New York journalist Michael Wolff has five years' worth of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, up until shortly before his death, in his possession. He is now releasing his bombshells with the regularity of a metronome. This week’s drop: he was quoted in a now retracted Daily Beast story saying that Epstein took credit for introducing Melania and Donald.

If true, the official story of their meetup is false. If not, it’s interesting that Number One litigation terrorist Trump has not gone after Wolff, whose unflagging courage in reporting on the President’s past and present sets him in a league of his own. Yesterday, when the Daily Beast asked the White House for comment on Wolff’s reporting, all they got was the predictably surly Steven Cheung insult-laden ad hominem denial. The Beast took the story down, after Melania’s attorney sent a letter “challenging the headline and framing of the article.”

I spent a good deal of time researching Melania for my book on the Trump family women, The Trump Women: Part of the Deal. Anyone who has tried to learn what Melania Knauss was up to in the years between leaving Slovenia around 1990 and washing up in New York City a few years before she says she met Trump in 1998, finds a lacuna, a blank slate on which there is almost no record. Mary Jordan, a Washington Post reporter and author who wrote a 2019 Melania biography, noted in her preface that she had an easier time reporting on national security spooks than on Melania.

I made some headway: I interviewed denizens of the New York fashion world who suggested, at the very least, that she was never a “supermodel.” I went to Slovenia, found a few sources who talked, and much fear, including in a powerful businessman who told me he was backing out of talking to me about Melania’s father’s legal problems after he was visited in his office by thuggish men in business suits.

In my reporting on Melania, I never ran across an Epstein connection. But it was 2018, and he wasn’t on my radar. I did discover a discrepancy in the official story of how Trump and Melania met. Melania says she met Trump in 1998 at a Victoria's Secret party. But fashion photographer, Jarl Alé de Basseville (who shot her in the nude scenes for a French men’s magazine that the New York Post published during the 2016 campaign) told me he and his team recalled her telling them in 1996 – two years before the official story – that Trump was her boyfriend.

Melania, of course, denies this.

The truth is that Melania was an Eastern European beauty who came of age in a formerly Iron Curtained-off country, Tito’s Yugoslavia. Like her predecessor, Ivana Trump, she grew up looking longingly over at the luxuries of the West, from plentiful Coca-Cola and Swiss chocolate to Italian jeans to Mercedes cars. As soon as the Berlin Wall fell, two things happened to women like her: one, they saw an escape hatch in commodifying their beauty, and two, they were ripe for exploitation by men like Epstein, whose business model involved trafficking Eastern European women – and girls.

One person who talked to me at length about this – and about Melania – was the man who claims to have brought Melania to New York: Paolo Zampolli, a jolly Italian businessman and sometimes model agent. Zampolli’s Milanese family had become wealthy making toys, including the Italian version of the Easy-Bake Oven (marketed in Italy as Dolce Forno). At the time I met him, he was a U.N. ambassador representing the Caribbean island of Dominica and a welcome guest at Trump’s first White House.

Here’s the story he told me, as I wrote in my book:

In the 1990s, beauties from the former Soviet Union were flooding the New York market. Books and articles have been written about this era and the rampant exploitation of these women.
Zampolli told me that there were so many gorgeous photogenic women looking for work that the value fell and pretty soon they were doing other things, things that maybe weren’t supposed to be captured on camera. He doesn’t deny this was true—although he has never included Melania in this category.
“At the time, once a month, I would have some guy calling me, putting pressure on me, saying his girlfriend should’ve been a model. And most of them, they were from Eastern European countries, because they had a visa problem. And you know, the girls would be beautiful. But they’re not model material, you understand. It’s a very different thing, is to be model material, or to be a girl you take out, or do other things. Okay. And in the nineties, New York was overflowing with these—those things—you might say. But this is not what happened in model agencies. Because in model agencies, we wanted to make money left and right.”
To accommodate the influx and see whether he could make money off it, Zampolli opened a division for the nonprofessionals.
“They’re not models, they can get little jobs, but they have to understand, they’re not models, they’re not fashion models.”
His People division was roughly equivalent to what other agencies called a Showroom division—basically lower-tier models who were contracted to designer showrooms. But Zampolli girls were also sometimes employed by what he called “party promoters”— tall, glamorous human decorations.
“But these are not models. They are beautiful girls with a stunning body that fits the clothes and their face is okay, but nobody gives a shit about the face because you just need somebody to wear the clothes.” He called them “clothes hangers.”
Sometimes he would send a dozen of his showroom girls to an “event,” Paolo recalled. That didn’t mean he expected them to stay out all night, he said. He chalked those incidents up to the “party promoters.” Zampolli described the party promoters as like Uber drivers with second jobs stocking nightclubs with lissome babes. “Remember this was before Uber. I had drivers driving them around in SUVs.”

Zampolli now holds a Trump appointment as “special envoy to Italy.” Melania is America’s mostly absent First Lady. And Jeffrey Epstein’s ghost haunts them all, but chained in a vault of 100,000 pages of FBI files that, we now know, a thousand agents were detailed to flag for mentions of Trump. We don’t know what’s in them, and the not knowing threatens to crack the MAGA coalition.

One thing is certain: Epstein was a capo in the global community of men who profited off the commodification and exploitation of Eastern European women. Much reporting exists indicating he was one of the most prolific movers of women out of Eastern Europe through New York. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that, through his involvement with that community, Epstein met Melania Knauss before she met Donald.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.