MODELING’S MISCREANTS FACE THE MUSIC

“The music pounds, the champagne flows,” went the opening lines of my 1995 book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. “There is brimstone in the air along with Poison, Obsession and Vendetta. It is the smell of a factory that feeds on young girls.” In the century since the fashion modeling industry was invented by a failed actor named John Robert Powers, it has shrugged off scandal with supermodel-caliber suavity. But in the six years since agent Jean-Luc Brunel’s name was first associated with that of pedo-perv Jeffrey Epstein, the fashionably-connected money manager with a heavy jones for young female flesh, it’s become more difficult for the industry to ignore the smoke and flames.

Brunel went into hiding in 2019 and was arrested by French authorities in December 2020, at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, while trying to board a flight to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The next fall, he was indicted for raping a 17-year-old model, a charge he denied; then, in the early hours of February 19^th, the 75-year-old was reported to have hung himself in the prison outside Paris where he was being held pending trial.  Questions swirl, as they did over Epstein’s “suicide,” and may never be answered.

Meantime, in August 2021, Carré Otis, now Carré Sutton, who’d made headlines in 1994 when she was stalked during New York Fashion Week by her estranged husband, the actor Mickey Rourke, grabbed the spotlight again. She sued Gerald Marie, another notorious French model agent, and the longtime head of the Paris office of Elite Models, alleging he’d repeatedly raped her when she was 17 years old, and trafficked her “to other wealthy men around Europe.” More than a dozen other models promptly came forward with similar allegations of their own in a criminal investigation against Marie in Paris. He’d been regularly accused of being a sexual predator, first in the pages of Model, then in a 2000 BBC documentary.  But Marie has steadfastly denied the charges and has not been arrested; he is reportedly still living the good life on the Spanish island of Ibiza, where Elite’s elite all had homes. Yet, even his ex-wife, Linda Evangelista, has reportedly spoken out in support of her fellow models, saying, “I believe they are telling the truth.”

Evangelista was standing beside Marie at a Vogue party in Paris in the 1990s when he threatened my life for writing about the couple. “Paris is my town and if you ever write another word about me or wife, you will never take another step here,” he spat at me, shoving a warning finger in my face.  Yet, not long afterward, he consented to an interview for Model, as did Brunel, and their role model, Elite founder John Casablancas, who successfully danced away from charges of sex with underage girls for decades before his 2013 death.  None of them was willing to admit, in 1994, when they sat for those interviews, that they’d ever done much wrong. Indeed, they smirked with pride over the notches on their belts, as long as specifics like the age of their conquests were left vague.

Lately, it’s me who’s been interviewed, by innumerable journalists and filmed for about a half-dozen documentaries about these men and others. And Sony Pictures Television and Neil Meron, who produced Hairspray, Chicago, Footloose, and most recently, Annie Live! on NBC are developing a limited series based on Model.  This time, it seems, the bad boys of modeling won’t be dancing away from their deeds quite so easily.  For now, meet the men, one dead, one still very much alive, behind the latest scandal, in these excerpts adapted from Model.

Jean-Luc Brunel

Jean-Luc Brunel grew up among the haute bourgeoisie in Paris, started his career in public relations, specializing in restaurants and tourism, and got into fashion by arranging location trips for magazines. He married a Swedish model, Helen Högberg, who was with John Casablancas’ first modeling agency, Élysées 3, and organized dinners where celebrities like Johnny Halliday and Omar Sharif met models. Högberg later joined Paris Planning, where Brunel did P.R., but when Gérald Marie arrived, Brunel gave an ultimatum to its owner: “He said, ‘It’s Gérald or me.’”

Jean-Luc and Helen moved to Ibiza, where he opened a bar and restaurant called El Mono Desnudo—The Naked Monkey—with a few partners. “He had no money or at least not enough to support his tastes,” said someone who knew him there. “If not for Helen, he would have starved.” But  Ibiza was a refuge of decadent chic. Young British lords and ladies with heroin habits mixed with dethroned royals and Paris models, and they all went to El Mono Desnudo. There were lots of women. “He had them all,” said Brunel’s friend.

Gaby Wagner, the model, was Högberg’s friend. “I knew he was taking coke,” she said. “I knew he was cheating on Helen. I traveled with her to Ibiza, and I went out with the crew at night, and I saw all these girls sitting on his lap.” But then Brunel ran afoul of some powerful people who gave him twenty-four hours to get off the island. “Whatever it was that he did, it was real bad,” the friend said. Borrowing money from one of his partner’s parents, Jean-Luc ran.

Divorced, he was looking for something to do in 1979, when another of his ex-wife’s friends, Karin Mossberg, asked him to work for her Karins model agency. She needed a man around because male competitors “were cleaning Karins out completely,” Brunel said. “Karin called me up and said, ‘As you’re going out a lot, and you know everybody, can you come and help in the agency?’” He said he agreed to give it six months and buy half the agency if things worked out. Two years later he owned the place and many modeling folk say that after he took over, he started sharing his models with his friends. Where Gérald Marie operated “for himself,” said Jacques Silberstein, Brunel already “operated for other people.”

“Jean-Luc is considered a danger,” said Jérôme Bonnouvrier. “Owning Karins was a dream for a playboy. His problem is that he knows exactly what girls in trouble are looking for. He’s always been on the edge of the system. John Casablancas gets girls the healthy way. Girls would be with him if he was the butcher. They’re with Jean-Luc because he’s the boss. Jean-Luc likes drugs and silent rape. It excites him.”

“I really despise Jean-Luc as a human being for the way he’s cheapened the business,” said John Casablancas. “There is no justice. This is a guy who should be behind bars. He was the guy flying all the girls from Karins for the weekend to St.-Tropez. They were very well known in Paris for roaming the clubs. They would invite girls and put drugs in their drinks. Everybody knew that they were creeps.”

Despite his bad behavior, Brunel led a charmed life. It couldn’t have been otherwise with the American modeling queen Eileen Ford as his guardian angel. “Eileen took Jean-Luc as her son,” said Jacques Silberstein. “She let him become very powerful.” Some saw a flirtation between them. “Jean-Luc made her feel girlish and desirable,” a model school owner said.

“Not with my girls” was the motto of most agents who sent models to Europe in the days when that meant dropping them like raw meat into a tank of piranhas. Brunel seemed to honor that pact with Ford. “I love Jean-Luc. I think Jean-Luc’s great,” Christy Turlington said in 1994. “I stayed at his apartment all the time, and never once did I ever see anything wrong, never once did he treat me wrong.”

Finally, though, people began warning Eileen Ford that her Paris partner was up to no good. Bonnouvrier told Ford how Brunel was thrown out of a modeling convention in Las Vegas after a drug party in his room. “She started screaming, ‘You’re jealous, he’s successful!’” Bonnouvrier recalled. “I said, ‘I’m not sure jealous describes my feeling. I’m talking about drugs.’ She refused the evidence. She said, ‘He makes me laugh.’”

A 60 Minutes investigation wiped the smile off her face. John Casablancas told reporter Craig Pyes he was covering “a conspiracy of silence, greed, and fear,” and then declined to go on camera. But Eileen Ford agreed to an interview that turned into a sneak attack.

Pyes had found models who called Brunel’s parties a “meat market … for the purpose of somebody wanting to take you home to bed.” Brunel was “the matchmaker … he’s got the girls.” And if a girl said no, she got no work. “I was personally proposed to … by Jean-Luc,” one said. “I laughed in his face, and I had no more appointments and I never worked.” Another model said Jean-Luc had given her cocaine and taken it himself. “He’d always give me a little vial of cocaine,” she said. “He did that with all the girls.” Finally, an fourth model said Brunel gave her a drink at his house that made her pass out. She awoke the next morning in his bed, positive she had been raped.

  “American Models in Paris” aired in December 1988. Within months Ford cut off its relationship with Karins. But Brunel survived and remained a power in modeling, a partner in Next, an agency in New York and the owner of Karins, where he received me in an office he shared with a woman who’d been made his partner after the 60 Minutes broadcast.

Brunel was, as advertised, a charmer, small, with hollow, Gallic features, a broken nose, long, wavy brown hair, and a slightly dangerous air, softened by a blue cashmere sweater and a pair of tortoise-framed glasses. “I’m no saint,” he said by way of introduction. “But I never messed with the girls of the agency, and not one girl left me.”

He readily allowed for another difference: that he had a problem with cocaine for half a decade. “I admit it,” he said. “So, big deal! I never did it in the day. I was not mixing it; it never happened in the agency. I did it as an experiment. Fine, it lasted maybe a bit longer than it should. I started to do it for a few years, and then I stopped it; it was ruining my life.”

Brunel said he’dlived the night life in Paris since he was a teenager and admitted that models have passed through his bed. “You get laid tonight with a model, is that a crime?” he asked. “I don’t understand why people go into your personal life, what you do yourself, and to yourself, and they don’t look at things that are really important!” What’s important? Brunel said that teenage girls shouldn’t be allowed to go to Paris by themselves to model. “I’m against it, it’s crazy, it’s nuts,” he said. “I don’t like having girls who are fifteen, sixteen. The only thing they give you is trouble. You just have to mother them; you just have to look that they’re fine. When that image of big supermodels started, it gave hope. But it doesn’t work that way. And what happened was a lot of agencies took too many people that weren’t the right people. There were so many girls with nothing to do.”

Brunel had heard all the stories told about him and brought them up to deny them. “You’re going to hear I bring girls to St.-Tropez,” he said. “I never took girls to parties, to dinner, never, never.” But he admitted to inviting girls to dinners with his friends. “If I have a dinner, I don’t pay any attention,” he said. “I’ve dined with many girls from my agency, and then it becomes like twelve, twenty people, but the girls they can go whenever they want, nobody’s going to bug them.”

Karins was “a business,” he went on. “Otherwise, it would not last this long. Then, you have my life. My life is not a story as long as I don’t take young girls to serve either my own, or … I mean, I don’t need those doors to open,” he said, referring to the sorts of men who would invite him places because he might bring models along. “I know tons and tons and tons, and I don’t want to see them,” he said. “I don’t want to be invited for a girl. How many times have I been invited on a boat and this and that; I never said yes, never, never, never.”

Brunel married model Roberta Chirko the day before 60 Minutes aired. Though the timing was curious, they’d been together for two years, he said. Others added that she was so in love with him she’d stop girls on the street and recruit them for Karins. Nonetheless, people talked. “Jean-Luc married Roberta right after 60 Minutes to clean up his image,” said an American model who worked in Paris. But he hadn’t cleaned up his act, she adds. “He’d call her from other girls’ beds and say, ‘I’m so lonely.’”  And the night after our interview, I ran into him in a nightclub, where his marked agitation, and a friend with a bad case of sniffles made me wonder. Later, Eileen Ford would tell me that 60 Minutes was “the end” of Brunel for her.

 

GERALD MARIE

In the wake of the rise of Elite agency founder John Casablancas, a new breed of agent rushed into the model trade. The most successful by far was Gérald Marie. At least, that’s what he calls himself now. In the beginning he used an aristocratic name, Gérald Marie de Castellac. “I didn’t want to work under my name at the time,” he (sort of) explained. “I didn’t know what was possible, and at the time everybody was working under a different name. Maybe I was stupid or crazy enough to say I was going to work and invent myself another personality, another system. I didn’t have anything in common with myself, so I worked with that a little bit and I dropped it.”

Though some people who have worked with him believe he was an orphan, Marie has said he is the son of a hospital administrator. He apparently grew up near Marseilles and entered show business as a go-go dancer on local television, or at least that’s what he told one of his many model lovers who marveled at his bedroom acrobatics. Marie said that as a student he promoted ballroom dance concerts. “It worked quite well, and through that I started to meet a lot of girls because they followed the bands, and some of them happened to be models,” he said. He fell in with an older woman, and she offered him a modeling agency. They called it Modeling. “She proposed to me that I work with her,” Marie said. “I didn’t know a thing, frankly. But I knew how to look at a girl, how to talk to her. I think [the head of Paris Planning, a competing model agency in Paris] heard about me. He was in the middle of a kind of war with John Casablancas, and he proposed that I work with him.”

That competitor didn’t like what was happening in modeling. “The work was different, more aggressive and much more money-looking,” he said. Casablancas also slept with the girls. “giving new services,” another competitor, the late Jérôme Bonnouvrier, smirked.

A street fighter by temperament, Marie learned to charm but didn’t make it a habit. His new boss “was too much of a gentleman for the concert that was playing at the time,” he said.  Rough around the edges, Marie was a road show John Casablancas and soon earned the nickname Chevalier de Longue Queue, or Knight of the Long Tail, a not-so-subtle reference to his sexual prowess. “He was the stud,” said photographer Jacques Silberstein.

By all accounts, Marie changed his women as often as the sheets on his bed. Said Bonnouvrier, “He’s funny, but he’s a pimp who fucks the girls.” He didn’t deny it.  “I’m not an angel,” Marie said. “But I’m very picky about the women I date, and I don’t work by quantity. We are men in the business of women. We love women, and I think we’re just acting normally. The woman at a model agency is using another kind of charm, playing mommy, sister, confidante.”

For what? “Money,” Marie said.

Those were different times. Models who met Marie then saw nothing particularly sinister or sexist about him. “He was the cock of the court,” said model Gaby Wagner, “Of course, he wanted to screw me.” He would tell new models that they would get editorial work if they slept with him. “I’d just go, ‘Fuck you,’” Wagner said.

Another model said, “he was like a kid in a candy store, awed at finding himself in the position to sleep with all these girls.” He struck her as “somebody you could fuck for work,” she said. “It was the only time I ever compromised myself, but it didn’t seem so serious. I liked him.” Their interlude lasted a few weeks. “I never loved him, and he never loved me. And funny thing, I don’t think he got me any work.”

“He was an episode in everybody’s life,” said another of Marie’s model lovers with a tolerant sigh. “His persistence amused me. He is relentless to the point of being humorous and I had nothing better to do for the day. There’s a hundred thousand guys like that in Paris. They’re nurturing, madly in love, and then they’re out of your life as fast as they got into it. A brief encounter of the most odd kind.”

Two years later, Marie’s agency had surpassed Elite in profitability, and Casablancas’ business partner secretly offered Marie an equity stake in Elite and in 1986, he became a one-third partner and director. “John was furious,” said an Elite employee of that era. “He said, ‘He’s a sleaze. He beats up girls. He rapes them. He takes coke.’”

Casablancas had long been a proponent of the theory that models were raw stones that needed to be having sex to become glittering diamonds. “European men are important abrasives in the finishing process; they tend to be male chauvinists,” he’d said. “That attitude … gives the model an awareness of her femininity, which is an indispensable quality.” Originally, that service was provided by the playboys who surrounded the agents. By the time Marie joined Elite, the sexual polishing process was more often conducted in-house. “He’s a good lay, I’m sure of that,” said his former boss “I’ve heard it from all of them.”

Marie said his first serious romance was with the Australian-born model named Lisa Rutledge. They lived together for five years and had a daughter, but domestic life did not domesticate him. “Gérald wanted to fuck the girls,” said Jacques Silberstein. “His way was, if you want to work, fuck me.” Just before he made the move to Elite, Rutledge was out of Marie’s life—out of Paris altogether, in fact—and Christine Bolster, a California blonde, was in.  “Christine Bolster was fifteen,” said a a female modeling agent. “Gérald Marie was really a very bad man. Fifteen!”

In fact, she was only fourteen when she came to Paris, began sleeping with her agent, and ended up living with him for six years, before another model, Linda Evangelista, did to her what she’d done to Lisa Rutledge. “I stick pins into a voodoo doll of him,” Bolster told me, launching into the tale of what can hardly be called their romance.  “I was fourteen and a half when I started modeling.” She was in Paris within days of being discovered in California. “At first I shared an apartment with two other models…Then suddenly I found myself moving into an apartment that Gérald Marie paid for. It all started about two weeks after I got there. You kind of get a feeling when someone’s interested and you’re interested. So, I was waiting for him to ask me to dinner, but I went into his office one day after work, and he just jumped on me. There was no way that he was going to get turned down. It was like I had no choice!

“I knew what I was getting myself into. I wasn’t like the naïve girl from Podunk that came in and got drugged at a party and sold to the Arabs! I had my reasons, you know? I knew that ultimately I was not going to be with this guy. But I didn’t know how powerful he was, and so it was a little more serious and involved than I ever expected it to be. But I walked into it because he was an agent, because he could get me what I wanted. At first it was a mistress kind of a thing because he was still living with Lisa [Rutledge] when I met him. It was very sudden. It was like, a decision he made, and then she was just gone. He sent her home.”

Marie made her a star. “He was like God; he gave birth to me. He decided that I was going to be ‘big shit.’ That’s what he used to call me. Big shit. And he did it. “Suddenly there I was in the middle of it all! At a very wild time, too. Everybody was doing drugs. … He used to do coke in his office, on his desk, with the windows open, right on the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré. He’d do it on the table in La Coupole; he didn’t care. He was untouchable as far as he was concerned.

Their relationship and careers flourished for two years, “then it got very cold,” Bolster continued. “We didn’t really have sex all that often or really wild sex. He was always too tired from running around. And he did so much blow. I think that drugs had a lot to do with it, and the fact that he had as much power as he did. He was overwhelmed by it. He took advantage of it, and he really became sinister.”

Marie fell in with a new group of friends an “started not coming home at night, Boslter said.  “They were so promiscuous it got to the point that our freezer was full of shots, the stuff you take when you’ve got VD—a box of this in our freezer! I, amazingly enough, didn’t get anything because I think he gave himself his own shots! I’d walk in, and they’d be bending over the kitchen table with their pants down, and Gérald would jam them, and they would pay him for these shots! Every now and then something like that would happen that would make me sick to my stomach.

“We ended up with separate bedrooms because he was seeing other people and I’m not stupid. I would find my clothes walking around Paris. I approached him saying, ‘How come so-and-so has my Azzedine dress on? I know that’s my dress because it’s missing!’ I spent at least a year and a half trying to catch him because he was so sneaky. He tried to make me feel stupid. He would say, ‘But I spent the night in jail,’ or some ridiculous story.” He gave her the nickname casse-couille, which means ball breaker.

Just after Marie started seeing Linda Evangelista, Bolster started to work more in America.  “I was going to start going back and forth between Paris and New York. I’d moved most of my stuff there. I came back to get the rest of my stuff. They didn’t know I was back in Paris. I got in the apartment. Gérald was at work. Linda walked in, with a key. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, Just the person I want to see.  “I said, ‘So, what’s going on? And she said, ‘Well, I guess it’s obvious, isn’t it?’ I was so angry. I said, ‘I want you to get out until I get the rest of my stuff packed up.’ It was pissing rain, and she said, ‘But I don’t want to go wait in the rain.’ She was just beside herself. She’s very whiny. I can’t stand her.”

On his return to their apartment , Marie “was threatening. “He said no one would ever believe that I left him. The world would think that he left me. He said, ‘You will never get away with this! In New York you’d better take care, and don’t walk past too many dark alleys.’ I sort of died when I left Paris. I lost all desire to create, and New York didn’t help any, because it was the nine-to-five grind, and it was so cold, and my apartment there was the dingiest place. The truth is, I was so depressed that I just couldn’t get up in the morning. Everything that I enjoyed, anything to do with modeling made me think about him, and I just wanted to forget about him. Modeling was my life for six and a half years, twenty-four hours a day, and I loved every second of it. I have to thank Gérald for that, but that’s why I dislike him so much, because he took that away from me. I have a completely different life now.

“I’m just amazed I survived!”

The publication of Model changed nothing. Both Marie and Brunel remained in the modeling trade, the latter eventually in a quiet partnership with Jeffrey Epstein.  Their days of reckoning were still decades away. Now that Brunel has met his end, perhaps Gerald Marie has also begun to wonder how much longer he can survive.

Adapted from Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful Women. Copyright © 1995 by Idee Fixe Ltd. All rights reserved.  Courtesy of HarperCollins.