Three months before FBI agents arrested Jeffrey Epstein at a private New Jersey airport for his alleged role in a global child trafficking ring, his old pal and business partner Jean Luc Brunel was busy scouring Brazil for girls who could make him even richer.
Through big cities and dusty frontier towns, Brunel stopped at more than 20 agencies and interviewed hundreds of girls, a Brazilian model agent recalled to The Post.Brunel, 72, an agent who in the 1980s discovered some of the biggest names in modeling — Christy Turlington and Angie Everhardt — was on a month-long scouting jaunt, crisscrossing the South American nation for the next big thing.
“He spent more than two hours with us,” said the agent, who owns a talent firm. “I brought my wife and 7-year-old daughter to the meeting. I knew nothing about what he had been accused of doing. I still don’t quite believe it.”
Brunel’s been implicated in court filings of procuring girls for his old American chum, who was indicted on charges of sexually abusing dozens of girls before his suicide in a Manhattan federal lock-up on August 10.
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Brunel — who has not been charged with a crime — has vigorously denied all allegations against him in the past, and model world insiders told The Post he continues to work as an agent and scout for MC2, which once counted Epstein as an investor.
“Oh, yeah. That guy is always scouting for girls,” said Jarl Ale de Basseville, a Paris-based fashion photographer who has known Brunel since the 1990s. “But it’s a fine line between modeling and prostitution, and the problem with guys like him is that they think they own the girls.”
Another longtime Brunel associate said, “He likes fresh flesh, that’s for sure.”
Jean Luc Brunel was born into a wealthy family in Paris two years after the end of the Second World War. His father was a successful realtor who amassed a sizeable fortune. – READ MORE