How to (Really) Bring Down Jeffrey Epstein’s Network

There's hope...

This week, in a courthouse in Paris’ 17th arrondissement, six women filed allegations of rape and sex trafficking against a man named Gérald Marie.

This event has received very little attention, as most people are not familiar with the name Gérald Marie, and don’t understand the potential implications of this case with its new victims.

But this filing is tied to something much larger: a broader effort, by a small team in France, that has a real chance of exposing Jeffrey Epstein’s wider network and delivering justice for countless victims.

There has been enormous, rightful, international frustration over how little accountability there has been for the crimes committed by Epstein and his associates. To date, only Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell have been arrested and prosecuted for their crimes.

What we want to lay out here is why this case in France represents a genuine opportunity for that accountability, and why we hope more people pay attention to it.

First, some background.

Who Is Gérald Marie?

For over 10 years, Marie was the European president of Elite Model Management – one of the most powerful positions in global fashion. He is also a notorious sexual predator, one about whom nobody, including the French government, did anything for decades, despite overwhelming evidence and claims of his abuses.

In 1988, 60 Minutes aired a Diane Sawyer-led investigation into the predation of Gerald Marie and others.

In 1998, the BBC journalist, Lisa Brinkworth, was allegedly sexually assaulted by Marie on camera while posing undercover as a model. The BBC, under pressure from Elite Models Management, allegedly buried the story.

A former modeling agent described overhearing a conversation in which two female employees at Elite Models “begged” Marie to “stop sleeping with the young teenage girls.”

He refused.

One French attorney says she has so far spoken with 31 women all detailing similar stories of rape and sexual assault by Marie, but the true number of survivors is likely many, many more.

Unfortunately, Gérald Marie was not an aberration. Marie’s boss, John Casablancas, founder of Elite Model Management, and a long-time friend of Donald Trump, was notorious for his predation: dating 14 year old Stephanie Seymour when he was 42 and marrying a 17 year old, at 50.

John Casablancas and Donald Trump

And then there was Epstein’s business partner and co-conspirator, Jean Luc Brunel, who ran Karin Models Management in Paris before moving his operations to the United States, where he founded MC2 Model Management, financially backed by Epstein.

Brunel was similarly featured in 60 Minutes’ story all the way back in 1988, but wouldn’t be arrested until 2020 – 32 years later.

While in a Paris prison awaiting trial for rape and trafficking charges, he allegedly committed suicide by hanging, 2.5 years after Epstein’s own alleged suicide by hanging in an American jail.

The international modeling industry has, therefore, been ground zero for predatory men for more than 50 years and was - above all - the industry that directly enabled the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.

The Epstein Part of the Story

Which brings us back to Epstein. We have no evidence at this time that Gérald Marie and Jeffrey Epstein were in direct communication.

However, Epstein’s use and abuse of the modeling world is well-documented.

Starting as early as the 1990s, Epstein used his ties to Victoria’s Secret founder, Les Wexner, to lure girls to his homes and hotel rooms under the false promise of modeling contracts.

He financially supported Jean-Luc Brunel’s MC2 modeling agency, which Epstein then used to import hundreds or thousands of girls into the United States, including many who were underage.

He used his apartments in the Upper East Side to house models – often four girls per apartment at a time.

He was in regular contact with Faith Kates, founder and CEO of Next Model Management, to whose charitable projects Epstein donated at least tens of thousands of dollars. In fact, it seems he once even offered to help Kates purchase a New York City apartment.

And, of course, Epstein was, for years, in touch with a series of “model scouts” (each with varying degrees of legitimacy) who presented him with images, videos, and opportunities for meet-ups with girls of varying ages.

And thus, what Epstein and Gérald Marie fundamentally shared was a network of individuals who enabled their crimes, helping to recruit young girls through oft-empty promises of modeling careers.

Daniel Siad

And one of the key names in that shared network is Daniel Siad.

Daniel Siad is a Swedish-French modeling scout, who has been accused of rape by former model Ebba Karlsson, who says Siad raped her in the south of France before bringing her to meet Gérald Marie himself in 1990. She says Marie then sexually assaulted her as well.

And this is critical. Because Daniel Siad, as it turns out, was one of, if not the primary recruiter, for Jeffrey Epstein. His name appears in Epstein’s emails thousands of times, and he presented Epstein with tens, if not hundreds, of girls over the years.

Siad, of course, has claimed he knew nothing about what Epstein was doing. That he was simply a model scout who happened to recruit models for Epstein.

Nevertheless, the link between Gérald Marie and Epstein’s broader network, through people like Daniel Siad, is exactly what opens the door to bringing the whole network down within the French justice system.

The Promise of the French Justice System

To understand the opportunity here, you have to understand something about the French judicial system.

In criminal cases of a violent nature – rape, sex trafficking, etc. – there are two different paths to justice in France.

The first is a plainte simple, a simple complaint. Several of the women who filed this week tried this route in 2020 and 2021. Those earlier cases were dismissed, largely on procedural grounds tied to the statute of limitations.

But there’s potentially another reason those cases stalled: bureaucratic overload.

As any French lawyer will tell you, the French justice system is overwhelmed with cases and simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to take them all on.

Prosecutors tend to prioritize active threats to society: i.e. the case of a woman who walked into a police station because she was raped yesterday by a man still on the street rather than a case implicating men in their seventies, many living internationally, whose accusers are presenting decades old cases.

But the second path to justice in France is actually very well-suited for taking on cases exactly like those of the survivors of Gérald Marie.

This second path to justice can lead to investigations designed precisely for the purpose of dismantling broad, powerful, criminal structures, like the networks of Marie and Epstein.

The Critical Piece: the Juge d’Instruction

At the center of this second path is a figure with no real equivalent in the American system: the juge d’instruction, or investigating judge.

This is a judge who operates outside the normal hierarchy of political power in the French system, giving them a very different kind of latitude to operate and investigate.

And crucially, unlike a judge in the United States, the juge d’instruction holds the powers of a prosecutor. They can direct the police, order search warrants, search homes, and gather evidence. It is, in fact, part of the investigating judge’s job to expand their search to an entire criminal network – not just one defendant – where applicable.

In fact, it is this system that, years ago, brought down former French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, after his presidency.

And so this is the opportunity.

With the right survivors – and enough of them – there is a real chance of investigating and charging not just this one man - Gèrald Marie - but the many others he is connected to, very much including Epstein’s network.

The Waiting Game

The six additional women who filed complaints of rape and, in some cases, sex trafficking against Gérald Marie this week, are joining a case filed last month by the American model Carré Otis.

If it moves forward, it could present a real opportunity for tackling the broader network that enabled Jeffrey Epstein.

The French system does not move quickly. It could be six months or more before a juge d’instruction is even assigned to this case.

But that wait is itself an opportunity. Every month that passes is a chance for more survivors to come forward and strengthen the case, not just against Gérald Marie, but against the entire network of powerful men who operated with impunity for decades inside the modeling world, systematically raping and trafficking young women and girls.

And that is why six complaints, filed today without fanfare in a courthouse in Paris, could be an incredibly important start to the accountability that so many have been fighting for.

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PSA: We are in touch with Innocence en Danger – the non profit organization that initially got the investigation into Epstein’s French network launched – and their lawyer who represents many of the survivors mentioned here.

If you are a survivor of Gerald Marie, Daniel Siad, Ghislaine Maxwell, or other French abusers from the modeling world, your case could bring this network to justice. We are happy to put anyone in touch with the right people in France discreetly.