Jean-Luc Brunel, the former model scout who was in jail accused of trafficking underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein has been found dead in his prison cell in France. He was found hanging in his cell in La Santé, Paris, at approximately 1 am during a night check-in by guards.
The fashion agent was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport in December 2020 while trying to fly to Senegal for holiday. The death comes just days after Prince Andrew, 62 settled Virginia Roberts’s lawsuit. Roberts had accused Brunel, 74, of obtaining more than a thousand women and girls for Epstein.
Brunel was awaiting trial in France for raping minors. “A night patrol found his lifeless body at about 1 am,” according to multiple media reports. “A judicial inquiry has been launched, and early evidence points to suicide.”
Brunel founded Karin Models and MC2 Model Management. Prosecutor Remy Heitz, after arresting Brunel, said Brunel “is suspected of having committed acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment on various minor or major victims and of having, in particular, organized the transport and accommodation of young girls or young women on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein.”
Because many of the crimes he was accused of fell outside of the statute of limitations Brunel was walking free until Roberts went on record saying Brunel raped her in the early 2000s when she was between the ages of 16 and 19.
From The Daily Mail:
Officers were set to arrest Brunel in January 2020 following further enquiries, but on December 16 he was intercepted at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris with a one-way ticket to Dakar, capital of Senegal, in West Africa.
‘This led to his immediate arrest and he was placed in custody,’ said the source. ‘The multiple rape charges solely relate to the testimony of Virginia Giuffre, and not any of the other alleged rape victims.
‘The sexual harassment indictment is nothing to do with the Epstein case, and instead relates to incidents in 2016 following a complaint by another woman who has not gone public.’
The ‘multiple rapes’ of Giuffre – now a mother of three who was called Virginia Roberts before her marriage – were said to have mainly taken place at Epstein’s home on the private island of Little Saint James, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Giuffre had produced sworn testimonies saying that both Brunel and Prince Andrew attacked her there.
According to French law, a French citizen such as Brunel can be tried in France for offences committed abroad.
The Daily Mail also reported:
Jeffrey Epstein’s French modelling agent friend Jean-Luc Brunel, who allegedly procured more than a thousand women and girls for the pedophile financier to sleep with, died today in an alleged prison suicide.
It comes days after Prince Andrew agreed to settle Virginia Roberts’s lawsuit accusing him of sex abuse after they met through Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Roberts accused Brunel, 74, of procuring more than a thousand women and girls for Epstein to sleep with and he was awaiting trial in France for raping minors.
His death in an alleged hanging will fuel conspiracy theories around the Epstein affair after he also died in prison while awaiting trial in what authorities say was a hanging.
However, video cameras were not running at the time he died in the cell he shared with another inmate.
Prosecutors in Paris confirmed Brunel was found hanging in his cell in La Santé, in the south of the capital city, in the early hours of Saturday morning.
‘A night patrol found his lifeless body at about 1am,’ said an investigating source. ‘A judicial enquiry has been launched, and early evidence points to suicide.’
It was in December 2020 that Brunel was indicted after two days of interviews by an examining magistrate and specialist police from an anti-paedophilia unit.
According to a previous TGP report, Epstein once allegedly had three 12-year-old girls flown in from France and delivered to him as a birthday present, a former “sex slave” says in newly released court documents.
According to a former bookkeeper, several girls presented to Epstein worked for MC2, the modeling agency owned by Jean Luc Brunel, a longtime acquaintance and frequent guest of Epstein’s. Brunel received $1 million from the billionaire around the time he started the agency.
Epstein’s friend Jean-Luc Brunel had such a reputation of abusing models that 60 Minutes did a segment on him years ago.
Additional Reading:
