The Devil Wears a lot more than Prada writes former model Laurie Marsden. There are too many devils running around wearing luxury goods, many hiding in plain sight.
As film fans and fashionistas enthusiastically anticipate another movie with Miranda Priestly pitted against Andrea Sachs, I sit quietly and ponder an industry I know all too well and how the devils in it do in fact wear designer clothes.
Rife with power plays and one-upmanship, posturing, posing, and pay for play rules, the fashion business has long ago evolved past simple dressmaking and style setting. Instead, it’s morphed into a hierarchical global machine focusing on icon creation, luxury overload, and it seems for many years, collaborating with wealthy men like Jeffrey Epstein.
After 20 years in the business and six years now exposing it, I see clearly a system that seeks to control and often corrupt the innocent, how young models, many naïve teenagers, are put in positions where they have no power, little money, with all opportunities controlled by cruel editors like Miranda, agents who then introduce them to men who have nothing or little to do with fashion, and photographers who want more than to point their camera at them.
I observed many exploitative practices in my tenure as a model: arranged dinners with playboys in Milan, French photographers who want to shoot you naked or who will only book you if you sleep with them, agents demanding sex for exciting career making jobs in exotic locations. I wrote all about it in my memoir Men and Me Too. The meticulous years-long research for the book made me confront the assaults and demeaning behaviour I experienced regularly as the glamorous myth I had held onto fell like scales from my eyes. I thought I had come to terms with the industry’s underbelly.
But the newer revelations in the Epstein files shocked me, that Epstein, whose crimes disturb those with any sense of decency, had tentacles sunk into the biggest players in fashion. And those people introduced him to girls who fell into his dark orbit. Some like Jean Luc Brunel started as legitimate agents in Europe. He ran Karin Models when I went to Paris to do the collections with them in 1988, and later that year he was exposed as a sexual abuser on 60 Minutes by Diane Sawyer. However, that didn’t stop him; instead, he moved to the US and ultimately engaged in what can only be described as human trafficking with his new pal Jeffrey. Like Epstein, he was also found hung in a jail cell.
The Epstein files also show other first-tier agents held friendships and made introductions, sending their models to meet Epstein. I feel like I am in an (un)lucky dozen draw, because like Jean Luc Brunel, they also represented me. Faith Kates secured my bookings when she ran Wilhelmina Model’s women’s division before she opened Next Model Management. The files show she had a personal friendship with Epstein and models report being sent to him. Katie Ford is also exposed by Epstein survivor Lisa Phillips as being a tight friend and introducer between Epstein and models in her care. Although Eileen and Gerry held the reins when I was with Ford Models for 7 years, Katie and I went to San Paolo in 1990 to open the Ford’s satellite agency in Brazil.
As if those revelations were not enough, enter the most famous “model of the moment”, Melania Trump. Her press statement distancing herself from Epstein and then the social media posts from ex-model Amanda Ungaro gripped news watchers a couple of weekends ago as people struggled to understand the what, why and why now? Ungaro says she was detained and deported by ICE after a custody battle with her de-facto husband, Trump loyalist and former model agency owner Paolo Zampolli. Paolo reportedly brought many Eastern European girls into the US with modelling contracts and Einstein visas who were introduced to wealthy men, like Melania was to Donald Trump in 1998 at the Kit Kat Club in New York City
For those not in fashion or who only watch movies about it, modeling can be a legitimate career. Models do sell clothing, cosmetics, hair products, and lifestyles, presented with all the glitz depicted in a movie like the Devil Wears Prada (1 or 2). But they do have to navigate all the pitfalls, and it is a personal business where a model can often feel like a commodity, selling their personality, their attitude, their style as well as the product itself. But it appears many in the fashion industry took the idea of “selling a girl” in a very dark direction.
So, what are we to do?
Model Alliance, a non-profit advocacy organization in New York sent a letter on March 25th 2026 asking the Southern District of New York to investigate the industry and its players, and the request was also sent to Congressmen Ro Kahnna and Thomas Massie.
The week before, Victorious Angels, a group of model survivors asked the French government’s special Epstein team to investigate agent Gerald Marie during his reign with Paris Planning and Elite Model Management Europe. I have signed both letters.
With survivors coming out against industry players for decades, the Epstein file release now exposing fashion’s connections to a global cabal of elites, and Melania and Amanda engaging in a press conference and a Twitter exposé a couple weeks ago, where does all this leave fashion? I’d say firmly in the “please investigate” handbag.
There are too many devils running around wearing luxury goods, many hiding in plain sight.