French police are questioning the boss of a modelling agency suspected of supplying underage girls to the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Jean-Luc Brunel, 74, was arrested by police at Charles de Gaulle airport before boarding a plane to Dakar on Wednesday, French officials said.
Paris prosecutors told journalists Brunel was being quizzed as part of an investigation opened last year into the alleged rape and sexual assault of minors, sexual harassment, and human trafficking of underage girls for sexual exploitation.
Agence France-Presse reported Brunel’s lawyer had not responded to requests for a comment.
The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that that Brunel was detained on 16 December as part of an investigation into “rapes, sexual assaults, the rape and sexual assault of a minor aged 15, the rape and sexual assault of a minor over 15 years, sexual harassment, association with criminals and the trafficking and exploitation of minors”.
Prosecutors said the arrest was part of an investigation opened on 23 August 2019 by the Paris prosecutor’s office centred on possible “events of a sexual nature thought to have been committed by Jeffrey Epstein and other accomplices”.
Brunel was a close friend of Epstein, 66, who was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in August last year while awaiting trail on sex-trafficking charges. The justice department said his death was “apparent suicide”.
Brunel and Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late press baron Robert Maxwell, and Epstein’s former girlfriend, are alleged to have helped the billionaire financier procure underage girls.
Maxwell is in a New York jail awaiting trial next July on sex-trafficking charges, which she denies.
In the 1990s, Paris-born Brunel was a talent scout and boss of the agency Karin Models. After he was banned from the agency in Europe in 1999 following a BBC undercover investigation on abuse in the fashion world, he moved to the US and founded MC2 Model Management with funding from Epstein. He is credited with discovering a number of models who became internationally famous, including Christy Turlington, Sharon Stone and Milla Jovovich.
He had met Maxwell in the 1980s and she introduced him to Epstein.
Brunel has come under the spotlight several times after accusations made by models of sexual exploitation and drug abuse.
In 2015, Virginia Giuffre, an American campaigner for justice for victims of sex trafficking who founded the NGO Victims Refuse Silence, accused Brunel of supplying girls to Epstein, claiming the latter had bragged to her that he had slept with more than 1,000 “of Brunel’s girls”.
Giuffre, who was abused by Epstein, has claimed she had sex with Prince Andrew on three separate occasions, and was aged 17 on the first occasion. The prince has categorically denied her claims.
Brunel has always denied any involvement in illegal activities. He disappeared from public view shortly after Epstein’s death in August 2019. In December last year he told police he was available to help with their inquiries.