Juliette, former French model, tells how she escaped Jeffrey Epstein
A 43-year-old Frenchwoman recounts her encounter with Epstein more than twenty years ago. The Paris prosecutor's office has now identified approximately ten new alleged victims.
"I think he sensed that I wasn't going to be pushed around"
According to RFI, Juliette, 43, a former French model, met Jeffrey Epstein more than twenty years ago — and managed to escape him. Her testimony is part of a wave of accounts that have multiplied since the publication, four months ago, of the Epstein files by American justice authorities.
On 17 May, prosecutor Laure Beccuau stated on RTL that approximately ten new alleged victims had come forward to the Paris prosecutor's office. Two investigations have been opened in France since February: one concerning sexual violence, the other covering the financial aspect. Epstein, a convicted sex offender, lived in Paris for many years before dying in prison in 2019.
A recruiter in the street, a ticket to New York
In 2004, between auditions in Paris, Juliette was approached in the street by a man named Daniel Siad, who offered her work opportunities in New York. She was nearing the end of her modelling career at the time and consulted her agency, which assured her that Siad was "someone recognised and reliable". She accepted. She would learn much later that this man is suspected by the FBI of having served as a "scout" of young women for Epstein.
She received an aeroplane ticket to New York, with instructions to apply for a tourist visa. No information about the agency to visit, no schedule was communicated to her. "I proceeded on the assumption that I was in a professional process, so if information wasn't being given to me, it was certainly because there was no need to ask questions," she explains.
The first meeting: passport confiscated
Juliette met Jeffrey Epstein briefly for the first time, but he did not have time to see her, took her passport and scheduled a meeting for the next day. In the meantime, her mother, very suspicious, called her and urged her to recover her passport and leave, mentioning a possible human trafficking network. Juliette says she had no choice: no situation had yet given her concrete reason to flee.
From this period, she has kept almost everything: her portfolio, her email exchanges, her address book where the contacts of Epstein and Daniel Siad are noted by hand.
The apartment visit and alarm signals
The next day, Epstein received her and showed her around the premises. In a gym room, she noticed that close-up photographs of women's intimate parts covered some of the walls. "I looked at that with great curiosity, thinking to myself, what is this fascination with women's intimate parts. I found it a bit inappropriate, and it started to set off alarm bells," she recounts.
Epstein then led her down a corridor lined with bedrooms, entered one of them, sat on the bed and gestured for her to come over. Juliette stopped at the entrance and told him: "I'm warning you, I won't do anything." "It was a bedroom, not a professional setting," she clarifies.
Underwear, remarks about the body, then the escape
Epstein reassured her, invoking partner agencies. He asked her to remove her clothing down to her underwear — a common practice in the industry — and then to remove her bra, which was much less so. He walked around her, examined her, touched her hips and buttocks, and told her she was not yet "ready", implying that she needed to lose weight. He offered her access to gym facilities in his network and, to earn money "while waiting to be ready", jobs as a hostess in a private airline company or as an escort at evening events.
It was at this point that Juliette realised she had to leave. She made the connection with stories she had heard in the modelling world about men who abused their position to exploit young women. She got dressed, told Epstein she would think about it, and demanded to recover her passport. "I think he sensed that I wasn't going to be pushed around, or that I had understood how he operated," she analyses.
Blacklist and years of silence
Juliette spent a few days in New York and attended other auditions. She quickly realised that Epstein had put her on a blacklist with all the agencies in the city. For years, she avoided talking about this episode. "I was ashamed. Ashamed, on the one hand, if it was a modelling opportunity, at having left, and on the other hand, if it was a paedophile-criminal network, ashamed at having believed it could be something else," she confides.
It was only in 2019, upon hearing Epstein's name on the radio when he was imprisoned, that she says she was in a state of "shock" — and began to piece together what had really happened twenty years earlier.
Source: RFI