Weak Link in the Epstein Coverup

A Deportee from the Demimonde

As the Epstein files revealed the scale of Epstein’s Eastern European trafficking operation, I sometimes wondered whether the vulnerable Trump is not Donald but the former Melania Knavs of Slovenia.

Last week’s “statement” from the First Lady would seem to confirm that guess.

For months, the resistance has been burning the midnight oil studying emails and FBI memos in the files for THE silver bullet: a woman who can somehow verifiably prove that Trump raped her when she was underage.

Hope springs eternal that such a find could bring him down, despite the fact that since 2016 more than two dozen adult women - including some who were teens at the time - have openly and sometimes in court accused Trump of sex harassment, abuse and assault. One of them even won a $5 million judgement for the abuse, and when he continued to lie about E. Jean Carroll, a jury charged him another $80 million.

From the minute he was first elected, mere weeks after the “grab em by the pussy “ hot mic , we knew or should have known that Trump’s predatory behavior with women was not a political liability.

But there is a chink in the coverup dike. It’s always been there, repaired and shored up with SLAPP suits, actual lawsuits, threats of lawsuit and other forms of menace. Jeffrey Epstein even joked about it in an email with Michael Wolff.

It’s what Epstein called “the Melania story.”

Melania, unlike Don, is not Teflon. She is and always has been deeply vulnerable. An introvert, clearly uncomfortable speaking English, a beauty raised in Cold War Slavic peasantry, she entered America via one of the sleaziest operators in Trumpworld. Her arrival coincided with a period of time when Russian mobsters and American dirtballs including Coney Island thug Jeffrey Epstein, were commodifying young Slavic women for the New York and world market.

Earlier this week, her office issued a cryptic notice that the First Lady would be making a “statement”. At the appointed time, mystified reporters gathered in the White House and the world watched her deliver a six minute speech singling out unnamed people “telling lies” about her and her supposedly non-existent relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

The statement put Epstein back in the news. The focus of Melania’s slit-eyed rage soon became clear: a former pal in the 2000s Manhattan modeling demimonde named Amanda Ungaro. Brazilian born, willowy beauty Amanda was brought to the US from Brazil at the age of 17 by the odious late pedo Jean Luc Brunel, trafficked, abused and eventually hooked up with a Brunel, Epstein and Trump associate named Paolo Zampolli (whose eye she had caught when she was just a 15 year old in Brazil.)

Zampolli, heir to an Italian toy fortune, longtime holder of diplomatic immunity via a gig he got as UN Ambassador for the Caribbean island of Dominica, ran his own model agency, ID Models. For years he and Ungaro lived together in a Chelsea townhouse, where I interviewed him in 2018 for my book about Trump and his women. Fun fact: I noticed his houseman had a record involving money laundering.

The couple had a child together before splitting up a few years ago. Ungaro says a child custody battle ended with Zampolli - now Trump’s current “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” - siccing an ICE agent on her, and having her deported to Brazil. Zampolli has said he only called the ICE agent because he was “curious.”

Ungaro recently sat for an interview with Spanish newspaper El Pais, and that interview will be released Sunday morning (will update with link). It isn’t clear yet whether El Pais contacted the First Lady’s office or whether Melania was responding to Ungaro’s Tweets claiming Melania knew about the deportation and did nothing to help her - despite a long relationship that included Amanda’s friendship with Melania’s family. (After Melania’s “statement,” Ungaro went on a Tweet rampage. Xitter deleted them all. See some below.)

What would someone like Ungaro know that could provoke the wife of the Leader of the Free world to hold a press conference? Ungaro is breaking the omertà around Melania’s life story, a story that includes a lacuna between her late teens and mid-twenties. As I discovered reporting on her in Slovenia, people who knew about her and her father’s legal problems were personally threatened into silence. Washington Post reporter Mary Jordan wrote in her 2020 biography of Melania that she had an easier time writing about royals and drug cartel kingpins than the president’s soigné third wife.

With that intensely guarded biography it was always going to be a risky thing to trot her out as a political wife. In their early years together Trump would say she was Austrian and she let that stand uncorrected. Later the campaign would claim she spoke five languages. Yet French and Italians who worked with her in the fashion world never heard her speak either, and she certainly never deployed any of it on her official trips to Europe with the President.

She reportedly cried on election night in 2016. Her discomfort was increasingly palpable. She disappeared from view for long periods. But she showed up when it counted, gracing rally stages, stunning lumpen crowds in swing states with her balayage, stilletos and posture.

Her official duties included:

One: Brand enhancement. Bellowing from rally platforms “where’s my supermodel!”

Two: Impress the manosphere: Trump has worn “hot compliant wife (™) since Melania was just his girlfriend, heavy- breathing supposedly from bed into the phone on live Howard Stern broadcasts

Three: Con the rubes. Trump’s “faith leaders” even got white nationalist Christians to label Melania a “Proverbs 31 wife” - that is, a woman who posed in S and M gear and nude on a fake Air Force One is actually a bread-baking, baby-popping role model for women and girls.

That was her entire portfolio until quite recently, when suddenly the White House tried out a new role: Serious Melania (™).

Serious Melania (tm) emerged earlier this year to preside over the UN Security Council, reading a clearly AI-generated word salad of a script about children and peace while America bombed a school and Israel bombed hospitals, medics and civilians in Iran and Lebanon.

Serious Melania (™) then hosted a “Fostering the Future summit” on AI and education at the White House, reading another AI-scripted word salad about children and learning but this time before “representatives of 45 nations” and a robot.

A senior advisor warned that Serious Melania (™) plans “serious” implications for those who defy her version of history - including “a team of lawyers.” It’s worth noting that Trump, litigator in chief, has yet to file a threatened billion dollar lawsuit against Michael Wolff, for allegedly conspiring with Epstein to ruin him politically, including a reference to “the Melania story” coming out and driving him “over the edge.”.

Serious Melania (tm) concluded her “statement” with a cynical bit of tradesmanship, advocating that Epstein survivors be allowed to testify in Congress. The survivors replied in a letter that asking them to testify was shifting the burden of accountability onto them instead of where it rightly belongs - the U.S. Justice Department.

There are three million MORE documents in the Epstein files. There is evidence of crimes all over the already released documents but no indictments or investigations ahead. Trump’s acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has announced that there will be no more releases.

Among the currently available Epstein files is a chummy email exchange between Epstein’s madam Ghislaine Maxwell and Melania in which Maxwell called Melania “sweet pea.”

What could it possibly mean? Serious Melania (™) took no questions.

NOTE: We will be interviewing Amanda Ungaro for Courier’s Coverup soon. .Watch this space for more.