Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel

The semester begins tomorrow but rather than preparing for my students, I’m reading about the horror that was Jeffrey Epstein and his consorts, one of whom, I saw in the news last night, was my French modeling agent, Jean-Luc Brunel.

In the fall of 1982, I was a 19-year old fledgling model in New York city attempting to make enough money to continue my Stanford education.  I had gotten a few small jobs shooting a sportswear catalog in the Poconos and a beauty spread at a spa upstate when my Legends agent, Kay Mitchell, advised me to go to Europe, to get “tear sheets,” photographs in magazines, with which to fill my portfolio.

Kay introduced me to Jean-Luc Brunel, who was in New York City scouting for new faces for Karins Models.

Jean-Luc offered me a one-way ticket to Paris.

I agreed to go, but I bought my own ticket.  No way was I going to travel to Europe on a one-way ticket bought by an agent whom I would have to reimburse.  Whatever happened, I wanted to have my own ticket home.

So, in early January, off I flew to Paris on IcelandAir, via Reykjavik and Lichtenstein, $500 round trip.  

Jean-Luc sent a friendly guy named Fabrizio to meet me at Charles de Gaulle.   As we drove into Paris, me semi-delirious from twenty-six hours of travel and no sleep, I asked Fabrizio if Jean-Luc were as lecherous as rumored.

Fabrizio burst out laughing at my question.  Jean-Luc was a perfect gentleman, he assured me.

Fabrizio, it turned out, was not so much an employee as he was Jean-Luc’s friend and gofer.  Therefore, it was incumbent on him to report my question back to Jean-Luc, which became a running joke whenever my new agent saw me.  The joke was made even funnier, in Jean-Luc’s eyes, by the fact that I stood a foot taller than he was.

Fabrizio, my recent reading informs me, is also Fabrizio Lombardo, who later became head of Miramax Italy and has been implicated as one of those responsible for procuring women for Harvey Weinstein (https://www.thewrap.com/how-fabrizio-lombardo-became-harvey-weinstein-hustler/).

The rest of that day and week is inscribed in a hazy psychedelic vision in my head.  On the one hand, I was exhausted and jet-lagged.  On the other hand, I was thrilled to be in Paris and excited to meet the friendly models who, like me, were staying at Jean-Luc’s apartment, women including the very kind Reneé Simonsen, who had just won the “Face of the 80s” modeling competition. 

At his apartment, Jean-Luc treated the visiting models well.  At 11 pm, a cook served five course meals in Jean-Luc’s apartment upstairs, with tiny cups of sorbet to clear the palate between courses. An American from Seattle, I’d never experienced such a thing.  Later, well after midnight, we’d pile into cabs and head to Les Bains Douche nightclub where we models danced to “Billie Jean” while Jean-Luc and his friends drank expensive bottles of whiskey and watched us dance.

Jean-Luc never made a pass at me; I may not have been his type, and my height certainly intimidated him, but over the next few years I saw him hit on plenty of other young models right up until he married the sweet, naive, and twenty-five years his junior American model Roberta Chirko, perhaps as a way to mitigate the bad publicity resulting from the 1988 exposé of his coke- and alcohol- infused sexual assaults.

Back in 1983, during a late night of clubbing, I do recall one of Jean-Luc’s buddies trying to get me to have sex with him.

 “Ohh baaaby baaaby you’re so beauutiful,” he whispered in my ear.  “I just want to make love to you ohh baby baby.”

The man’s heavy French accent made me laugh almost out loud.  Did other women fall for this? I wondered.  It was like being propositioned by Inspector Jacques Clouseau.

As for Jean-Luc, even at the time I realized how lucky it was that I had asked that blunt, awkward, question, putting him on notice that I wasn’t easy prey.

Looking back, I’m also glad that I was a little older than the young girls Epstein and his ilk preyed upon, making me a little less vulnerable to wealthy, powerful, and manipulative men like Epstein and my agent.  How lucky I am that I was in Paris working as a model for one purpose only:  to make money to pay for my education. I wasn’t trying to be a star, vulnerable to an agent’s manipulation.

Only as models and prostitutes do women ostensibly get paid more than men.  Yet even in those fields the pimps and agents make most of the money while the women suffer the bulk of the exploitation and abuse.