France detains modelling agent in Jeffrey Epstein inquiry | World news | The Guardian

• Jean-Luc Brunel taken into custody on suspicion of crimes including rape and trafficking of minors
• French police are questioning the boss of a modelling agency suspected of supplying underage girls to the late American financier Jeffrey Epstein.
• The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed that that Brunel was detained on 16 December as part of an investigation into “rapes, sexual assaults, the rape and sexual assault of a minor aged 15, the rape and sexual assault of a minor over 15 years, sexual harassment, association with criminals and the trafficking and exploitation of minors”.
• Prosecutors said the arrest was part of an investigation opened on 23 August 2019 by the Paris prosecutor’s office centred on possible “events of a sexual nature thought to have been committed by Jeffrey Epstein and other accomplices”. Brunel was a close friend of Epstein, 66, who was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in August last year while awaiting trail on sex-trafficking charges. The justice department said his death was “apparent suicide”.
• Brunel and Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of the late press baron Robert Maxwell, and Epstein’s former girlfriend, are alleged to have helped the billionaire financier procure underage girls. Maxwell is in a New York jail awaiting trial next July on sex-trafficking charges, which she denies.
• He had met Maxwell in the 1980s and she introduced him to Epstein.
• In 2015, Virginia Giuffre, an American campaigner for justice for victims of sex trafficking who founded the NGO Victims Refuse Silence, accused Brunel of supplying girls to Epstein, claiming the latter had bragged to her that he had slept with more than 1,000 “of Brunel’s girls”.