Front Burner - Epstein-linked modelling agent found dead in prison

Episode Date: March 1, 2022

On Feb. 19, Jean-Luc Brunel, a top French model scout and longtime associate of the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his Paris prison cell. The 75-year-old was being held on suspicion of sexually abusing minors and sex-trafficking. Allegations against Brunel date back to his time as the head of top-ranked modelling agency Karin Models in the '80s and '90s, when he had close personal relationships with Epstein and other powerful figures. The long-running investigation into Epstein revealed ties to Brunel and the role he may have played in a global sex-trafficking ring that potentially targeted thousands of underage women. Today on Front Burner, we hear from former models Heather Braden and Thysia Huisman, who say they were among Brunel’s victims while they were underage and living in New York and Paris in the ‘80s. Then, we talk to The Guardian’s Jon Henley about the circumstances surrounding Brunel’s death, which echo that of Epstein’s, who died by suicide in prison. Brunel's death has ignited a firestorm of questions, even conspiracy theories, as another purported sex trafficker dies before anybody gets answers.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Just a warning here that this episode contains details of sexual assault. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. In the 1980s, Eileen Ford's models dominated the industry. High cheekbones and wide set eyes and big eyes and long necks. They walked the runways for Prada, Versace, Chanel, Claudia Schiffer and Linda Evangelista were on their roster. They've become the modern world's idea of perfection.

Young women who parade expensive threads on the catwalks of the world's most glamorous cities have become stars worthy of the silent screen era in Hollywood. So when 14-year-old Heather Braden was scouted by the Eileen Ford, she was thrilled. This was in 1987, and Heather had been modeling for a hair show in her hometown of Portland, Oregon, when she was discovered. You know, I knew who Ford Models was because I read Interview Magazine. And, you know, I'd sit at the salon and I'd see those things, I guess. And I knew that, you know, she, she, anyway, she wanted me to come to New York. She wanted me to come. Heather scraped together whatever she had, got on a Greyhound bus and made her way from Portland to New York. But she said, before you can come to New York to model, you've got to go to Paris. And I just went down there and I just

decided that I was going to do this. I was going to go to Paris. I was going to become a model. It was my way out. In some ways, it was this really idyllic time for these young girls vying to become the next Cindy Crawford. But it was also super cutthroat. It's like racehorses. You can have 100 racehorses and you train 100 of them and you're spending money on 100 of them, feeding them, housing them and training them. And then three will become your, you know, your champion Belmont contenders. You know, you might have... As soon as she got there, Ford steered her towards Europe. Because if you were trying to be a model in the 80s and 90s, Paris was the place to be. And the person there to impress was Jean-Luc Brunel.

you know you had to go and get the editorial pages in your books and so she arranged for me to have a contract with Jean-Luc and Karen's in Paris Brunel was a powerhouse in modeling even though he didn't look it he was small middle-aged unassuming a kind of caricature of the smooth talking Frenchman and seemingly harmless. Jean-Luc was around. We were sent to dinner parties with Jean-Luc at that time. And, you know, he was obviously very French and very charming. You know, baby, you're so beautiful, you know? The schmoozy, you know, the schmoozy French agent.

Like, I couldn't even make it up if I was trying to. Now, at the time, it was presented as we had to go to these events because it was a, quote, model party or an agency party. Under the guise of networking events, Heather Braden says Brunel would invite models to parties and expensive dinners where young girls were fed alcohol and drugs and were introduced to wealthy older men. That's where Heather says she would see Jeffrey Epstein. You know, and of course, sometimes there might actually be a client, but it was often people like Trump and Epstein and all these people. And that's where I would see many of them over the years. All of these agents were paid thousands and thousands of dollars

by all of these clubs and restaurants to use us as promotional visual material to lure in men who would do anything and spend anything to be there. So Trump or Epstein or whoever would pay any amount to be at a VIP table next to us or with us, or to just get a table and then make sure 10 models sit with him. It was also presented as a privilege to be invited because you're one of the 20 or the 12 that actually got invited to the dinner, the agency dinner. Not everybody got invited. You were in the upper circles. Despite enduring toxic behavior, sexual harassment, threatening situations, Heather says it took years to finally leave New York. Why I never left, I don't know.

To me, in my mind, I just, I had nowhere else to go. Unlike Heather, Dutch former model Tisha Heisman only spent one week with Jean-Luc Brunel. By 1991, the 18-year-old's modeling career was taking off in Belgium, when her agent introduced her to him, then in his mid-40s. He was right away really enthusiastic. He said, you have to come to Paris. And in those days, Brunel, he was this, you know, really a hotshot of the Paris fashion scene. So he was a really important player in the modeling industry.

So, of course, I was really happy that he saw potential in me. Yeah, he invited me to stay in his house, in his apartment. I was really starstruck, you know, because there were all these models that I knew from Vogue covers and from fashion shows on TV. And, you know, I arrived at this place and it was full of people from the fashion industry. And he was really this charming guy. You know, he made me feel welcomed at first. Having a number of agents was normal.

And apparently living in your agent's house with other models was pretty common. But my female agent, she said to me that it was really an honor to get invited to stay in his private house, you know, in his apartment. Every night that week, Brunel hosted parties. It was like, yeah, it was kind of, yeah, really decadent. Like VIP tables with a lot of drinks on it, a lot of bottles, bottles of champagne and whatever you wanted to drink. I felt a bit like a kind of caged animal, like you are in a zoo or an animal in a zoo. That's where she too says she met Jeffrey Epstein.

But she wouldn't realize it until years later when she saw pictures of Epstein from his first court case. when she saw pictures of Epstein from his first court case. I immediately recognized his face, you know, that that was the guy that I spoke to that night in Brunel's place. And he gave me, we started talking and he gave me his kind of career advice. He started saying things like, oh, you do understand, you know, that it's really important that an important guy like Brunel, that he sees potential in you. Tisha had quickly earned Brunel's affection. And it wasn't long before she saw a darker side.

The strange thing is that during the days he was this really professional guy who was, you know know really working and being serious and he arranged like castings for me and photo shoots and you know he really helped me but he changed uh during the night you know he had really two faces the whole week i stayed there he made like comments like uh one of these days i'm going to fuck you. The first night when I asked him, is there a bed for me? Where's my bed? Because I want to go to sleep. And he said, yeah, well, there's no bed for you. You sleep in my bed. And when I told him, yeah, hell no, I'm not going to do that. Then he just, he left me, you know, out there.

So I just arranged to sleep in another model's room. The night she was attacked by Jean-Luc Brunel is still vivid in her memory. During the day, I did this casting for a show, for a fashion show, and they went really well. So I got, like, booked for a job for a magazine. So that night, you know, Brunel, he was really like, oh, we should celebrate. And we first, we went out to a club. And when we came back, he gave me a drink.

And he said, yeah, we have to say, we have to like say cheers to your career. You know, you're going to make it big. So of course I was flattered. So we drank the drink. I remember that after 15 minutes I became dizzy and feeling really sick. And sounds were coming from far. And the whole room was starting to spin. So I told him I'm feeling sick and he said, yeah, I'm going to take care of you.

You know, let me, you know, come and you stay in my bed. And I remember that I thought, yeah, no, I don't want this, you know. But I didn't have the power anymore to say no. So I remember that he took me to his bedroom. He pushed me on the bed and that he was on top of me. And I blacked out. And when I awoke again, he was on top of me. And I remember that it was really i had a difficult um

it was difficult to breathe because of his weight and his hands were everywhere he started to rip my shirt and then and the last thing i remember that he penetrated me and then i blacked out when i um When I woke up the next day and when I realized what happened to me, because I felt really that the train rode over me. And when I started to put all the pieces of the puzzle together, I thought, okay, I have to get out of this place. I have to get out of Paris. And I started running to the nearest metro station and I took the first train out of Paris

and I felt so ashamed. And of course, you know, I felt also guilty and dirty. And, you know, I didn't want to go to the police, you know. And I also thought, who's going to believe me? You know, it's his town. He's an important guy and I'm a nobody. You know, who's going to believe me's an important guy. And I'm a nobody. You know, who's going to believe me? When Tisha got back to Brussels,

she was told by her Belgium agent that she'd blown an opportunity. She quit modeling after that. And she never went back to Paris. And I remember that when I looked at models in magazines, I always thought, oh my God, they have these really special and happy lives and I want that. But I found out that it was like, it had such a dark side. And so really my whole dream, you know, that fell apart. Yeah, it was destroyed. She stayed quiet about Brunel until decades later

when the Me Too movement against Harvey Weinstein prompted her to tell her story. In the wake of Jeffrey Epstein's death, court documents and victim testimony have revealed Jean-Luc Brunel is suspected to have been a key part of that sex trafficking ring that spanned the globe and deeply infiltrated the professional modeling world, victimizing potentially thousands of young women, many of them minors. He was a close confidant of convicted sex offender

Jeffrey Epstein and a former French modeling agent facing charges of his own. Tonight, Jean-Luc Brunel is dead, found in his Paris prison cell, hanged with his bedsheets, according to the Paris prosecutor's office. Authorities believe... On February 19th, Brunel was found dead in his Paris prison cell, where he was being held while being investigated for sexual abuse and trafficking of minors, allegations he denied. He was hanging by the neck, similar to the way his friend Jeffrey Epstein was found. Brunel's death has ignited a firestorm of questions, as another accused sex trafficker has died before we get answers. Today on FrontBurner, we're talking to The Guardian's

John Henley about Jean-Luc Brunel and the circumstances around his death. And we'll be hearing more from Heather Braden and Tisha Heisman throughout the episode. Hi, John, thanks so much for being here. Hi. So we just heard from two women who say that they were abused by Jean-Luc Brunel decades ago, while they were just young women in New York and Paris. But I'm wondering if you can walk me through who he was. What was he most notable for? And why was he so prolific and powerful in the industry? He was very well known as one of the most influential and for some years,

possibly even some decades, one of the most talented and powerful agents in the modeling world, not just in France, but in the States as well. He'd been around for a very, very long time. He first started working in the early 1970s. And in about 1978, he co-founded a modeling agency in Paris called Carine Models, which over the course of the years grew into one of the biggest agencies in the world. And he, I mean, he was undoubtedly a very talented spotter of modeling talent. He's credited with discovering notably kind of a number of models who went on to become actually sort of Hollywood A-listers, really. I mean, the likes of Sharon Stone, Mila Jovovich, Christy Turlington, Monica Bellucci. All these are models who went on to become real stars and started out with Jean-Luc Brunel. And tell me exactly what his relationship was with Jeffrey

Epstein. Well, they were very close. I mean, I think that's the least you can say. They were clearly friends. I mean, I think we can tell that from the, there was a period in the kind of late 1990s, early 2000s, where when police started looking into the Epstein case, and they were looking, for example, at the flight manifest of Epstein's private jets, they found Brunel's name coming up as a passenger more than 70 times. When Epstein was first in jail in the States in 2008, Brunel visited him more than 50 times during the short time that he was in jail. And of course, I mean, the allegation is from multiple women that Brunel was basically a procurer of young women for Epstein. He basically supplied Epstein with

the young girls who Epstein abused. And Brunel, obviously, also accused of abusing some of those women himself. I mean, I think everybody can see the sort of awful potential of the modeling industry to be a kind of a source of young women for abuse. It's a world inhabited by older, very powerful men who have the power to advance the careers of young, ambitious women. Has he been accused of procuring young girls for other men? Yeah, I mean, it's very difficult to disentangle all this. I mean, obviously, the whole circle of which Epstein was the center, you know, it was a circle, it was a large number or relatively large number of wealthy individuals who gathered in the States and in France, in Paris, in New York, in Los Angeles. And essentially, from what we can tell from what the women have said,

and from the kind of depositions and what's come out in Epstein's US court documents, young girls were basically passed around between these men. young girls were basically passed around between these men. I understand that Jean-Luc Brunel was reportedly introduced to Epstein through Ghislaine Maxwell, who is, of course, the ex-partner of Epstein, who has just been convicted of trafficking. And what more do we know about that relationship between Brunel and Maxwell? We know that they met, or at least we're told, this has been reported by several different people and in several different places, that Maxwell first met Brunel sometime in the early 1980s. We don't know the circumstances, we don't know the exact time or the place, but it's kind

of, I think, broadly accepted that that's how the introduction was made. And I think that is clearly how Maxwell, who allegedly obviously was also one of the major purveyors and procurers of women for Epstein, it's quite clear that Brunel was up to something very similar to what Epstein was up to. In the 80s in Paris, a now well-known CBS 60 Minutes about the world of Paris modeling agencies in the late 1980s, 1988, you know, in which Brunel featured very large. At discotheques like the Bandouche and the Palas, models are admitted free. When we filmed at the Bandouche, Jean-Luc Brunel was there. A number of models told us he has used cocaine heavily and offered it to the girls

along with help in their careers. So you first met Jean-Luc Brunel in a nightclub when he offered you drugs, cocaine. And Jean-Luc, did he use drugs? Oh yes. From which emerged this awful picture of what appeared to be the standard practice at the time, which was of young girls, 16, 17 year old, sort of would-be models being enticed to Paris. And Brunel and associates would slip drugs into their drinks. And the girls would wake up the next morning having been sexually abused. I understand another character that they focused on really heavily in that documentary was this guy named Gerald Marie, right? And can you

tell me a bit more about him? I mean, a very, very similar character to Brunel, I think. And he is currently under investigation by the French police. So Gérald Marie is associated with the Elite Model Agency, which was another very, very big and influential modeling agency based out of Paris. It discovered and launched the careers of really very big kind of supermodels in the 80s and 90s, people like Naomi Campbell and Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford. Gerald Marie himself was married for a while to Linda Evangelista, top model of the time. The extraordinary thing is that despite the media coverage that both Brunel and Gerald Marie got, Marie was particularly really hauled over the coals in a BBC, over the coals in a BBC, undercover BBC documentary, 10 years after the CBS documentary, which really laid bare these practices. Although that documentary itself was kind of later discredited and the investigative reporter, Donald McIntyre, who carried out the work,

ended up losing his job at the BBC. A lot of questions about his journalistic practice in getting access to this world. But enough people see the program to keep the issue alive in the fashion world. Both Marie and Burnell adamantly deny the claims and continue to work under the radar until... But interestingly, it was one of the reporters who was working on that 1998-99 documentary, I mean, just last year, filed a suit against Gérald Marie. And since then, between a dozen and 15 women have come forward and added their testimony to hers. So French police are now investigating Gérald Marie as well. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem.

Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Cops. We talked about the connections between Jean-Luc Brunel and Epstein, but what are the connections

between, if any, between Gérald Marie and Jean-Luc Brunel and Gérald Marie and Epstein? Like, how does he fit into this puzzle? I mean, Gérald Marie certainly knew Jean-Luc Brunel. They were arch rivals as the heads of two hugely successful model agencies. They certainly will have known each other since they operated in the same world, and it now transpires. Allegedly, in the case of Marie, they got up to pretty much the same kind of abuse. As regards the connections between Marie and Epstein, I don't know, I'm afraid. I'm not aware that Marie's name, Gerald Marie's name, has come up, for example, in U.S. court documents to the extent that Brunel certainly came up.

And fair for me to say, I know when we talked to Heather Braden, one of the victims of Jean-Luc Brunel, she said that this was like bigger than Epstein. of Jean-Luc Brunel, she said that this was like bigger than Epstein. You know, Epstein was a client of Jean-Luc's and started out as a client relationship. That's what I would call it where Jean-Luc is the one who was supplying him, you know, and then of course, it probably morphed into some sort of a symbiotic relationship where I think Epstein brought a much more of a global, massive market of clients to Jean-Luc, who at the time... And this is what she's talking about here, this world. Yeah, I mean, I think that's probably how you have to see it. And I think it's probably fair to say that the investigations have only really kind of found the tip of the iceberg at the moment.

Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who is one of the kind of the most vocal of the iceberg at the moment. Virginia Roberts-Jufre, who is one of the kind of the most vocal of Epstein's victims and also of Brunel's victims, she said that Brunel, in her estimation, was probably responsible for procuring 1,000 girls for Epstein. And I mean, which is just the most extraordinary number, clearly part of a global jet setting clique of rich men who were abusing young girls on a massive scale. Right. And Virginia Giuffre, the suit that, of course, she just settled a massive lawsuit against Prince Andrew. It was a suit filed under New York State's Child Victims Act. And this is the same act that I believe a former model, Carrie Otis, who was just 17 when she says that she was raped by this other man, Gerald Marie.

She has also now filed a lawsuit against him, maintaining that she was trafficked by him. The staggering thing is that these accusations have clearly been around since the 1980s. It's just they weren't taken seriously. Right, there was a whole documentary done about them, as you just mentioned. But they now are being taken seriously. But the tragedy is because so many of these abuses took place in the 80s or 90s, but in France, at least, many of them have now passed the statute of limitations, meaning that they're crimes that can no longer be tried. So back to Jean-Luc Brunel. He'd been working and living in the U.S. up until a few years ago.

But during this time, I know he was sort of under the radar, even nicknamed the ghost by French authorities. And so you talked about how hard it is to try these crimes because they happened so long ago. But what ultimately did result in him being charged? did result in him being charged? Well, I mean, he basically disappeared from sight very shortly after Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019. And the last time that Jean-Luc Brunel was seen in public was in Paris in July of that year. He was at a country club in Paris, and he essentially disappeared pretty much straight after that. It's thought maybe that he was in Thailand for a while, also that he was in Latin America. Nobody really knows. But what we do know is that he was arrested on the 16th of December in 2020. So he was sort of out of sight

under the radar for more than a year before French police finally got their hands on him. And he was arrested at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris. He was on his way to Senegal. He claimed he was on holiday, but he was arrested and detained and eventually placed under formal investigation, which is a sort of status in the French judicial system that's basically one step short of being charged. So he was placed under investigation first for one rape of a minor in Paris, and then subsequently for a second rape, again, of a minor. And he was also questioned quite intensively and was still being questioned, as I understand it, at the time of his death about these allegations that he trafficked minors for the purposes of sexual abuse by Jeffrey Epstein. And so this brings us to the reason we're having this conversation right now. Jean-Luc Brunel was found dead in his prison cell in France on February 19th.

And what do we know about the circumstances surrounding his death? And what do we know about the circumstances surrounding his death? What we know is that his body was found sometime between Friday night and Saturday morning, apparently at around about 1am in his cell. Multiple sources have said that he had hanged himself, although that hasn't been officially confirmed by the police or the prosecutors. We're still waiting for an autopsy. He was in a cell, he was in a kind of, I guess you'd call it a medium security cell. He wasn't under a particular suicide watch, although apparently, and again, this hasn't been confirmed by the police or prosecutors, but French media, one French newspaper in particular, has reported that he had attempted, previously attempted suicide. He wasn't in a very special cell where the materials in the cell, the kind of blankets and towels and that kind of thing, are kind of specially designed to prevent suicide attempts.

And all the indications are that there was no camera in his cell. The permanent recording of the interior of prison cells is against European human rights legislation. It is possible under French legislation, very recent French legislation, actually, it is possible. But this is really in exceptional circumstances. So, yeah, I mean, as a result, because there was no camera, the usual raft of conspiracy theories have flourished on the Internet. But as I say, you know, as far as the lawyers in the case are concerned, they seem to feel that it was pretty clearly a suicide. And in fact, Brunel's lawyers themselves have very strongly suggested that it was a suicide. And they said that he did it not out of a sense of guilt, but that he did it out of a sense of injustice, that he felt that he was being caught up in the system and that he was given no chance to prove right uh and of course you talk about the raft of conspiracy theories these are people who believe

that epstein uh did not kill himself in his jail cell that that there were no cameras there as well, that he also wasn't put on a proper suicide watch. You can see where these theories come from in that these men moved in a world of very rich and powerful people who clearly have every interest or had every interest in them not appearing in court and not giving evidence. So that's obviously where these theories come from. But there's no evidence at all that either of these deaths were anything other than suicides. We've talked a number of times in this conversation about Virginia Dufresne, who accused Prince Andrew of sexual assault at Jeffrey Epstein's home. And she just settled with him. And she reacted to the death of Brunel on Twitter, a man who she said abused her and countless girls and young women. She said that this ends another chapter, that

she's ultimately disappointed that she wasn't able to face him in a trial to hold him accountable. We've also heard from Heather Braden and Tisha Heisman about what his death means to them and the question of justice. I've got really mixed emotions when I just heard the news a couple of days ago. I was in shock and feeling really disappointed and frustrated because I've been fighting, you know, to get him in front of a judge to make sure that there would be a court case against Brunel for two and a half years.

And then all of a sudden, poof, you know, it's gone. So that felt really frustrating. You know, on one hand, you know, I won't shed a tear, you know. The world has a rapist less, and that's a good thing. Let's not forget that Brunel was in jail because 15 women came forward and made sure that he was arrested and that he was in jail already for 14 months. And that is also a kind of form of justice. What else do you think they may not be able to learn now that he's died? In exactly the same as with Epstein's death.

You know, I mean, I think for the victims, they clearly feel that both men have taken a large number of secrets with them to their graves and that, you know, a lot will not now come out and will not now be public. I think, you know, that's important for two reasons. It's clear that we may now never learn about the kind of mechanics of this network and how it actually operated. But I think for the girls, these were girls who were sort of 16, 17 at the time, they're now in their 50s. For them, that sort of sense of closure that they're going to miss, that sense that justice has been done and that they've had their

day in court and that these men have been held accountable, now clearly not going to happen. John, thanks so much for this. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Pleasure. All right, that is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. We'll talk to you tomorrow.