Zampolli – Trump’s modelling agent ‘friend’ he dare not fire
Tue 1:17 pm +00:00, 7 Jul 2026On April 19, 2026, the Italian state broadcaster RAI aired a segment of its investigative program Report titled “La guerra di Epstein,” Epstein’s War. In it, a man named Paolo Zampolli sat for an interview about his decades inside the international modeling business and his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. He was asked about the young women in Epstein’s orbit. His answer, recorded and broadcast on national television, was this:
“I knew he had the girls, but they weren’t mine. They weren’t even models, they were young girls, masseuses.”
The phrase “young girls” is doing a great deal of work in that sentence, and Zampolli appears to have understood exactly how much.[1] His lawyers sent RAI a formal cease-and-desist, a diffida, demanding the network not air the interview. RAI aired it anyway, on the grounds that what a sitting envoy of the United States says about a child-trafficking network is news.[2]
That is the part worth holding onto. Paolo Zampolli is not a private citizen describing a regrettable old acquaintance. Since March 2025 he has been the Special Representative for Global Partnerships, appointed by President Trump, traveling the world cutting deals in the name of the United States government.[3] An Italian public-broadcasting unit asked him on camera what the American Department of Justice never managed to ask him at all.
Modeling Agent, Then Friend of the President
The basic biography is not in dispute. Zampolli, born in Milan in 1970, learned the modeling trade from John Casablancas of Elite and from Jean-Luc Brunel, the agent whose MC2 agency was funded by Epstein and who died in a Paris jail cell in 2022 awaiting trial on rape charges.[4] Zampolli founded his own New York agency, ID Model Management, and in September 1998 he introduced a Slovenian model named Melania Knauss to Donald Trump at a party during Fashion Week. He has been a fixture of Trump’s circle ever since, which is itself notable. The president is not famous for keeping the same friends for twenty-eight years.[4]
What Epstein thought of him is preserved in Epstein’s own correspondence. In a 2011 email warning an Emirati business contact, Epstein wrote:
“Be careful, zampoli is trouble. Lots.”
The line is widely cited in mainstream profiles of Zampolli, though the exact court exhibit index has not surfaced in the public databases.[5] When Jeffrey Epstein is the one warning you that a man is trouble, the assessment carries a certain authority.
The relationship was not only social. Epstein patronized ID Models, and in 2004 the two men partnered on a joint bid to buy Elite Model Management outright. The bid failed, but the ambition is the point: Epstein and Zampolli wanted to own a modeling agency together.[4] What a modeling agency provided, in the architecture Brunel and Epstein built, was a lawful-looking pipeline of young women with visas, apartments, and a reason to be in the room.
“Sleazy,” in the FBI’s Files
The released Department of Justice production includes an FBI interview report that puts Zampolli’s conduct on the record in law-enforcement language. The 302, drafted on August 26, 2019, during the Southern District of New York’s Epstein investigation, documents a former ID Models signee.[6] She had gone to Paris at seventeen. At eighteen she signed with ID Models and was placed in a model apartment on Varick Street with two other girls. The report’s characterization is blunt: Zampolli was “sleazy” and dated models. He made her get a short haircut, then let her go. She lasted about a year, during which, she said, she mostly sat around the apartment.[6]
That is one interview, redacted, of a kind that recurs across the modeling-world testimony in the files. It describes the ordinary machinery: young women imported, housed together, kept available, discarded on a haircut. The same production contains a 2010 email in which an associate forwards Zampolli’s United Nations gala material directly to Epstein, with the note “Paolo asked me to forward this to you.”[7] The channel between the two men ran straight through the diplomatic world Zampolli was busy building for himself.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s Ocean Charity
In 2013, Zampolli became one of only four core partners in the TerraMar Project, Ghislaine Maxwell’s ocean-conservation nonprofit.[8] TerraMar presented itself as an advocate for the high seas. It was, by the assessment of international-development specialists, an influence-peddling vehicle that gave Maxwell a podium at global forums and a charitable reason to stand next to powerful people. The organization was dissolved in both the United States and the United Kingdom within days of Epstein’s federal arrest in July 2019, which is the timing one expects of a genuine conservation charity.[8]
Zampolli ran his own version of the same instrument. His “We Are The Oceans” and “Save Our Shark Coalition” events, co-hosted with his then-wife Amanda Ungaro, drew the same crowd. Maxwell attended a We Are The Oceans reception in New York on March 10, 2016.[9] RAI’s reporting indicates that the oceans branding was load-bearing in a more literal sense: the operation is now under examination for its role in a financial-fraud matter involving the United Nations Office for Project Services, the allegation being that the moral glow of conservation was used to wave funding past the auditors.[10]
A Sovereign Passport Business, Litigated in New York
The diplomatic credentials were real, and Zampolli monetized them. In 2011 he was named Minister-Counsellor to the Commonwealth of Dominica’s UN mission, and in October 2013 Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit elevated him to United Nations Ambassador and Ambassador for Oceans and Seas. The following June, Grenada appointed Ungaro its UN Ambassador for Youth Affairs. The pattern of converting social access into sovereign titles was, by this point, a method.[11]
What the titles were worth is documented in a New York courtroom rather than in a blog. Zampolli sued the government of Dominica, Kempinski Hotels, and the Dubai-based Range Developments in the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, seeking a finder’s fee he said he was owed for aligning the parties behind the Cabrits Resort and Spa Kempinski Dominica.[12] His own filings describe how the resort was financed: through the sale of roughly 800 family passports under Dominica’s Citizenship-by-Investment program, at about $225,000 each, for an estimated $195 million in state revenue. Dominica’s opposition leader, Lennox Linton, confirmed publicly that Zampolli was chasing approximately $7.5 million, a five percent cut, and that the government had paid $30 million to the developers while leaving his commission unpaid.[12]
Strip away the conservation galas and the UN letterhead and the business underneath is selling national identities to anyone with a quarter million dollars, then suing when the commission check is late. The man marketing the passports now markets the United States.
ICE as a Custody Tool
The clearest illustration of how Zampolli uses state power is what happened to Amanda Ungaro, the Brazilian former model who was his partner for roughly two decades and the mother of his teenage son. As their custody battle escalated, Zampolli contacted a senior Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, David Venturella, and reported her immigration status. Ungaro was detained and, in October 2025, deported to Brazil.[13]
The next court date in the custody case would reportedly have moved their son toward her. Instead the federal deportation apparatus removed her from the country. The ethics watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has called for the Department of Homeland Security Inspector General to investigate a Trump ally using ICE to detain the mother of his child.[14] A man with the President’s phone number arranged for the government to deport the woman he was fighting in family court. Whatever else this is, it is a demonstration of capability.
“Brazilian Women Are Programmed”
The RAI broadcast did not only capture Zampolli on Epstein. Asked about Ungaro, he offered a theory of her nationality. The exchange, reported by the Brazilian press, went like this:[15]
Zampolli: “Brazilian women cause trouble with everyone, right? It’s not like this was the first one. Brazilian women are programmed.” Interviewer: “To extort?” Zampolli: “No, to cause trouble.”
He also, according to Brazilian government statements and regional reporting, called Brazilian women a “cursed race,” raça maldita, programmed to behave this way.[16] The remarks detonated a diplomatic incident. Brazil’s Ministry of Women, under Minister Márcia Lopes, issued a formal condemnation calling the comments misogyny and hate speech. The country’s First Lady, Rosângela “Janja” Lula da Silva, denounced him publicly and noted that the man insulting Brazilian women as a class had been accused by one of them of domestic, sexual, and psychological abuse.[17] A sitting United States envoy generated a head-of-state-level protest from the largest country in South America by going on Italian television and describing its women as a cursed, defective race. The Global Partnerships portfolio is off to a strong start.
Twenty Billion Dollars in Twenty Minutes, Minus Twelve Billion
Zampolli’s actual diplomatic work follows the same pattern as his charities: the branding vastly outruns the substance. He has described himself as “Boeing’s number-two salesperson in the world, right after the president,” and claimed he closed a $20 billion aircraft deal with Uzbekistan in twenty minutes after personally demanding the Uzbeks raise their offer from $4 billion to $50 billion.[18]
The record disagrees. The State Department confirms the Uzbekistan Airways order was negotiated directly by President Trump in a September 5, 2025 phone call with Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev. The signed contract was worth a little over $8 billion, for 22 Dreamliners. Boeing has declined to confirm Zampolli’s self-assigned sales title.[18] He rounded up by twelve billion dollars and gave himself a job at Boeing in the same breath.
His freelancing has unsettled actual allies. In February 2025, before his appointment was even formal, Zampolli toured Italy styling himself “Special Envoy to Italy” and proposed that the United States join the Global Combat Air Programme, the sixth-generation fighter venture run by the United Kingdom, Italy, and Japan. He had not, he later conceded, discussed any of this with President Trump.[19] When reporters asked Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani about the American envoy reshaping a multinational defense program, Tajani replied:
“Zampolli who?”
Lockheed Martin declined to support the proposal. No documented meeting with Italy’s actual defense manufacturers ever materialized.[19] This is shadow diplomacy in its purest form: a man with no State Department title, no staff, and no mandate, generating real confusion among allied governments while taking credit for deals the President closed himself.
The Journalist He Erased at Two in the Morning
The most recent data point is the most telling, because it shows what Zampolli does when the documentation gets close. An independent journalist, Bekah Day, spent months reporting his record and built an audience of 1.4 million followers on TikTok. The night she was preparing to publish her investigation, at roughly two in the morning, her entire account was deleted. No strikes, no violations, no warning.[20]
Zampolli then posted a screenshot of her vanished profile to his Instagram, captioned it with the word “removed,” and set it to the YMCA song.[20] He did not appear to notice that her username was still legible in the center of the image he was celebrating. A representative of the United States government publicly took a victory lap over the deplatforming of a reporter, and left his fingerprints on it. For a man whose entire defense rests on free speech being weaponized against him, it was a clarifying moment.
What Italy Aired and Washington Filed
Set the pieces beside each other. A modeling agent who built the same kind of pipeline as the trafficker who called him “trouble.” An FBI report calling him sleazy. A partnership in Ghislaine Maxwell’s charity. A $195 million passport business litigated in open court. The use of ICE to deport the mother of his child. A diplomatic rupture with Brazil over calling its women a cursed race. A twelve-billion-dollar exaggeration about Boeing. And the deletion of a journalist’s platform, celebrated to a disco track.
Every item on that list is documented, and almost none of it was surfaced by the institution that should have surfaced it. Italian public television aired the interview the Department of Justice never conducted. Brazil’s Ministry of Women issued the condemnation the State Department did not. A Kansas City reporter with a phone did the work the FBI’s own 2019 file suggests it had already begun and then set down.
The Epstein network was never one man, and it did not end in a Manhattan jail cell. It was a system for converting access into impunity, and its surviving operators did not retire. One of them is a Special Representative of the United States, and the only people holding him to account are a foreign broadcaster, a foreign government, and an independent journalist whose account he had erased before sunrise. He told the truth on television. It is the rest of us who are supposed to pretend we did not hear it.
