The Paris prosecutor’s office has counted 26 alleged victims in the French strand of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case and has received the names of further suspected recruiters. Paris public prosecutor Laure Beccuau gave the figures in an interview with public radio station France Inter today.
Beccuau said 24 of the victims had been clearly identified and eight had yet to be heard, some of them because they lived abroad. She added that 13 had never featured in any previous file, including the cases against model agents Jean-Luc Brunel and Gérald Marie.
Prosecutors reopened their preliminary investigations in February, after the US Department of Justice released a vast trove of Epstein files on January 30. Epstein died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex-trafficking charges.
Beccuau said the inquiry covered possible offences by French nationals, including against victims abroad. The leads ran to New York, Paris, Saint-Tropez and Cannes, she said.
She also addressed the death of Daniel Siad, a model scout accused of recruiting young women for Epstein, who was found dead at his home in Colombes, west of Paris, on July 20. Siad, who faced several complaints including for rape, had denied the accusations.
Beccuau said investigators regarded him as one of Epstein’s recruiters and had been due to question him shortly before he died. She sought to reassure victims upset by his death, saying the case would go on to identify all those who might be implicated.
Investigators had since received other names of potential recruiters, she said, without identifying them. Beccuau described the Epstein network as a labyrinth that could not be unravelled by pulling a single thread and said no lead would be neglected.
The French strand of the affair centres on intermediaries and modelling agencies accused of recruiting young women and minors for Epstein. Brunel, a co-founder of MC2 Model Management, was found dead in his Paris prison cell in 2022 after being charged with raping minors.
Marie, the former European head of the Elite agency, faces complaints filed in Paris on July 15 by six women alleging rape and human trafficking. He has firmly denied them.
Diplomat Fabrice Aidan was referred to prosecutors in February by the French foreign ministry over claims he passed United Nations documents to Epstein. He has rejected the accusations.
Former Socialist Party culture minister Jack Lang resigned as president of the Arab World Institute in Paris on February 7, after his name was found more than 600 times in the files. Financial prosecutors opened an investigation into him and his daughter Caroline on suspicion of laundering the proceeds of aggravated tax fraud, accusations Lang has called baseless.
