Less than three years after notorious convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell, a French man questioned for his connection to Epstein has also been found dead in prison.
Both men died by hanging.
According to The Guardian, 75-year-old Jean-Luc Brunel was found Saturday morning in his cell at La Santé prison in Paris. The French prosecutors’ office said an inquiry had been opened into his cause of death.
Brunel was the former head of the MC2 modeling agency. He has also worked as a talent scout for Karin Models, but was banned from the agency in 1999 after a BBC undercover report on abuse in the fashion industry. Brunel moved to the U.S. to establish M2 with funding from Epstein and is credited for discovering supermodels such as Christy Turlington and Milla Jovovich.
A complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, said an alleged victim claimed that Epstein, Brunel, Ghislaine Maxwell – who was found guilty of multiple sex trafficking counts late last year – and others “deliberately engaged in a pattern of racketeering that involved luring minor children through MC2, mostly girls under the age of 17, to engage in sexual play for money,” according to The Daily Beast.
Maxwell reportedly introduced Brunel and Epstein.
While he was preparing to board a plan to Dakar, Senegal at the Charles de Gaulle airport in December 2020, authorities arrested Brunel.
He had been accused of rape.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a longtime Epstein accuser also made allegations against Brunel, which he denied. According to The Guardian, “several top models” also accused him of sexual assault, which he also denied. French police reportedly interviewed hundreds of potential witnesses.
Although he had been released on bail in November, Brunel was being held on remand in La Santé awaiting trial at the time of his death.
Epstein was also found dead by hanging while awaiting trial at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan in August 2019. His cause of death was determined to be suicide, but it set off a “rash of conspiracy theories,” on social media that were repeated by high-profile figures, according to The New York Times.
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