Former French model agent Jean-Luc Brunel, close to American billionaire Jeffrey Epstein, who died on August 10, 2019, has been indicted again in an investigation in Paris for rape and sexual assault, a judicial source informed on Wednesday. September 15, confirming information from Parisian. This indictment for “rape of a minor over 15” dates from the end of June.
“Our client has always firmly stated that he has never abused any woman”, reacted to Agence France-Presse his lawyers, Mr.es Marianne Abgrall and Mathias Chichportich. “This accusation which arises almost twenty years later and without the slightest proof is a new illustration of the media-judicial lynching suffered by Jean-Luc Brunel since the suicide of Jeffrey Epstein”, they denounced.
This new indictment follows the hearing of a model who accuses her of raping her in the late 1990s when she was 17 years old, according to The Parisian.
The septuagenarian, suspected of having played the role of tout for Mr. Epstein and accused of rape by several former top models, had already been indicted in December 2020 for “rape of a minor over 15 years old” and “harassment sexual ”.
Also placed under the intermediary status of assisted witness for the facts of “Trafficking in human beings aggravated to the detriment of underage victims for the purpose of sexual exploitation”, he was incarcerated.
An imprescriptibility request
The former modeling agent, whose name is mentioned in an investigation in the United States into the sex scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein, found dead in his cell in August 2019, was arrested at Charles-de-Gaulle airport while ‘he was about to take a flight to Dakar.
Billionaire financier, Mr. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 in the United States and then imprisoned pending trial for having organized, between 2002 and 2005, a network of young girls he allegedly sexually exploited.
The Paris prosecutor’s office, alerted to the potential existence of French minors among the victims of Mr. Epstein, opened a preliminary investigation in August 2019. A complaint was filed two months later against Mr. Brunel for acts of “harassment” sexual ”which were not prescribed, contrary to several charges against him.
Former models, accusing fashion figures of the 1980s and 1990s of having raped them, demanded the imprescriptibility of sex crimes against minors, during a Senate conference held on Tuesday. Among them, the Dutch Thysia Huisman, who claims to have been “Drugged and raped” by Jean-Luc Brunel in 1991.
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