By Nancy Ing and Isobel van Hagen - NBC News
PARIS.- A modeling agent who is suspected of organizing the "accommodation of young girls or young women in the name of Jeffrey Epstein" is now charged with the rape of minors, a French prosecutor announced this Saturday.
Jean Luc Brunel
was arrested on Wednesday, as part of the open investigation into the Epstein case, when he was trying to board a flight to Senegal at Charles de Gaulle airport.
The Paris prosecutor Remy Heitz said he was later formally charged with
sexual harassment and sexual abuse of persons under 15 years of age.
Brunel, who was still in preventive detention this Saturday, “is suspected of committing acts of rape, sexual harassment and sexual harassment against several underage victims or those of legal age, and especially of having organized the transport and accommodation of young girls or women. young people on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein, ”according to Heitz.
[A "cool" guy who enjoys "younger" girls. This is how Trump described Epstein]
So far he has not been charged with human trafficking, which is why the investigation against him arose, as a magistrate determined that there is still not enough evidence for that charge.
This was the role of Ghislaine Maxwell in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse and child trafficking network
July 3, 202001: 44
However, Brunel has been given the status of a “serious human trafficking witness”.
That means he can be questioned by three investigative judges and that crime could be added to the list of charges if new information emerges from the interviews.
An attorney for Brunel did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
[Jeffrey Epstein's former workers tell the true story of the so-called 'island of pedophilia']
Several women have spoken to police as victims since
French authorities opened the investigation in August 2019, the same month that Epstein was found dead in prison.
Brunel had tried to separate himself from Epstien in the past;
in a 2015 lawsuit, he said that the American accused of child sex trafficking had generated "negative publicity" that had damaged his reputation in the world of modeling.
Brunel's arrest comes more than a year after France began to investigate allegations of sexual abuse around Epstein and his accomplices on French soil.
Virginia Roberts Giuffre, one of the women who has publicly denounced Epstein and his ex-girlfriend and partner Ghislaine Maxwell (currently in prison), said she was also sexually abused by Brunel.
A building owned by Jeffrey Epstein in Paris in an August 2019 image, when French authorities opened their investigation against the man accused of sex trafficking of minors in the United States.
In a 2016 affidavit released recently, Giuffre said Epstein and Maxwell had tasked him with providing "services" to Brunel.
When Giuffre spoke to NBC News, sister network of Noticias Telemundo, for the
Dateline
program
in September, the woman indicated that
Epstein had once boasted of having slept "with more than a thousand women that Brunel brought
.
"
Epstein died in August 2019 of a suicide in his cell in New York, while a trial against him on sex trafficking charges was pending.
Maxwell was arrested in July and remains behind bars pending her trial.
Nancy Ing reported from Paris and Isobel van Hagen wrote from London