October 31, 2001. The famous model Karen Mulder comes as a guest to a program on the France 2 television channel called Tout le Monde en Parle (Everyone is talking about this). During the interview, she relates that she has been raped continuously since she was two years old until the previous month of April. She claims that both she and other models have suffered systematic sexual exploitation by her agency - the prestigious Elite - and extends her accusations to all kinds of personalities in French society, politicians, policemen, businessmen, including Prince Albert of Monaco, with whom he had related in the past, and whom he accuses of having raped her.
She claims that they have forced her to use drugs, that executives hypnotized her to abuse her and that they coerced her to have sex in exchange for getting better contracts. "After five minutes I realized I was sick," the presenter, Thierry Ardisson, told the Libération newspaper . "I stopped the interview and we decided not to broadcast it, even if it means being accused of censorship. It would have been super exclusive. Perhaps there were some true things in his testimony, but it was obvious that he was not in his normal state. When he left, he said, "You are also part of the plot."
"I stopped the interview and we decided not to broadcast it, even if it means being accused of censorship. It would have been super exclusive. Perhaps there were some true things in his testimony, but it was obvious that he was not in his normal state. When he left, he said to me: 'You are also part of the plot ”
Thierry Ardisson, presenter of Tout le Monde in Parle
Karen was not there by chance, nor was the subject of abuse raised by surprise. The aim of the program was to debate a controversial BBC documentary shot two years ago denouncing the sexual exploitation suffered by very young models, many teenagers, by prominent figures from the Elite agency. Mulder was a strong testimonial who knew first-hand the fashion world in general and Elite's performance in particular for a condition that very few people on earth could boast of: having been a supermodel.
Born in the Netherlands on June 1, 1970, as a teenager Karen was a finalist in the prestigious Elite Model Look beauty pageant. He signed for the agency and started working for them with great success: before turning 18 he was already parading for the biggest brands in the industry, from Versace to Yves Saint Laurent. Nicknamed "the blonde with class," she starred on the covers of different international Vogue or Elle headlines and achieved two milestones that made the difference between top-notch models and those in the crowd: appearing in the number of Sports Illustrated swimsuits and parading as one. of Victoria's secret angels.
The height of his career had coincided with a very specific moment that marked the appearance of the phenomenon of supermodels. In the early 1990s, the fashion industry became fashionable, never better said; The previous almost anonymous mannequins had risen to become global celebrities, famous at the level of actors or singers, and with them, their lifestyle, identified as luxurious, glamorous and fun, had become an object of desire for thousands of people all over the planet. Karen had been part of the most exclusive group of the most sought after, requested and highest paid along with Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Stephanie Seymour or Claudia Schiffer. He decided to voluntarily stop parading on catwalks in 1997 and surprisingly, he left the profession entirely in 2000.
During that time, the shadows of a profession in which large amounts of money were gathered with very young women, often minors, who made a living from their physical appearance, had set off some alarms, and the BBC documentary that it was being debated that night on French television was proof of this. Filmed in 1999, the documentary stated unequivocally that teen models were sexually exploited by Elite executives. Two company workers were fired, but after several lawsuits by the agency for defamation, the network had to admit that it could have misrepresented the statements of some of the recorded businessmen and that they had pressured one of them to obtain the type of material that they were looking for.
Between denials, cross-accusations, and discussions of suspicious investigative journalism on a morbid topic in and of itself, there was undoubtedly much to discuss with Karen Mulder at Tout le Monde in Parle , but the result exceeded expectations. In addition to never emitting the fragment in which the old model launched its powerful accusations, the tape was destroyed. However, the program was recorded with a live audience, and although they were instructed to remain silent about what they had witnessed, rumors soon began to circulate on the Internet and emails reached the newsrooms explaining what had happened.
“All those who betrayed me were people I loved very much. Then I realized how far the conspiracy went. People from the government and the police were involved, who used Elite girls ”
Karen Mulder, in an interview given three days after the show's never-released recording
Three days after the aborted conversation, a journalist managed to interview Mulder again. She repeated to him everything she had said on the show, starting with the fact that a person in her family environment had sexually abused her when she was two years old, and that in her family there were several pedophiles who used her as a sex slave. She claimed that shortly after arriving in Paris two photographers had raped her and after her complaint, they were fired, and she repeated her arguments against Elite giving all kinds of rugged details. Media like Paris Match declined to buy the interview, but VSD magazine accepted and the model's words came to light the first week of January 2002. This was how the scandal became massive.
During the talk with the journalist, Mulder gave names of both the relatives and the executives whom he accused, but the magazine did not reproduce them to avoid any type of legal conflict, although according to some the photographs that illustrated the report left little room for speculations. There were shocking phrases, but at the same time everything was so extreme that some readers understood that these were obvious delusions of someone with a mental illness. “All those who betrayed me were people I loved very much. Then I realized how far the conspiracy went. People from the government and the police were involved, who used Elite girls, "said Karen Mulder, in addition to mentioning that they had used" hypnotic tricks "and" sprinkler systems "against her.
"They have tried to kidnap me and poison me," he said at one point. "All the people that my family frequented were pedophiles," he denounced in another. “Now I realize that there is a whole plot around me, it is huge. These are people in the government and in the police who use girls from modeling agencies, even the best known ... I was a toy that everyone wanted to have. ” Claiming that everything was a conspiracy against him sounded like a paranoid person's argument, something that seemed to be confirmed because hours after interviewing the journalist, Mulder was admitted to a psychiatric hospital at the request of his sister Saskia, also an Elite model, with the parental permission.
When the VSD issue came to light, all of this had been made public and the "Karen Mulder case" had broken out. Many criticized the magazine, accusing it of taking advantage of a person's fragile state of mind to sell more copies with outrageous nonsense. The VSD director claimed that Mulder was conscious and sane and knew very well what he was saying. Around this diatribe would develop the entire subsequent controversy: was Karen Mulder unbalanced by everything that had happened to her or was she simply unbalanced and had invented everything?
Not all were testimonies on television or magazines. The model also went to the French police antiproxenetism brigade, where she made a formal statement repeating the same thing she had told the media. But the judicial investigation did not reach any conclusion. The case of Karen Mulder, with the possible implications of shady goings-on in the fashion industry that she may have, was tarnished to become yet another character free fall that collapses in stages before the eyes of the public.
To begin with, she was admitted and sedated for five months at the Montsouris hospital. In a surprising turn of events, the center's bills were paid by Gerald Marie, ex-husband of Linda Evangelista, and also the former Elite president who had been featured in the BBC report for offering money to a 15-year-old model in exchange for sex. Some media pointed out that he was one of the men Karen had accused of rape. Mulder's father said the blame for everything was due to his daughter's cocaine use and the pressure he had experienced in his professional life.
The video clip for 'I am what I am', a disco song that Karen Mulder released shortly after the scandal.
When she left the psychiatric hospital, Karen retracted all of the above –except for the abuse suffered as a child– and recovered the musical career that she had started in 97, when she retired from the catwalks, bringing up the song I am what I am . Its success as a summer song was medium, and the promotion again included a visit to the Tout le Monde set in Parle in which only what happened less than a year ago was mentioned in passing. In December 2002, the story took an even more tragic turn: Mulder was found in a coma in her Paris apartment after ingesting an overdose of barbiturates. It was his ex-partner, Jean-Yves Le Fur, who raised the alarm. He had risen to fame in the early 1990s as the first formal boyfriend of Princess Stephanie of Monaco until it was published that he was a "scoundrel and an uneducated hunter" who had been in prison for fraud.
The following model years remained almost anonymous. He had a daughter, Anna, whose paternity was never revealed to the public and occasionally returned to the catwalks, but the next time he made headlines again was for another sad reason: assaulting his plastic surgeon in 2009. Since then , has been photographed in Saint Tropez or Saint Barth, in images that were sold with the "unrecognizable Karen Mulder" hook, although taking into account the time that has passed since her years as a supermodel and her fresh overall appearance, the assertion would be debatable that so much has changed.
What happened almost twenty years ago is barely remembered, and if it is mentioned, it is as an example of emotional collapse or mental disorder associated with the always demanding and conflicting fashion world. But the truth is that in his perhaps disjointed and easily ridiculous speech there were a few uncomfortable truths. The exploitation that some characters in the industry systematically exerted on young and often inexperienced women had always been denounced decades before the #MeToo movement. In 1988, in the American Girls in Paris segment of the American program 60 Minutes , several mannequins, some of them minors, denounced having been drugged and raped by businessmen such as Claude Haddad and Jean-Luc Brunel, at the head of prestigious agencies.
There was also the everlasting accusation of being coerced into having sex with rich and older men in exchange for working with more prestigious brands. And, without going into the processful issue of model abuse in general (see what happened with the BBC documentary), the more specific sections of her speech fully agreed with those of other women who had been in the same situation. The young Swedish woman Ebba Karlsson testified that Gerald Marie had abused her during a casting in Paris, and the also famous model Carré Otis claimed in her biography that when she was 17 years old she had been raped by Marie himself, then fiancé of Linda Evangelista.
It can be argued that all this is not accusations investigated and proven by justice, but testimonies of something criminal that happened years ago, but if something has happened in recent years thanks to cases like that of Harvey Weinstein or Jeffrey Epstein, it is that the dynamics of The profoundly unequal power that exists in certain settings causes victims of abuse to be completely unprotected. The very act of reporting was conflicting because they had much more to lose if they spoke than if they were silent. It is difficult to discern what was reliable in Karen Mulder's statements and what was the result of a serious anxiety crisis, but the suspicion that what was labeled as delusions of an unbalanced one hid something much more sinister and perverse remains today with more force never.
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