France has launched two probes into the Jeffrey Epstein affair, looking at potential crimes committed in the country or involving French nationals tied to the late American sex offender. The author of a new book tells RFI how Paris, as a fashion capital, provided a “reservoir” of the very young women preyed on by Epstein’s grooming network.
France set up a special task force in February to probe alleged sexual crimes and possible financial wrongdoing committed in the country or involving French nationals who could be implicated in Epstein’s crimes.
It came after the United States Justice Department released the latest batch of the so-called “Epstein files” relating to its investigation into the disgraced financier, who was found dead in his prison cell in 2019 awaiting trial for trafficking underage girls for sex.
The top Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said earlier this week that around 20 suspected victims had made themselves known after she urged potential victims to speak. Ten “new victims” had come forward, she said.
RFI spoke to investigative journalist and author Frédéric Ploquin, whose recently published book on the case Epstein: Les secrets de la filière française (“Epstein: Secrets of the French Network”) argues the scandal is very much a French affair.
RFI: Frédéric Ploquin, you’re best known for writing about organised crime. What drew you to the Epstein case?
FP: Because, when you get down to it, these powerful men are criminals like any other – and I decided to treat them as such. I normally write about gangsters, armed robbers, that sort of thing. But when I grasped the scale of this affair, I felt investigative journalism had a duty to these victims. It’s a criminal case, plain and simple. And I treat it as one.
The book reads like a thriller – which isn’t surprising, given that beyond the very large number of women who were raped, there are also deaths. It’s a murky world, and the Jeffrey Epstein I uncovered is not just a sexual predator but a major international fraudster and a kind of shadow diplomat, compromising people left, right and centre. That connects with my usual territory – espionage, organised crime.
But the real reason I wrote this book is that the two main suspects – Jeffrey Epstein and Jean-Luc Brunel – both officially died by suicide, and as a result the victims, including those who had come forward to testify before French courts, were robbed of any trial. I thought: there’s been no justice, these women have been left to fend for themselves, 20 years after the events, having made the effort to come forward. So I decided to make some noise.
[Editor’s note: Jean-Luc Brunel was a French model scout and agent, and Epstein’s key accomplice in the Paris-based sex-trafficking ring. He died by suicide in his prison cell in February 2022, just before his trial for the rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation, related to his work with Epstein. His lawyers stated he died by suicide not out of guilt but from a feeling of injustice.]
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I also wanted to focus specifically on the French angle, because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t come to Paris simply to drink good wine and visit Versailles, as some American billionaires do. He came because Paris – and this is the central argument of the book – was the reservoir, the epicentre of the whole system. They exploited Paris as the fashion capital of the world, the fact that it attracted young women – very young women – from across the globe, all of them knocking on the doors of modelling agencies, dreaming of becoming famous.
RFI: You say the victims waited 20 years. How do you explain French justice turning a blind eye for so long?
FP: It’s what astonishes me most when I trace this system back over 30 years – because its roots in Paris go a long way back. When I pieced together the history, I found that 20 years ago young women had already given testimony – anonymously, including in an interview on CBS in the United States – and French justice had not seen fit to act. Nobody had, in fact.
After that, it really came down to a handful of specialist organisations – Innocence en Danger in particular – who moved heaven and earth to get a new case opened. Crucially, they gave these women – now 20 years older than when the events took place – a safe space to come to Paris, to open up and say what had happened to them, and potentially to bring Jean-Luc Brunel, the modelling agency boss at the heart of it all, to trial.
RFI: You’re quite categorical that Paris was the epicentre of this organised abuse, in the toxic world of 1980s fashion – a world where wealth, you argue, was seen as a licence to commit crimes against children.
FP: Exactly. These were men drunk on their own power, they believed money could buy anything – including people’s bodies. They felt untouchable, and to a large extent they were.
RFI: There were people who turned a blind eye. How did they escape scrutiny for so long?
FP: It was a whole system. You could point the finger at the fashion world, which put people like Jean-Luc Brunel on a pedestal and never asked too many questions about what was going on, never really wanted to look. Honestly, you didn’t need a degree to work out that these men were preying on young women who came to Paris with their heads full of fairytales and ended up in a house of horrors.
RFI: They were easy targets…
FP: They were easy targets because they arrived with dreams and, generally, very little money. What strikes me when I go through the testimonies is that some of them barely had enough to eat when they got to Paris. So they depended on others for food, for drink… They were given free entry to nightclubs, which is precisely where they’d come across these predators. They weren’t necessarily aware of what was happening to them. But when one of them woke up and realised she’d been raped – sometimes drugged beforehand – it was too late. Most of them didn’t stay in Paris, the majority didn’t even speak French.
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RFI: You write that they didn’t dare report what had happened – less out of fear than out of shame. Shame had a hold over them.
FP: A very powerful hold. When they woke up from this nightmare, they felt they’d been naive, that they’d been taken for a ride – and that created an overwhelming sense of guilt and shame. That’s precisely what these predators counted on. The women went home, barely said a word to their families, and it only came out years later.
Since the book came out this week, I’ve already heard from two victims personally – women who have never spoken before and now want to. That tells you there’s still a need to open these floodgates.
RFI: Around 10 new victims have come forward, and you mention others who have recently approached the Paris prosecutor’s office. Do you want the investigation reopened, with cooperation from US justice?
FP: That’s partly why I wrote the book – to pile on the pressure. There are at least two major obstacles. First, the statute of limitations. Second, during the original French police investigation – which I describe in detail – the American justice system was completely uncooperative and handed over nothing. That will be a stumbling block again, and it may need to be resolved at a higher diplomatic level, given that some very powerful people are involved.
This interview has been adapted from the original version by Veronique Rigolet for RFI’s French service and has been lightly edited for clarity.
