They stood together next to Donald Trump, posing for the camera in front of a giant Christmas Tree at Mar-a-Lago, their hands almost touching.
Melania Trump, 55, and Amanda Ungaro, 41, came to the United States from Slovenia and Brazil, respectively, in search of a better life.
For a while, Ungaro and her then-boyfriend, businessman Paolo Zampolli, were close to Trump and Melania, regularly dining with them at the president’s Palm Beach resort.
Moving in similar jet-set circles meant they both met Jeffrey Epstein and some of his coterie.
But their American dream has taken them in very different directions in recent years.
From posing with the first couple and dining with them at Mar-a-Lago in Trump’s first administration, Ungaro claims she was deported back to Brazil by the president’s ICE agents last year.
Meanwhile, Melania has kept a relatively low profile since her return to the White House.
Or at least she did until Thursday, when she made her surprise announcement lambasting the “lies” she claimed were being spread about her alleged relationship with Epstein and reports she had flown on his plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”
The conduit connecting the two women, both mothers of one son, is Zampolli—Ungaro’s estranged partner and a friend of Trump’s who serves as the administration’s special envoy for global partnerships, a position that appears to have been created specifically for him.
Milan-born Zampolli, 56, has known Trump since the mid-1990s when he moved to New York, and he claims to be the person who introduced Melania to the future president.
In 2016, The New York Times reported that Zampolli secured Melania’s U.S. visa after meeting her at a Milan casting call and introduced her to Trump at a 1998 party he threw at the Kit Kat Club in New York.
“I said: ‘Melania meet Donald, Donald meet Melania,’ and then I left the table because I had 300 guests,” Zampolli told the Daily Beast.
The former model agency boss said he also flew with Trump to attend his Mar-a-Lago wedding to Melania in 2005.
On Thursday, Melania emphatically denied reports that Epstein first introduced her to Trump or that she had ever been on the “Lolita Express.”
Ungaro claimed that she was a regular guest of the Trumps after his first election win.
“When Trump won in 2016, Paolo acted like he had been elected, too,” Ungaro told Brazil’s O Globo publication. “We were suddenly invited everywhere. At New Year’s parties at Mar-a-Lago, we and one other couple were the only ones at the table with Trump and Melania,” she added.
Zampolli’s Instagram account included a post that read, “I am honored to have been a friend of the President for more than 30 years, a friend of the First Lady for 29 years.” It adds, “Loyalty is king.”
At one point, Ungaro was herself appointed to a ceremonial role as an ambassador of Grenada to the United Nations through Zampolli’s connections to the White House.
After splitting from Zampolli after 19 years, during which they had a son together, Ungaro married a Brazilian physician and was living in Aventura, Florida, when she was arrested in June 2025 on fraud-related charges and ultimately deported for overstaying her visa.
At the time, she was involved in a custody dispute with Zampolli over their teenage son.
According to The New York Times, Zampolli asked the administration for a favor, requesting that she be placed in ICE detention to help him win custody of his son.
In an interview with the Times, Zampolli denied asking for ICE to intervene, calling the allegations “absurd.” The Department of Homeland Security also refuted any claims that Ungaro was deported for political reasons.
Zampolli’s name appears a number of times in the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice. He reportedly discussed buying a modeling agency with the disgraced financier, who killed himself in 2019, aged 66.
Ungaro told O Globo that she had been asked to testify before the House Oversight Committee investigating the Epstein case, although she has not been subpoenaed.
The former model also said that she had flown on Epstein’s plane as a 17-year-old at a time when she was represented by Jean-Luc Brunel, the French owner of a modeling firm and an associate of Epstein who recruited young girls for the late child predator.
Like Epstein, Brunel killed himself in his jail cell while awaiting trial.
Ungaro remembered the other girls being much younger than even she was.
“There were around 30 girls on the plane. I found it very strange. They looked more like students than models—very young, beautiful, but not with a model’s profile,” she told the Brazilian news site.
The Daily Beast has contacted Ungaro and the White House for comment.
