Ruslana Korshunova, a Kazakh-Russian supermodel who rose at fifteen through IMG and had flown on Epstein’s jet, plunged from a New York high-rise in 2008, ruled a suicide despite a diary describing entrapment and manipulation.
IMG:
IMG Models was founded as a division of the International Management Group (IMG) by Mark McCormack in 1987. The agency has since become a leading modeling agency, representing a diverse range of talent globally. Wikipedia
Victims of 2008 sub prime mortgage crash, plus other notorious crashes, will be interested in this research put together by Zev Shalev. He has produced a carefully researched timeline of events around Epstein et al plus New York and international locations which hosted their corrupt money theft activities:
Here is a snippet:
Meanwhile, Ben-Menashe revealed the staggering scale of the slush funds Maxwell controlled. To fund Iran-Contra, Israel and the United States each contributed $600 million in off-the-books money—$1.2 billion in secret funds that Americans would never be able to trace. When Maxwell died in 1991, control of these funds passed to his network, including his daughter Ghislaine and her partner Jeffrey Epstein. Did Epstein inherit the CIA’s $600 Million?
See Zev Shalev Substack.
Remember John Paulson?
The Man Who Turned $147 Million Into $15 Billion by Betting Against the American Dream?
It is interesting that in recent days John Paulson’s name has been connected to Epstein. Did he become known to Epstein before or after he became a billionaire?
Major NYU donor and Stern board member John Paulson was named “one of the billionaires” in Jeffrey Epstein’s contact list last week by Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who is spearheading a bill to release all files related to the convicted sex offender.
Paulson’s name was also publicly listed in the first “black book,” published by former blog site Gawker in 2015 and containing 1,748 other names dating back to 2004. Being listed in the books does not directly indicate criminal activity.
“If John Paulson is in Epstein’s black book, it’s news to him. He never shared a meal or even a drink with Epstein,” a spokesperson for Paulson’s investment firm Paulson & Co. told Newsweek in a statement. “This is a weak attempt to imply a relationship with Epstein that never existed at any level or of any kind.”
The billionaire hedge fund manager graduated from NYU’s Stern School of Business in 1978 and has been one of the university’s most prominent donors since 2009. As of 2023, Paulson gifted at least $146,000,200 to NYU — with more than a decade of yearly donations ranging from $100,000 to $20,200,200. The $1.2 billion John A. Paulson Center opened in 2023 with funds from Paulson’s $100 million gift to the university in 2012 — “among the largest NYU has ever received at its Washington Square Campus.”
An NYU spokesperson did not respond to request for comment.
Contact Amanda Chen at achen@nyunews.com.
Watching shorts:
Carson Block’s Muddy Waters is now Wall Street’s best known activist short seller, having taken down a number of high-profile frauds. Block began his short selling career by focusing on Chinese companies with a listing in the US and Canada, with his hedge fund’s name derived from a Chinese proverb: “muddy waters make it easy to catch fish”. His big break came in 2011 when he released a scathing report alleging fraud at Chinese forest plantation company Sino-Forest, which later collapsed into bankruptcy. The report caused about $460mn in losses for funds managed by US billionaire John Paulson and established Block as a short to watch on Wall Street
And a summary of the beneficiaries of the 2008 crash:
The main beneficiaries of the 2008 financial crisis included large financial institutions that received government bailouts, such as banks and insurance companies, which were propped up by programs like the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Additionally, some banking executives with political connections made significant gains during this period due to insider knowledge related to the bailouts. Wikipedia imperial.ac.uk
Update from Zev Shalev Dec 2025:
Zev revealed new details from The Greatest Heist showing how Epstein triggered the 2008 financial crisis. Using 57 million dollars from Leslie Wexner’s Financial Trust Company, Epstein invested heavily in Bear Stearns mortgage-backed securities in 2006. In 2007, Epstein demanded full redemption. That 57 million represented a billion dollars of value, Zev explained, he knew that as he was telling them to redeem, he’d be starting the collapse of the American economy. Within weeks the funds collapsed, then Bear Stearns fell, triggering the broader market collapse. The timing placed the economic crisis at the doorstep of the incoming Obama administration.
The images of wealth and the benefits flowing to Jeffrey Epstein:
In 1991, Les Wexner began building his New Albany home:
The Wexner mansion is located in New Albany, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio, and it is spread over 336 acres of land. The mansion is located in the middle of the estate, surrounded by lush greenery, private lakes, and exquisite gardens. Leslie Wexner bought the land for $3 million in 1990, and construction of the mansion was completed in 1991. The mansion has been the residence of Leslie Wexner and his family ever since.
COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Documents unsealed Tuesday from cases tied to Jeffrey Epstein, who died while facing federal sex trafficking charges, have named Ohio’s richest person as one of those involved with his victims.
The documents from the 17th Judicial Circuit Court of Florida, tied to a Jan. 16, 2016, deposition of Virginia Roberts Giuffre, show quotes where she directly names L Brands creator Leslie Wexner as one of the “powerful business executives” she was sexually trafficked to.
1995:
Donald Trump fed his daughter into the model world machine when she was just 14:
Ivanka’s modeling career started at the age of 14.
Trump and the Elite Modeling Scandal: How Power Seduced and Silenced Teenage Dreams
The untold story of Trump’s presence among predators exploiting underage girls at the world’s biggest modeling contest — and the culture that enabled it.
Two yacht parties in September 1991 and 1992 became defining moments of discomfort and coercion. Shawna Lee, age 14 in 1992, was pressured to descend stairs and “dance” before Trump and Casablancas despite her objections, The Guardian reported. Another 15-year-old contestant said she was warned that refusing would jeopardize her standing in the competition. Witnesses described underage drinking and inappropriate touching during these events. Trump denies any knowledge of or participation in such behavior and stated he was unaware of misconduct by others.
Note the founder of Elite Models had a fondness for underage girls:
Elite Model Management was founded in 1972 by John Casablancas and Alain Kittler in Paris, France. Casablancas is particularly noted for his role in creating the supermodel phenomenon. Wikipedia WWD
divorced in 1983,[13] as he was having a public relationship with Look of the Year contest finalist Stephanie Seymour, 16 years old at the time. Casablancas was frank about his preference for girls of barely legal age.[14]
In 1993,[15] the 50-year-old Casablancas married his third wife, 17-year-old Aline Mendonça de Carvalho Wermelinger, winner of Elite Model Look 1992 in Brazil. Wermelinger was close in age to Casablancas’s children, who were 22 and 14 at the time. The couple had three children: John Jr., Fernando Augusto, and Nina.[1][16]
A resident of Miami, Florida, Casablancas died on July 20, 2013, in Rio de Janeiro, where he had been receiving treatment for cancer. He was 70 years old.[1]
Donald Trump bought Mar-a-Lago in 1985:
Mar-a-Lago was placed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1972 and was designated a national historic landmark in 1980. Upon Post’s death in 1973, it was bequeathed to the federal government with the intention that it would be used as a presidential and diplomatic retreat. In 1983 it was conferred back to the Post Foundation because of its high maintenance costs.
Real estate mogul Donald Trump purchased the property in 1985 and used it as a private residence until 1995, when it opened to the public as the Mar-a-Lago Club. Amenities offered to the club’s guests and members include a full-size croquet lawn, a beach club, a spa and fitness center, and a 20,000-square-foot ballroom with imitation Louis XIV gold and crystal finish, completed in 2005. Nearby in West Palm Beach is tshe Trump International Golf Club, which has hosted professional golf tournaments.
When did Epstein buy the property and what did the house look like?
The front exterior of the Palm Beach home of late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as it appeared shortly before demolition of the property … Show more
DAMON HIGGINS/PALM BEACH DAILY NEWS
The residence had stood since 1952 on three-quarters of an acre facing 170 feet on the Intracoastal Waterway at the end of a quiet dead-end street in Palm Beach’s Estate Section. With a total of 14,223 square feet, the compound included the main house, a cabana building by the swimming pool and a separate building used by household staff.
With Bermuda-style architecture, the house had been designed originally by society architect John L. Volk but had been extensively remodeled. The house had a white-stucco exterior, a gray roof, simple balcony railings and an exterior spiral staircase leading to and from the pool deck.
Epstein had paid $2.5 million in 1990 for the house, which at the time carried the address of 358 El Brillo Way. In 2011, he transferred its ownership from his name to an entity named Laurel Inc., a company registered in the U.S. Virgin Islands
1990s and 2000s: Background of Trump and Epstein’s connection
Epstein and Trump reportedly met in 1990 when Epstein bought a mansion 2 miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club and estate.
Over the next decade or so, the two would party and socialize together between Florida and New York, where they also at one point lived within miles of each other.
Trump famously called Epstein a “terrific guy” for a 2002 article in New York magazine.
“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump told the magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Jeffrey Epstein was one of the only people I knew, back when Donald Trump was still, at best, a novelty candidate, to believe that Trump would become president. He was also, from the first, terrified of this outcome. Both views came from the same place: he understood that Trump was uniquely ruthless, with a preternatural, or as he put it “sociopathic,” focus on getting what he wanted.
They had spent more than ten years side-by-side in pursuit of fashion models (age of little consequence), in a post-playboy climate of permissibility, and access to capital, as markets and opportunities were geometrically expanding. At some point these two quests became, for both men, finely intertwined—money, power, permission, entitlement. But by the time Trump was running for president in 2015, their friendship had broken up with great enmity and promises from each man that they would be the agent of the personal destruction of the other. Epstein believed that if Trump became the president of the United States, he would not be safe from his former friend.
Michael Wolff, Substack, 13th Nov 2025
The Modeling agency That Helped Build Trump’s Empire. He Secretly Closed It Down In 2017 So He Could Run For President
According to a report in the Miami Herald, Epstein associate Jean Luc Brunel’s model agency sent a busload of paid models, some underage, to a Mar-a-Lago party, at which former model Zoe Brock says she was given a spiked drink.
Shortly after publishing her Weinstein article on Medium in October 2017, Brock wrote another article detailing her sexual harassment in 1992 at the hands of her French modelling agent [11]Jean-Luc Brunel. Brunel is accused of sex-trafficking underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein and of exploiting, raping and drugging young models since he was first exposed by a CBS 60 Minutes episode that aired in 1988.
Multiple women and[12] some men have come forward to try to help French and US police locate Brunel.
Who brought the internationally trafficked girls to New York? The answer has been on the Internet for many years:
He didn’t start as a mogul.
He started as a teenage scout.
At nineteen, in Milan, Zampolli was already studying the equation that shaped the rest of his life:
beauty + poverty + powerful men = leverage.
He wasn’t running an agency — he was learning how the game works.
By the mid-1990s, in his late twenties and living in the U.S. on a student visa, Zampolli launched ID Model Management. The structure was exactly what you’d expect from someone trained in the Casablancas–Brunel ecosystem:
The real machine came in New York.
See:
Annotated Source List (for publication)
1. Vanity Fair (2001)
Profile of Zampolli confirming ID Model Management launched mid-1990s and describing its operations and culture.
2. Associated Press investigation (2016)
Confirmed Melania Trump performed paid modeling work while on a tourist visa that did not permit employment.
3. PBS NewsHour (2016)
Detailed timeline of Melania’s visa status and work history.
4. CBS News interview (2016)
Former modeling agent confirmed Zampolli’s involvement in Melania’s visa pathway.
5. Trump White House Archives (Dec. 22, 2020)
Official release naming Paolo Zampolli to the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center.
6. Kennedy Center “Board of Trustees” official page
Public listing confirming Zampolli’s position.
7. Paolo Zampolli biography pages (multiple)
Confirming his roles as Director of International Development for the Trump Organization and Special Envoy for Global Partnerships.
8. Industry testimonies, lawsuits, and public reporting (1990s–2010s)
Documenting the model-import visa pipeline used by Elite, MC2, Brunel, and Zampolli.
‘We brought a saw’: FBI found diamonds, cash, passports, CDs and hard drives after cracking open safe in 2019 raid on Epstein’s Upper East Side townhouse
Dozens of CDs and hard drives found in 2019 FBI raid on Epstein’s 19,000sqft Manhattan townhouse, Bevan Hurley writes
Wednesday 08 December 2021 14:37 GMT
A safe found in Jeffrey Epstein’s 5th floor dressing room contained large amount of cash, diamonds, foreign passports and CDs and hard drives (US District Attorney’s Office)
…………Ghislaine…….
On Monday, FBI special agent Kelly Maguire testified in Ms Maxwell’s trial at the Manhattan federal court
She led the team that searched the 40-room, 19,000 square foot property at 9 East 71st Street on 6 and 7 July 2019 and walked the jury through what the photos depicted.
Yet, in the same article:
Ms Maguire, from the child exploitation and human trafficking task force, said they arrived at Epstein’s property at around 5.30pm on 6 July after obtaining a search warrant for the property, and forced their way into the building when no one had answered the door bell.
After conducting a sweep to ensure no one was home, they methodically searched the 40 rooms, finding CDs and hard drives stashed in plastic bins and draws throughout the home.
She said they found the safe in a closet in a fifth floor dressing room and pulled it into the middle of the room.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
borderslynn 
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