Britain.
The vice president once again pushed to release as much of the Epstein files as possible. And with an eye on the public messaging, he proposed that he should be the one to appear on Rogan’s influential podcast. Vance had just gotten off the phone with Rogan, and he later told others that Rogan said he wouldn’t have Blanche on his show but would take Vance.
Vance argued that if he were the one to appear on Rogan’s show, then only a part of the conversation would be about Epstein. The rest of the interview, he told the group, could be about the president’s recently passed legislation and what it would do for working families.
But the larger conversation before them was how to handle the crisis and the public relations risks for the administration. The challenge would be any embarrassing or damaging allegations about the president, even if they were unsubstantiated. If everything was publicly available on the website they had planned, it could include all kinds of potentially humiliating material.
Suddenly, one of the officials in the Situation Room raised the subject of a disturbing but uncorroborated accusation against Trump that had come to light in unsealed filings from a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell, which had been settled two years later. The secondhand accusation, alleging a specific type of sexual abuse, was the perfect example of something that would show up on the public website and put the spotlight on Trump, whether it was true or not.
Giuffre, who had met Epstein when she was a teenage spa attendant at Trump’s club, Mar-a-Lago, in Palm Beach, Fla., became one of the sex offender’s most outspoken victims. Giuffre stated in late 2016 that, to her knowledge, Trump had done nothing improper. She died by suicide in April 2025, three months after Trump returned to power. The old Giuffre case file included emails sent to a journalist by another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, who later sued Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein had also settled that case.
In the emails, Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.
Ransome’s credibility was not uncomplicated; she had made another claim that she possessed video footage of prominent men having sex with young girls in Epstein’s entourage. She later retracted the claims, saying she feared for herself and her family if she proceeded. But after a federal judge ordered the unsealing of some of the Giuffre case files in 2023, the document that connected Trump to the claim about abused nipples was among the material that came out. It was an unconfirmed allegation and had not been made publicly, but the disclosure led to some articles that were quickly lost in the swirl of election-year news.
Some of Trump’s advisers in the Situation Room had never heard of the nipple claim; those who had seemed to have only a passing familiarity with it. Many in the room thought this was all just discredited nonsense. But it might not matter. The Ransome emails could get new attention if they were included in a “public-facing and searchable” Epstein library that carried the branding of the Justice Department. An administration official had already searched for Trump-related materials on the still-private test version of the website, and the nipple material was among the first items to show up. None of the credibility issues would come into consideration if a government-endorsed database gave Ransome’s claim about Trump a stamp of validity.
“This is out there,” one of the officials told the group in the Situation Room. “They’re going to make a huge scene of this, even though it’s not true and everybody knows it.”
As the president tried to redirect everyone away from Epstein on social media, members of both parties began to push the other way, adding to the political pressure on the president’s team. Credit...Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
Blanche argued that in context, the Ransome document — and Ransome’s disavowal of some of her other claims — would make clear why the allegations related to Trump had never been pursued for prosecution. Besides, these allegations were already available online because of what had been unsealed, so there was no reason to leave them off the Justice Department website.
The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse. “I think we should put it out,” he said. “It would cause people to say we’re going further than we need to.” Wiles quickly responded that the president would not, in fact, be OK with it. It was a point no one wanted to continue debating.
One official would later describe it as a “surreal” experience to be discussing nipples in the White House Situation Room.
This was, in miniature, the entire problem the White House had with the Epstein files: Piles of accusations were impossible to disprove and equally impossible to make go away. Every door they opened led to another room, and in every room were more claims from more women.
For a few weeks, they thought they had found a way out. The subpoena from Comer’s committee had specifically requested Justice Department documents, communications with the White House and material from the Epstein and Maxwell criminal case files — not material from civil litigation, such as the Ransome emails. They could comply with the letter of the subpoena, post the Justice Department material to a stripped-down version of the planned website and leave the rest aside. Civil cases were separate matters, outside the remit of the Justice Department. And the subpoena allowed for another escape hatch — the Justice Department could withhold certain documents, as long as it explained to House lawmakers what they were and why they were held back.
But that strategy collapsed quickly. More Republican lawmakers would press for additional disclosures, including former Trump allies like Greene and Lauren Boebert. And the Trump administration was slow to comply with even the initial limited set of documents required by the House subpoena.
By mid-November, the bipartisan coalition the Trump team had worried about since the summer finally had the votes to force the administration’s hand. The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House and the Senate in quick succession, and on Nov. 19, Trump, yielding to the inevitable, signed it into law.
The new law went further than the House subpoena. It sought a broader tranche of files and contained a warning to the administration that “no record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.” It sought everything that Trump had spent the better part of the year trying to suppress.
The legislators who passed the bill had no idea how many files they had mandated to be released within a month. The pages would end up numbering in the millions, and the president, his family and places like his Mar-a-Lago estate would be referred to more than 38,000 times, according to a New York Times analysis.
The Trump Justice Department said there was no client list. But the entire episode was another flashing light in an era when belief in the American system of justice had corroded to the point of collapse. Raw witness accounts and evidence from incomplete criminal investigations were never meant to be seen by the public. There were longstanding systems in place to protect both the accused and the accuser. The files amounted to a public dump of any Justice Department document that mentioned Epstein’s name, no matter whether the information was confirmed as accurate or not. The released pages did name many powerful men. Among them was Epstein’s former close friend — now the president of the United States.
In a January 2020 email, a federal prosecutor told a colleague that Trump had flown on Epstein’s private jet far more than anyone knew. Flight records in the files showed at least eight trips between 1993 and 1996, sometimes with his second wife, Marla Maples, sometimes with his children. In January 2024, Trump declared that he had never been on the plane.
What else remained undisclosed? The question would only sharpen as people combed through what was redacted or missing. The Justice Department, after more than 3.5 million documents were made public, said no others needed to be released. Trump, characteristically, was creating his own reality. He had long claimed that everyone else was corrupt, especially his critics. These files, he would say — despite the avalanche of references to himself — were the proof.
“There are a lot of questions about it,” he told reporters at the White House in February 2026. “But nothing on me.”
Trump had declared Epstein a dead issue during the summer, but as he began the second year of his presidency, his own team could see that voter concerns about Epstein were still breaking through to an alarming extent.
In an internal memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers in late March 2026, the president’s pollster, Fabrizio, summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted that month. Fabrizio’s memo listed the “Epstein files” as the sixth most important issue raised in the focus groups, behind inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and health care — but ahead of data centers, military issues, crime and safety, and being “pro-working class.” In the section on “key takeaways” of the focus groups, Fabrizio’s memo stated: “There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters.”
The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see. The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world’s richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.
Source images for illustration above: Marc Guitard/Moment, via Getty Images; Hulton Archive/Getty Images
