Even though the American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein died years ago, the fallout from his scandal keeps spreading through elite circles in Europe and the US.
Daniel Siad, a 69-year-old model scout, was found dead at his home near Paris this Monday. At the time of his death, he was under investigation in France for rape and human trafficking charges. Prosecutors launched a probe into the cause of death that night and will perform an autopsy.
Specifically, he was accused of helping Epstein find and bring in young Swedish women over a decade. His activities reportedly spanned Sweden, Poland, Slovakia, and Hungary.
It’s said Epstein paid Siad tens of thousands of dollars, with some funds coming from Epstein’s accomplice, another French model agent named Jean-Luc Brunel.
But Siad insisted he was innocent, claiming the American sex offender had taken advantage of his trust. In an interview, Siad said he once truly believed Epstein was a casting director for Victoria’s Secret and the modeling agency MC2.
MC2 was founded by Brunel, with offices in Tel Aviv, New York, and Miami. Its core business covers model scouting, career development, and booking models for fashion shows, ad shoots, and magazine spreads.
According to the French prosecutor’s office, Siad’s name appeared in over 1,000 documents released by the U.S. Justice Department in January this year after the Epstein files were unsealed.
In a 2014 letter to Epstein, he compared recruiting models to fishing, saying sometimes you catch one quickly, and other times you come up empty. “I’ve got two Swedes, one Slovak, two French, and a Russian on my hands,” he wrote. Epstein replied, “I’ll reimburse you for all expenses.”
So far, 24 women have come forward to testify or have been identified. But the prosecutor’s office says they still don’t have enough evidence to arrest Siad.
Brunel was arrested at Paris airport in December 2020 and found dead in his cell two years later, with officials initially ruling it a suicide by hanging. His death closely mirrored Epstein’s own 2019 hanging in a Manhattan jail.
Epstein died suddenly in a New York prison in August 2019. Since then, questions about whether he was murdered and who his big clients were have been at the center of attention. Some big names tied to the Epstein case have already fallen from grace.
Prince Andrew, the brother of King Charles III, has been accused of having sex with underage victims multiple times at Epstein’s private mansion. He faced a lawsuit in 2021 but settled out of court. One of the victims, Virginia Giuffre, died by suicide in Australia last year. This connection has turned into a ongoing scandal dragging the British royal family through the mud.
Norwegian economist and World Economic Forum President Børge Brende unexpectedly resigned in February this year, triggered by his close ties with Epstein over two years. Brende said he didn’t know about Epstein’s past or crimes before meeting him in 2018 and regretted not digging deeper into his background.
In the U.S., the Pritzker Architecture Prize, originally set to be announced in the first week of March, was delayed, breaking a 40-year tradition. The reason? The Epstein scandal: Thomas Pritzker, a key member of the Pritzker family and chairman of the Hyatt Foundation, was a regular visitor to Epstein’s private villa.
Also, due to ties to the Epstein case, former Treasury Secretary and Harvard University President Lawrence Summers will resign from his Harvard faculty position after this academic year.
Last month, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett postponed his annual multi-billion dollar charitable donation. Since 2006, Buffett has served as a trustee for the Gates Foundation, and together with Bill Gates, they’ve pushed global billionaires to pledge over half their wealth to charity. But after Gates divorced his wife in 2021, Buffett stepped down as a Gates Foundation trustee.