In March last year, Donald Trump announced that he was appointing his friend Paolo Zampolli, a former modelling agent, as a special envoy for global partnerships.
It was Zampolli who was sitting with vice-president JD Vance last week in Hungary for talks with prime minister Viktor Orbán in advance of the country’s elections.
The 56-year-old Italian-American businessman is now faced with a most delicate task: helping to quash the online speculation around Melania Trump and any links she might have to Jeffrey Epstein.
Melania stunned the White House press corps on Thursday with a surprise press conference in which she denied any connection to the sex offender. She also denied a claim that Epstein had introduced her to Donald Trump, which she described as “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation”.
The intervention and condemnation of false online rumours about her links to Epstein have put Zampolli in the spotlight. He arranged a visa for Melania to work as a model in the US and says that in 1998 he introduced her to her future husband at a party he was hosting at the Kit Kat Club in New York.
Zampolli has now offered to testify before Congress that he, rather than Epstein, introduced the Trumps.
There is some bewilderment in media circles in the US over the reasons behind such a high-profile intervention on an issue which, until the president’s wife spoke about it, was receiving scant public attention.
The Trumps had been photographed with Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, but Melania told reporters they were never friends.
“Donald and I were invited to the same parties as Epstein from time to time, since overlapping in social circles is common in New York City and Palm Beach,” she said at the press conference at the press conference. “To be clear, I never had a relationship with Epstein or his accomplice, [Ghislaine] Maxwell.”
Melania Trump’s lawyers have already threatened the US writer Michael Wolff with a $1bn defamation lawsuit over claims he has made over her alleged links with Epstein. He has launched a counter-claim in New York, warning that it will call for subpoenas for “those who frequented or who were part of Epstein’s circle, including Mr Trump”.
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The legal documents involved in the Wolff action cite an FBI interviewee report from July 2019, which includes a claim from a Polish model who worked for Epstein that he had introduced the Trumps. There is no evidence or details to support the claim, which was published in the justice department files concerning Epstein.
In an interview with the New York Times in 2016, Zampolli said he had first met Melania in Milan, where he was scouting for models. “She was a very beautiful girl with her head on her shoulders,” he said.
Zampolli ran the agency ID Model Management and was an associate of Epstein’s. In 2004 he reportedly launched an unsuccessful joint bid with Epstein to buy the agency Elite Model Management.
Epstein himself seemed wary of Zampolli, writing in one email to an associate: “Be careful, zampoli is trouble. Lots.” Zampolli has said he did not have a close or warm relationship with the financier.
Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model, is one of Zampolli’s former girlfriends and arrived in New York for the first time in 2002, flying in one of Epstein’s planes.
In an interview last month, Ungaro told how there were about 30 girls on the plane, many of whom were teenagers. She was accompanied by the modelling scout Jean-Luc Brunel, who was found dead in a prison cell in 2022 while being investigated for trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation.
Ungaro never saw Epstein again and became a friend of Melania’s.
Ungaro and Zampolli are reported to have regularly dined with the Trumps at the Mar-a-Lago resort club in Florida. Ungaro has now split acrimoniously from Zampolli and has claimed he asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain her in the midst of a custody battle for their son. This has been denied by Zampolli.
One of the reasons Melania may have decided to intervene is increasing scrutiny of how modelling agents were used to recruit women for Epstein. The BBC reported last month how one US-based modelling agent introduced a woman as young as 18 to Epstein and pleaded with him to have sex with a model he knew.
There is no suggestion that Zampolli was involved in any wrongdoing involving Epstein and there are no claims made against him. Melania’s statement made clear that she had no close ties to Epstein.
She said there had been “numerous” fake images and statements that had circulated for years on social media. These were completely false, she said.
Photograph by Rossa W. Cole/Sygma via Getty Images