A California woman is suing the estate of French model scout Jean-Luc Brunel, claiming the late buddy of Jeffrey Epstein falsely imprisoned her, tried drugging her, and sexually assaulted her.
The complaint—filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court and first reported by Rolling Stone—alleges Brunel and his staff approached the woman when she was an 18-year-old model in New York. The suit does not, however, mention Epstein or indicate whether the agency that approached her was Brunel’s Epstein-funded MC2 Model Management.
According to the lawsuit, Brunel and his employees drove the woman to Canada “where she stayed at a home” she was told Brunel owned.
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“She could not leave and there were numerous attempts of offensive touching, sexually [sic] assaults including groping,” the legal filing adds, “as the men tried unsuccessfully to arouse her by providing her with drugs in which she did not ingest.”
“After a few days of being falsely imprisoned at the home, she woke and realized that Jean and his employees were getting into their cars leaving,” the complaint says.
The woman, now 40 and identified under the pseudonym “Jessica Kramer,” then fled through a window and “hitched a ride back to New York,” the suit alleges.
Based on Kramer’s age, the alleged episode would have occurred around 2002, when Brunel still helmed Paris-based Karin Models.
Three years later, Brunel would launch MC2 Model Management with $1 million from Epstein, according to testimony from his former bookkeeper.
In addition to Brunel, Kramer’s lawsuit names defendants Does 1 through 50, who are unknown associates or employees of his but “legally responsible in some manner for the allegations.”
She is suing them and Brunel’s estate for negligence, sexual assault, sexual battery, sexual harassment, gender violence, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and negligent infliction of emotional distress.
Brunel, a frequent flyer on Epstein’s plane and visitor to his mansions around the world, was accused of recruiting young foreign models for the sex-trafficker to abuse. Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Epstein, also accused Brunel of abuse herself.
“Brunel would offer the girls ‘modeling’ jobs,” Giuffre said in a 2015 affidavit. “A lot of the girls came from poor countries or poor backgrounds, and he lured them in with a promise of making good money.” Brunel, she added, joined Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell for orgies with teens at Epstein’s homes in the U.S. Virgin Islands and elsewhere.
“Jeffrey Epstein has told me that he has slept with over 1,000 of Brunel’s girls, and everything that I have seen confirms this claim,” Giuffre stated.
Brunel denied Giuffre’s claims that year: “I strongly deny having committed any illicit act or any wrongdoing in the course of my work as a scouter or model agencies manager. I have exercised with the utmost ethical standard for almost 40 years.”
But in December 2020, more than a year after Epstein’s death in a federal lockup, French authorities charged Brunel with raping young girls.
The 76-year-old model agent—who discovered Milla Jovovich, Christy Turlington, and Sharon Stone—met a similar end to his friend Epstein, who killed himself in jail; in February 2022, he was found hanged in his Paris jail cell before he could face trial. “It sounds so suspicious,” one victim of Brunel’s, Thysia Huisman told The Daily Beast. “I don’t believe it, that he killed himself. It’s like what happened to Epstein. It’s too convenient.”
Brunel had long faced accusations of misconduct. In 1988, American models told 60 Minutes that the Frenchman drugged them, and one accused him of rape.
