Scouting for Girls: Fashion’s Darkest Secret review –
terrible tales of sexual abuse in the modelling industry
Grooming, conditioning, coercive control: nowadays we
have words for fashion’s horrific treatment of young women in bygone decades.
This sober expose puts the atrocities in the spotlight
Lucy Mangan
@LucyMangan
Fri 24 Jun
2022 22.00 BST
There’s a
scene in the 1990 movie Awakenings, about Dr Oliver Sacks’ investigations into
the epidemic of sleeping sickness in which Robin Williams – who plays a
character based on Sacks – muses on the evidence. “You’d think,” he says, “at a
certain point all these atypical somethings would amount to a typical
something.”
I hear some
version of that in my mind every time I see another documentary about predatory
men and their abuse of (almost invariably) women and children, hidden in plain
sight as they go about their life-wrecking business with impunity, often for
decades. Michael Jackson, R Kelly, Jimmy Savile, various rock legends, Jeffrey
Epstein and Harvey Weinstein are among the most recent, but the list could go
on and will undoubtedly be added to in the future.
The latest
entrant in the increasingly crowded field is Scouting for Girls: Fashion’s
Darkest Secret (Sky Documentaries). This three-part documentary (made by
Wonderhood Studios and the Guardian, building on the investigation by Lucy
Osborne) reveals the endemic sexual abuse of the girls – and when we are
talking about 13, 14, 15-year-olds there is no other word – and young women
embarking on modelling careers by those supposedly in charge of their welfare.
It centres
on four agents in particular; John Casablancas, Gérald Marie, Jean-Luc Brunel
and Claude Haddad who essentially controlled the modelling industry in the 80s
and 90s – its most glamorous public era, the heyday of the supermodel. The
promise, the allure for young women around the world was intoxicating. The
reality was very different. Gérald Marie is the only one of the four still
alive, and he categorically denies all the allegations.
Scouting
keeps to the format and grammar we have come to expect from such exposés.
Victims of predators’ historical abuses tell their stories. Here, former models
Carré Otis, Shawna Lee, Jill Dodd and others testify to their experiences at
the hands of these men (those of whom are still alive deny the allegations).
The women tell essentially the same stories, which are as old as time itself.
Lonely and isolated in foreign countries, desperate for work, dependent on the
agencies for contacts, shelter and money, they are grateful when the boss takes
an interest. A kindly chat, a shoulder to cry on, a bit of support given
evolves gently into a suggestion to stay over in an apartment late at night.
And then comes the flip. “Suddenly he was on top of me” is a common refrain.
The word “devastated” recurs often. The men rape and then fall asleep as the
children/women lie crying silently or numbly terrified beside them until the
dawn.
Dodd also
remembers finding out that it was common practice for agencies to “introduce”
models to rich men – who chose them from books – for vast fees. Nowadays, we
have a term for that: human trafficking. We also have words like “grooming”,
“conditioning”, “coercive control” and so on, to name other experiences, though
it is hard to tell how much safer this makes the vulnerable in a world where
rape convictions are so low as to be effectively nonexistent.
At the
time, Carré et al thought these terrible things had happened only to them and
that they had brought them on themselves. The failure of exposés by CBS (on 60
Minutes in 1988) and the BBC (by Donal MacIntyre in 1999) to bring about a
reckoning did nothing to help them come to terms with their experiences.
Osborne’s
investigation helped bring scattered victims together. They are now mustering
in numbers and helping with a criminal investigation in France that they hope
will see at least Marie brought to justice.
It is hard
to see things ever changing – or certainly not as soon or as radically
required. This is a sober account of yet another industry’s failings. What
a terrible world.
.webp)
‘I woke up and he was on top of me’: six women on
being abused by fashion agent Jean-Luc Brunel
The Frenchman killed himself in prison in February
while awaiting trial for rape. Here, six former models speak out about him, his
friend Jeffrey Epstein – and an industry that seemed to turn a blind eye
A special
investigation
by Lucy
Osborne
Sat 28 May
2022 09.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/may/28/jean-luc-brunel-abuse-six-women-epstein
In the
autumn of 1985, 22-year-old Marianne Shine was invited to Paris to try her hand
at modelling. A confident and academic young woman, she had graduated in
classical art and archaeology from her college in Pennsylvania, having spent
several summers in Greece on archaeological digs, and was excited to visit
Europe again. Her Danish mother, a travel agent, and Hungarian father, a
gynaecologist, encouraged her to go, convinced that the modelling agents there
would take good care of her.
But after
six months of modelling in Paris, Shine returned home a different person.
“Before Paris I was this playful, creative girl, but that part of me vanished,”
she tells me now. Her mother found her a job at a travel agency in their suburb
of New York, but Shine wasn’t interested. She says: “It was like this
deadening. I couldn’t fall asleep at night, and then I couldn’t wake up in the
morning. I could barely trudge through the day.”
What Shine
knows now but didn’t have the words for at the time is that she was
experiencing a “deep, deep depression”. In Paris she had been sexually
assaulted multiple times by men in the fashion industry. This culminated in
being raped by her agent, Jean-Luc Brunel, then one of the most powerful men in
the business, and the person entrusted with her care.
“I didn’t
understand how deeply it affected me and I blamed myself,” says Shine, now 58,
from her home in Mill Valley, California. “I felt like this dirty, vile,
horrible thing.” She didn’t tell anyone, not even the therapist her mother
arranged for her to see. “I just kept burying it,” she says. “I was so alone in
that darkness.”
Three
decades later, as #MeToo reverberated around the world, Shine opened up to
close friends and relatives, but rarely went into details. In October 2020,
though, she read the Guardian’s investigations into abuse in the fashion
industry, drawing on accounts from former models who had had similar
experiences in Paris in the 80s and 90s, including some with allegations
against her alleged rapist, Brunel. “I thought: how many other women out there,
like me, had buried it?”
Two months
later, Brunel was arrested on suspicion of trafficking and raping underage
girls. The investigation was being led by police investigating the paedophile
Jeffrey Epstein. It emerged that the pair had been close associates, and that
Brunel was accused of supplying more than 1,000 girls and young women for
Epstein to have sex with. “That blew my mind,” Shine says. “I had no idea what
I had been a part of.”
Shine is
speaking now for the first time, and has contributed to a three-part Sky
documentary to be broadcast next month. The series was developed from my
Guardian investigations into sexual abuse in the fashion industry, and follows
former models and whistleblowers. In the final episode, Shine is filmed
recounting her experiences over the phone to a lawyer in France as a witness in
the growing criminal case against Brunel.
On 19
February this year, though, as justice seemed within reach, news broke that
Brunel had killed himself in prison – mirroring the fate of Epstein. The
75-year-old had spent 14 months in custody, awaiting trial on charges of rape
of minors and sexual harassment, which he denied, along with any participation
in Epstein’s sex-trafficking. Shine says she felt “this whole rollercoaster of
emotions. I had buried it for so many years and then to have it just go ‘pfft –
not possible’ … it was crushing.”
What I saw was horrific. These poor girls were just
kids, and it was like a Renaissance painting: underwear, nudity, cocaine …
definitely sex going on
For Shine
and the five other Brunel accusers who spoke to me for this story – four of
whom are sharing their experiences for the first time – his death has been a
trigger to speak out. All say their careers were affected by what they allege
took place in Paris. They say Brunel was at the heart of a network of sexual
abuse in the industry that still needs to be exposed. There were others around
him, they claim, who enabled the abuse and continued to put models in danger,
even after allegations against Brunel were aired on US TV in the late 80s. Some
of these people continue to work in the industry today.
Shine says:
“I don’t have to wait for a courtroom to tell me whether I’m right or wrong. I
know my truth. If I don’t give voice to this, it’s going to continue to
happen.”
Born into
an upper-middle-class family in Paris in 1946, Brunel started his career in
restaurant PR before moving into fashion. He rose to prominence as a model
scout in the late 1970s, and became the head of Karin Models in Paris in 1978;
claiming to have launched the careers of some of the most successful
supermodels of the era, including Helena Christensen.
By the 80s,
Brunel was one of the leading model agents in Paris and a fixture on the social
scene, particularly at the exclusive Les Bains Douches nightclub, where he had
his own table. He surrounded himself with VIPs, from businessmen and princes to
pop stars and movie producers – and, of course, scores of young models. Nights
of dancing were preceded by dinners at his apartment near the Karin
headquarters on the elegant Avenue Hoche, or followed by parties there. He’d
always select a handful of his favourite models to keep him and his male
friends company. Brunel was said to provide bowls of cocaine and encourage his
guests, models included, to indulge.
A
succession of young women who worked for Karin lived in his apartment – often
sharing bedrooms. In 1982, Scottish model Lynn Wales was one of them. She describes
witnessing one party at his home, which became “more like an orgy”. Brunel’s
apartment, she says, “was on one of the big avenues near the Arc de Triomphe.
He had a maid and a cook. It was all so foreign to me.” Speaking on the phone
from her home in Cumbernauld, North Lanarkshire, she says: “I was like the
weirdo in those days, I didn’t drink or smoke. I was sewing a patchwork quilt …
they thought I was from Mars.”
One night
at Brunel’s apartment, Wales says, he told her to answer his phone. “It was an
American mother worried about her 14-year-old daughter who was coming to
Paris,” she says. Shortly afterwards, this girl and several others from the US
arrived. Wales says she heard Brunel tell the young women he would get them
lucrative jobs, including a Benetton campaign and several pages in Vogue. Soon,
they joined Brunel’s party, which she says was “filled with old, fat men”.
“My room
was down the hall from the salon, which was where it was going on … and what I
saw that night was horrific,” says Wales, who was 17 at the time. “These poor
girls were just kids, and there were piles of cocaine. It was like a
Renaissance painting: underwear, nudity, cocaine … definitely sex going on.”
Wales, now in her 50s, adds: “I just went into my room. I was shocked at what I
saw and I suppose a bit scared.” The next day, she says, she confronted Brunel
and they had “a big fight”. Soon afterwards, she left the agency and returned
to London, disheartened.
Four decades
later, on 20 December 2020, after learning of Brunel’s arrest, Wales, who runs
a cleaning business in Glasgow, reported what she had witnessed to Cumbernauld
police station. “I’m from a wee village in Scotland … they must have thought I
was mad,” she says.
In the
1980s, many of those trying to make it at agencies in Paris were teenagers from
the US, Canada or elsewhere in Europe. Most were away from home for the first
time. For Marianne Shine, it was less a long‑term career move and more a way to make some money and travel before
returning to her studies. She was comfortable in front of the camera and spoke
a bit of French. “I thought I had it together: I have a college degree and I’ve
travelled, and my parents are European,” she says.
However, in
January 1986, within weeks of arriving in Paris to work for Prestige – a French
agency run by Claude Haddad, one of Brunel’s biggest rivals – she was beginning
to feel out of her depth. Haddad was another power player, who had discovered
Jerry Hall and Grace Jones. His staff were sending Shine all over Paris for
castings, but she had limited success. She began witnessing her boss’s
predatory behaviour towards young models and was disgusted when one day the
same thing happened to her. Haddad (who died in 2009) called her into his
office in front of clients and other agency staff and sexually assaulted her,
she says. He pulled her shirt down to show her breasts, “hoisted up my skirt,
smacked me on the arse and spun me around,” she says. Shine couldn’t believe
that no one did anything to stop it. She left Prestige shortly afterwards to
find another agency – somewhere she’d feel safer.
When Shine
found herself at Karin’s sunny office near the Champs-Élysées, it felt full of
promise. Getting in felt to her “like joining an exclusive club”. When she
first met Brunel, he told her she wasn’t allowed in until she slimmed down.
“He’d say, ‘You need to lose more weight in your face, come back next week,’”
says Shine. After several weeks of extreme dieting, she stopped getting her
period and began to lose hope that she would make the cut. But one day Brunel
finally told her she was ready.
Being a
model with Karin’s gave us this privilege. Where there was a velvet rope and
people queueing, they would just let us in. It felt so cool, like we were
celebrities
That night
Brunel whisked her off to a Sade concert in a limousine. “I was so excited,”
she says. There were other models in the car, but Shine was alone with Brunel
in the back seat and “he was sort of interviewing me,” she says. After that,
Shine started getting bookings. “Being a model with Karin’s gave us this
privilege,” she says. “Where there would be the velvet rope and people queueing
up outside, they would just let us in. It felt so cool, like we were
celebrities.”
In the
spring of 1986, she was invited to a dinner at Brunel’s house: “He had a very
nice flat, very fancy.” Several top models from the agency were there, as well
as a number of men, including one Shine now believes was Harvey Weinstein. She
was keeping an eye on the time, conscious of when the Métro would stop running,
but says Brunel kept insisting: “No, no, no – don’t leave yet. We’re just
having fun. I’ll have someone give you a ride home.”
When the
time came to leave, there was no one to take her home. The other models
suggested she stay at the apartment, reassuring her that they slept over all
the time, but she wasn’t sure. “Everybody went to bed and Jean-Luc and I sat
there, and he was like: ‘Yes, I really have hopes for you.’ I felt privileged.
He went: ‘How about I bring you a pillow and a blanket and you sleep here?’”
Shine reluctantly agreed. Brunel went to his room and she fell asleep on the
couch, but Brunel soon woke her up. “He was wearing a silk robe, he was
kneeling next to me, and he was like: ‘Go sleep in my bed.’ He kept repeating
that I needed my beauty rest.” Shine repeatedly said no, and he went away.
Eventually, she remembers: “He was standing over me and was insistent, almost
angry, and he went: ‘Go to my bed, I’ll sleep out here, you go now.’ I stupidly
went into his bedroom, into this big bed with these satin sheets.
“Somehow I
managed to fall asleep again, and I woke up and he was on top of me,” says
Shine. “He was naked and he was thrusting between my legs … ” Shine says he was
able to penetrate her through her underwear before she was able to push him
off. This, she says, made him angry. “He took my head and tried to make me go
down on him.” She was able to resist, but Brunel took her hand and placed it on
his penis. “He passed out and then rolled over and slept,” she says. “I was
petrified.” As soon as Shine heard his breathing change, she sneaked out. “I
was in full-blown survival mode, like: get the fuck away,” she says.
Shine feels
most angry about what happened at the agency the following Monday. “I showed
up, and my booker was there and she was like: ‘I can’t be seen talking to you …
you have to go.’” Shine says she went charging into Brunel’s office. He was on
the phone, and repeatedly shouted for her to get out. Shine recalls Brunel
saying: “I’m going to call the police on you. You don’t work here any more,”
before pushing her out.
“I couldn’t
understand it. I was the one who’d been raped.” Reflecting on the incident, she
says tearfully: “I really believed him when he said that stuff to me. I don’t
think I’m stupid. I think I’m quite intelligent, but a part of me wanted to
believe him. Looking back, I think Jean-Luc was grooming me, and if I was
someone who would play along with his fantasies, then he’d help me work. And if
I was not going to be a player, then he would make sure that I disappeared.”
Shine
returned to live with her mother in Bronxville, New York. During the previous
six months, she had been repeatedly subjected to sexual harassment and assault,
including an attempted rape by a fashion designer who told her that sex was “what
models are for”. She says: “I didn’t tell my parents … or anyone.” It became
clear that the events in Paris had spelled the end of her modelling career. Her
diary at the time reveals a woman battling with her mental health. Her first
entry after the Brunel incident, on 12 June 1986, reads: “I hate myself, I just
keep crying … I think I’m going insane … this pain of misery is too great to be
tolerated any more. I will do something drastic.” She says now that she was
suicidal. “I feel so sorry for that young woman that was me.”
I didn’t
realise how bad it was. There was this pattern through the entire industry. It
wasn’t just me
Two years
later, in December 1988, CBS released a 60 Minutes investigation into abuse in
the fashion industry, presented by Diane Sawyer. Titled American Girls in
Paris, it revealed allegations against both Haddad and Brunel. Shine and her
mother watched from their couch as Sawyer asked Haddad if he had slept with any
of his teenage models. He responded: “Almost never.” Brunel declined an
interview, but Sawyer talked to several of his accusers, including a woman who
spoke anonymously to say he had drugged and raped her. “Boy, did that hit close
to home,” says Shine. “I didn’t realise how bad it was. There was this pattern
through the entire industry. It wasn’t just me.” She confided in her then
boyfriend about what she alleges happened with Brunel, and he has confirmed her
account to me. However, she still couldn’t bring herself to tell her mother. “I
still felt too much shame,” she says.
After a
brief flurry of controversy, the CBS programme was the subject of an
undisclosed legal threat. A spokesperson for the TV company said recently that
the programme is “still on legal hold”, meaning the recording or even a
transcript cannot be shared. Brunel’s career continued to thrive.
The
following year, in 1989, Brunel had a hand in creating another agency, Next
Management, based in New York, which is still running today. Craig Pyes, who
produced the CBS film, says: “We accused somebody of drugging and raping people
in front of 8 million people, and then they can come to the US, open a
modelling agency and bring in more underage girls? What happened?”
A
spokesperson for Next Management says of the allegations against Brunel: “None
of that happened in our orbit. When we started Next in 1989 we had no idea
about any of that – zero. It was a very short-lived relationship. He left after
a year and a half and neither of the partners ever ran into him again.”
In 1995,
Brunel expanded Karin into the US. Joey Hunter, a veteran American agent,
agreed to go into business with him in New York. “It was the biggest mistake of
my life,” says Hunter, who sold his stake and quit after two years, sick of
Brunel. Brunel also continued in a senior role at Karin in Paris through the
90s, but stopped working for the Europe division by the end of the decade.
Karin continues to be a leading agency in Paris today, but declined to comment
for this article.
‘He wanted to control me completely’: the models who
accuse Gérald Marie of sexual assault
In a 1995
interview with journalist Michael Gross, who was writing a book on the
modelling industry, Brunel claimed there were other French agents whose
behaviour was worse than his, including Haddad and Gérald Marie – at the time
the European boss of the leading modelling agency Elite – who was previously
married to supermodel Linda Evangelista. Marie was one of Brunel’s rivals, but
the pair reportedly “exchanged” models between their businesses and frequented
the same parties and clubs in Paris. Brunel told Gross on a tape that will be
heard for the first time in the new documentary: “[There are] a lot of other ones
that you don’t see, that you don’t hear … Gérald is 100 times worse than I am.”
Marie has categorically denied all accusations against him.
Pyes says
the alleged behaviour of Brunel, Haddad and Marie (who wasn’t referenced in the
CBS programme) was an “open secret” three decades ago. He believes it was able
to continue because the industry chose to look the other way. “These were
normal girls from all over America and no one cared,” he says. “We’re talking
about a conveyor belt, not a casting couch. What I want to know is, who else
was involved who helped move this along?”
One of the
young women Pyes interviewed for the CBS programme was Courtney Soerensen. Then
19, she told film-makers that turning down Brunel’s repeated sexual advances
meant her work dried up. Now she says that what really happened in Paris went
much further.
From her
home in Livermore, California, Soerensen tells me that not only was she
repeatedly sexually assaulted by Brunel in the spring of 1988, but she was also
“pimped out” to his friends in an orchestrated system of abuse. She tells me
this culminated in a meeting with a man Brunel referred to simply as “Jeffy”,
supposedly a top movie agent looking for a new young actress. Soerensen, now
53, says it was only recently, after recognising him in TV footage, that she
realised this was Jeffrey Epstein.
Soerensen,
who began modelling in her home town of Stoneboro, aged 13, describes her
teenage self as “your all-round American girl from a small rural Pennsylvania
town”. She played in the school band and sang in the church choir. She and her
younger brother were raised by their single mother, a teacher. Her mother
insisted she attend college at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, but Soerensen
left three months before completing her degree in fashion merchandising to
become a model with the agency IMG. A few months later, she says: “I was sent
to Paris to fill out my book, get polished and then come back to take New York
by storm.”
From the
moment she arrived at the apartment she was to share with other models,
“everything was highly personalised and very hands-on with Brunel”, she says.
“It was all super-glamorous … I got to go to George Michael’s concert and sit
and eat dinner with him and Brunel afterwards … all sorts of crazy, beautiful
things.” Soon after, Brunel began pestering her for sex and subjecting her to
unwanted touching, grabbing her breasts, putting his hand up her dress and
rubbing himself against her. On one occasion, she says, he lured her into his
bedroom on the pretext of showing her photos of a Miss Universe contestant
whose career he’d developed. “He got handsy, then pushed me down on the bed and
jumped on top of me,” she says. Soerensen was able to escape Brunel’s advances
because she was much bigger than him: “I was quite thin at the time, but I’m
6ft tall and I was raised on a farm and as an athlete.”
Soerensen
says Brunel told her she would be rewarded if she went along with his requests.
“He said if I was good enough at these sexual things, he could send me to
people who could really help build my career.” But Brunel soon “seemed to
understand I had no interest in him and proceeded to set me up on
‘appointments’ with his cronies”. From that point, she says, “there was always
this expectation that we’d be available to whoever of his playboy friends were
there”. She was sometimes paired up with these men by the female bookers at
Karin, who she says “would schedule lunches with them”. Brunel also began
punishing her, she says. She had grown a “luxurious mane of hair” and one day
Brunel sent her to a hairstylist who “chopped it all off, and turned it bright
orange”.
The last
straw was the so-called “casting call” with Epstein. She says Brunel told her
it was for a role in a Hollywood movie, and that “Jeffy” was looking for
someone “young, fresh and raw”, who could also bring some maturity to the part.
“I was so excited to be picked,” she says. Epstein is not known to have had any
genuine connections to Hollywood, but is accused by others of assuming false
identities in order to gain access to young models.
The
appointment at 6pm on 3 May 1988 was at an apartment just off the
Champs-Élysées. Epstein, who was joined by a videographer, told her: “First I
need to see that you’re a good kisser and that you’re passionate. This is going
to be a movie with a lot of love scenes, romance, so we want to make sure that
you have the right body and show us what you’re capable of.” Soerensen
expressed her discomfort, telling him she would prefer to do this with an actor
and not with him, but went along with it. She says he then suggested moving to
the kitchen to film a different “scene”. Epstein told her: “I’ll come up and
start kissing you from behind, and then we’ll make out on the floor.” Soerensen
says it was when he put his hands on her breasts and up her skirt that she
broke away and told him it wasn’t appropriate. She remembers he then tried to
hug her and began touching himself. “That’s when I just had to get
out of there,” she says. “I remember shaking … the shame and the fury.”
In the days
that followed, she made a tearful call to her US agency, IMG Models, begging to
come home. Soerensen told her female agent that Brunel was sabotaging her
career because she wouldn’t sleep with him and that she was no longer able to
make ends meet. She couldn’t bring herself to tell them what happened with
Epstein, she says. “I was horrified that they had video of him touching me in
that way.” The agency arranged for her to be spirited out of Brunel’s home in
the middle of the night by people from another French agency, and she hid for a
few days in another apartment. Soon afterwards, she flew home to Stoneboro.
Soerensen
says she was staggered to discover that IMG continued sending young models to
Brunel in Paris after that. She says this is why she feels it’s important she
speaks out now, “because too many people are complicit”. IMG declined to
comment for this article.
She says
that what happened with Epstein and Brunel “was something I buried pretty
deep”. It wasn’t until she saw footage of Epstein as a young man in the 2020
Netflix documentary Filthy Rich that she realised who the supposed film agent
had been. “It was the way that he would tap his fingers,” she says. “He would
put his arm around you and do that tapping, and to this day I can’t stand for
anyone to touch or tap me like that.” Since then, Soerensen has spent a lot of
time in therapy.
Brunel and
Epstein are thought to have met for the first time in the 1980s through the
British socialite and now convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, but their
relationship seems to have deepened in the late 1990s. According to flight
logs, between 2000 and 2005 Brunel took at least two dozen trips on Epstein’s
private jet – the so-called “Lolita Express”. Only a handful of people,
including Maxwell, appear more often. In 2005, Brunel transformed Karin’s US
division into a new agency called MC2, with financial help from Epstein,
opening offices in New York and Miami. Epstein and MC2 denied they had any
business relationship, but in a sworn statement in 2010, MC2’s former
bookkeeper, Maritza Vasquez, said Epstein had guaranteed a $1m line of credit
for the company and directly paid for the visas of models brought to the US to
work for it.
Vasquez
said Brunel and models as young as 13 lived in apartments controlled by Epstein
on East 66th Street in Manhattan. Epstein didn’t charge rent, but Brunel billed
the models $1,000 a month, Vasquez said. Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of
Epstein’s accusers, alleged in a 2014 court filing that the system was a cover
for sex trafficking. Brunel “would offer the girls ‘modelling’ jobs”, the
document read. “Many of the girls came from poor countries or impoverished
backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money.” Roberts
Giuffre also alleges that she herself was made by Epstein to have sex with
Brunel.
In 2006,
the authorities caught up with Epstein and arrested him in Florida. He spent
just 13 months in a Florida jail after pleading guilty to procuring an underage
girl for prostitution. Brunel visited Epstein in jail no fewer than 67 times.
Brunel
continued to operate MC2 in Miami until 2019. He led MC2 in New York until
2017, when he is reported to have sold the assets to help create two new
boutique agencies, which are still running. Both deny any connection to Brunel.
In 1991,
three years after the 60 Minutes exposé, Dutch model Thysia Huisman arrived in
Paris, aged 18. An only child whose mother had died when she was five, she had
been scouted in a Belgian club by a model agency in Brussels run by a female
friend of Brunel’s. Brunel invited her to work for him at Karin and live at his
Paris apartment. Huisman hadn’t heard about the CBS programme or its
allegations, but nonetheless felt uneasy. However, the agent from Brussels told
her that only “special girls he saw potential in” were given this opportunity,
and that Brunel would take care of her.
One evening
in September 1991, having already attended a number of Brunel’s dinners and
parties, she accepted a drink that Brunel mixed for her. She describes feeling
“paralysed”. In a previous Guardian interview, she said: “I felt him – this is
difficult – between my legs. Pushing.” Huisman said the rest was a blur. She
woke the next morning in a kimono that wasn’t hers, with soreness on her inner
thighs. She gathered her things and fled. Her modelling work never recovered
and she embarked on a career in television, always behind the camera.
Everybody in the industry knew. That is still the
thing that angers me the most
Huisman is
convinced that the female agent from Brussels knew about Brunel’s reputation
before she went to Paris. “Everybody in the industry knew,” she says now. “That
is still the thing that pisses me off the most.” Huisman says that four years
ago she confronted the agent. She says she told her over the phone that she was
mistreated by Brunel but was told that Brunel was “too sweet to do such a
thing”.
Zoë Brock,
a 17-year-old model from New Zealand, was in Paris at around the same time. She
tells me: “I was a cheeky, fun-loving, adventurous and sassy kid – kid being
the operative word.” She hadn’t heard about the CBS broadcast either, and her
mother was reassured by her agent that she would be safe at Brunel’s home.
One night
he called her into his bedroom, offered her cocaine and told her that “one of
these days” they would have sex, she says. She took the cocaine but avoided him
after that. However, she was soon told she could no longer stay at Brunel’s
apartment, which Brock believes was punishment for refusing his advances.
In February
1996, 17-year-old schoolgirl Leandra McPartlan-Karol was invited to Paris to
work for Brunel at Karin. She had already been scouted, aged 15, at the local
fair in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She enjoyed school and was a flag-twirler in the
marching band. She was in advanced maths and English classes, and loved
chemistry and poetry. Before her modelling career started taking off, she had
imagined a career trading stocks or as a chemist working on medicines or
vaccines. But by 17, she was in demand in the US modelling industry, doing
shoots for YM, Seventeen and Mademoiselle magazines. She was also photographed
by David LaChapelle for Allure and Details. She had offers of further work in
the US, but breaking into the European market seemed more exciting.
Unlike
Huisman and Brock, McPartlan-Karol’s parents had heard about the CBS show and
its allegations against Brunel, and expressed their nervousness. However, to
allay their concerns, Karin flew a female scout to see her family. “She assured
my parents that nothing like that was going on any more,” says McPartlan-Karol.
Her parents agreed it would be safe for her to go. So she graduated high school
early and made arrangements to fly to Paris.
They were
told that the models’ accommodation was being repaired, so she would stay in
Brunel’s apartment while he was away scouting. But when she arrived, he was
there “and he’d been on one of his notorious, three-day coke binges”, she says
now. After that, there were several dinner parties at the apartment.
McPartlan-Karol says it was at one of these events that Brunel raped her the
first time. “We were all hanging out in his living room and having drinks, and
the next thing I knew I was just blacked out,” she says. “I was in and out
through the rape … I just remember him being on top of me … like on my chest,
forcing his penis in my mouth. That’s basically all I remember.”
McPartlan-Karol attributes her blurry recollection to being in shock. She says
she had slept with her high-school boyfriend, “but I didn’t really have much
experience in anything, so it was all pretty new to me”.
Soon
afterwards, she had the opportunity to model in New York. However, when Brunel
found out, he locked her in her room: “He basically kidnapped me for three days
because he didn’t want me to leave Paris.” She says Brunel’s maid would bring
meals to the door. “My dad had to get on the phone with Jean-Luc and my agent
in Oklahoma, and they had to negotiate my release.” McPartlan-Karol says she
was too embarrassed to tell her parents about the rape. She said Brunel allowed
her to leave on condition that she return to Paris to continue modelling for
Karin afterwards. This time, she could live in the models’ apartment, not with
Brunel.
Back in
Paris, she “compartmentalised” the rape and focused on her work. Staff at Karin
invited her to dinners and parties with “a bunch of older, wealthy men”, most
of which Brunel did not attend. Cocaine flowed freely, she says, and she began
taking it socially. When she did bump into him “it was very kind of casual and
pally and, you know, just making me feel really comfortable”. One night she was
at an agency dinner at Barfly, a popular bar-restaurant, and Brunel was there.
“I don’t remember if we all left together, but I remember him driving me around
in one of his vintage Ferraris back to his place,” she says. “I went upstairs
to watch a movie with Jean-Luc and I was laying on my stomach. He was doing a
lot of cocaine and I think I did a line with him, but it was getting late and I
was kind of ready to go.” But Brunel started massaging her back, she says, “and
that’s when he pinned me down and raped me anally”.
Speaking
from the home she now shares with her film producer husband and four-year-old
son in Hollywood, McPartlan-Karol tells me: “There was always that shame that
it happened that second time, that I let it happen or was responsible for it.”
Even now she tries to explain to me why she went to his apartment, saying: “We
had been doing cocaine so I’m sure I was not making the best choices.” She says
her cocaine use had become a coping mechanism. When she returned to the US and
a family member found the drug in her bag, she says, she stopped taking it.
But despite
McPartlan-Karol’s feelings of guilt, she didn’t want other models to go through
what she had, and told her American agents. Among them was her so-called mother
agent – the term used to describe the first agent a model works with, who
develops their connections to the rest of the industry – in Oklahoma. Speaking
to me now on the condition of anonymity, the agent confirms details of
McPartlan-Karol’s story. “I think it was a Sunday, so it was quiet in the
agency, and she came in and told me the whole story,” he says.
Having
worked with McPartlan-Karol “since she was a kid” and got to know her family,
the agent now feels he “let her down”. He decided to speak to Karin and
confronted the female scout who had flown to the US and reassured
McPartlan-Karol’s family she would be safe. They met in the lobby of a hotel in
Tulsa, he says, and discussed McPartlan-Karol’s case until the early hours of
the morning. He suggested McPartlan-Karol might consider going public, and
raised the possibility of Brunel compensating the model. But he says the scout
“made it very clear that Brunel had a relationship with the Russian mob”. He
says: “I remember her saying, ‘If you don’t let this go, you will just
disappear. That will be the end of it … you’ll just be gone.”
It’s not
known if Brunel really did have mafia connections, but other sources who knew
or worked with him say they suspected as much. Not long after the meeting, the
Oklahoma agent left the industry. He says he is still scared of people linked
to Brunel: “These people are way out of my league.” He adds, “I placed a lot of
girls, but Leandra had the potential to be absolutely amazing, and that’s
what’s so sad.”
Word of
McPartlan-Karol’s allegations also got back to her agent in New York. From that
point on, she says, “my career trajectory changed”. She can’t be sure her
allegations were the reason her agent dropped her, “but back then, once you
came forward about stuff like that, you were kind of damaged goods … they
didn’t want to deal with it”.
In the
mid-2000s she found out via social media that another of her former US
agencies, based in Texas, was still sending models to work for Brunel, even
though it had knowledge of her allegations. “It’s maddening,” she says. “I just
couldn’t understand why you would put another young girl in that situation.
There were so many people who were complicit.”
In the
years since her experiences with Brunel, McPartlan-Karol says she has battled
anxiety and depression. When she learned last year of the criminal case against
him, and that at least 10 other women had come forward (including one with an
allegation from as recently as 2000), she considered reporting her story.
Brunel’s suicide came just as she was about to contact Anne-Claire Lejeune, a
lawyer in Paris representing several of his accusers.
It horrifies me to know in my heart that someone else
is out there doing the exact same thing
Brunel’s
legal team said in a statement at the time: “His distress was that of a man of
75 years old caught up in a media-legal system that we should be questioning.
Jean-Luc Brunel never stopped claiming his innocence and had made many efforts
to prove it. His decision [to end his life] was not driven by guilt but by a
deep sense of injustice.”
When news
of his death reached his victims, they tell me they felt a mixture of dismay
and disappointment. At the time, Huisman, who now lives in Amsterdam with her
boyfriend and their son, and has written a book, Close-up, about her
experiences in Paris, said she was disappointed that she wouldn’t be able to
“look him in the eye in court”. Now, having had more time to process it, she
tells me: “He died behind bars, and why? Because we used our right to come
forward and we used our voices, and I hope it sends a message.” Brock agrees
she is “happy he’s gone” and can no longer hurt any more women.
McPartlan-Karol, now a full-time mother who volunteers with underserved
communities in LA, hopes there’s a possibility for change in the industry:
“Before, it was just like screaming into a void.”
While the
case against Brunel is now unlikely to go to court, a source close to the investigation
tells me that the judge is in “no rush” to close the case, and is keen to
identify other suspects or co-conspirators. Soerensen, now a web developer and
a mother of four, says: “It just horrifies me to know in my heart that someone
else is out there doing the exact same thing.”
In the
months before Brunel died, Marianne Shine was filmed by the Sky
documentary-makers giving her witness testimony over the phone to lawyer
Lejeune, sitting on the sofa next to her 90-year-old mother, who was hearing
her daughter’s story for the first time. She says in the series that Brunel’s
death had left her with “a sense of feeling cheated at the last minute”. Now
she tells me: “Jean-Luc Brunel’s death did not take away my hope. In fact, it’s
fuelled it.” She adds: “I realised that this was much bigger than what happened
to me … it became this big network, this boys’ club.”
Shine is
keenly watching the criminal investigation into Gérald Marie. At least 14 women
have testified, including supermodel Carré Otis. But in contrast to the Brunel
case, none of the women’s allegations fall within France’s 30-year statute of
limitations; unless a more recent one emerges, Marie will not be charged. “I
think the pressure cooker is really rising,” says Shine. “He needs to be
accountable for the decades-long abuse that he’s rained down on these women.”
Marie’s
lawyer says he “categorically denies” the accusations against him, which “date
back more than 40 years”, adding: “The complainants are attempting to conflate
Jean-Luc Brunel, now deceased, with Gérald Marie. They therefore intend to
frame my client as a scapegoat for a system, for an era, that is now over.
However, in France, one does not condemn a system; one condemns a person,
provided that it is proven that he or she has committed an offence. This proof
is sorely lacking in this case.”
Shine, now
quietly determined, says: “For many years, I was quiet. But I’m not any more …
If you don’t step forward and talk about it, it’s going to continue to happen.”
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