Melania and Donald Trump’s closest friend for over three decades, and Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships, is facing what he claims are multiple criminal complaints against him. This is one.
Jeffrey Epstein wrote that about Paolo Zampolli on February 15, 2011, in an email the Justice Department released under the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Fifteen years later, a woman named Victoria Drake put the line in a federal complaint and, beneath it, described what she says the trouble looked like.
Drake filed the suit on the night of September 3 in the Southern District of New York. It runs eleven pages, names one defendant, and asks a jury to find that Zampolli — Donald Trump’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships, the man who by his own account introduced Trump to Melania Knauss in 1998 — drugged and raped her in the basement of his townhouse at 119 East 17th Street on October 7, 2023. Judge Ronnie Abrams has the case. Summons went out September 4. Zampolli has not yet answered.
Narativ has spent most of this year on Zampolli. On June 12, Amanda Ungaro — his partner of two decades and the mother of his son — sat with me live, in her first interview since ICE took her into custody last June, held her for months, and put her on a plane. Four days later we published “Melania’s Shadow,” tracing what Ungaro’s documents showed: a Russian-cultivated network run for years out of the United Nations. On July 11, “The Spy at the First Lady’s Side” laid out the rest — the modeling agencies, the 2004 auction bid for Elite alongside Epstein, the 2013 nonprofit with Ghislaine Maxwell, the ambassador-rank title from Trump with no Senate vote and no security clearance behind it.
Sixteen days after that piece ran, Melania Trump’s lawyer sent me a letter. It demanded that Ungaro and I “immediately retract the false, malicious, and defamatory statements” and compensate the First Lady for “overwhelming financial and reputational harm.” I read it on air on July 27 and declined. No suit has been filed. What arrived instead, five weeks later, was Drake’s.
Her lawyers, Jesse Weinstein and Max Bracero of Arcé Law Group, have now put our pattern into a court filing, under penalty of Rule 11, with Bates numbers. A plaintiff’s complaint is one side of a story. But this one cites the government’s own Epstein documents by page — EFTA00173834, where a correspondent calls Zampolli “sleazy”; EFTA02618736, a list the filing describes as purported “killers” with his name on it; EFTA01836539, the “trouble” email — and it names Ungaro’s deportation, in paragraph 3, as an act of a presidential appointee using his office against the mother of his child. Nobody has sworn to that in a federal pleading before.
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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
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