The Man Who Links Melania Directly to Epstein

As Melania Trump tries to shut down questions about Jeffrey Epstein once and for all, one man keeps pulling the story right back into Trumpworld’s orbit.

That man is Paolo Zampolli — the well-connected former modeling agent who says he personally introduced Melania Knauss to Donald Trump at a New York Fashion Week party in 1998. And while Zampolli is now loudly defending the first lady and dismissing any suggestion that Epstein played matchmaker, his own history is only fueling fresh scrutiny over the social circles that brought all of these figures together.

Zampolli has long moved through the kind of elite world where fashion, money, celebrity, and political power all collide. Back in the late 1990s, he recruited Melania from Slovenia, brought her to New York, and then introduced her to Trump during a high-profile Manhattan event. According to Zampolli, the moment was simple.

“I said: ‘Melania meet Donald, Donald meet Melania,’” he told The Daily Beast, insisting he was the one who made the connection before walking away to attend to hundreds of guests.

That claim comes as Melania this week publicly blasted what she called “lies” linking her to Epstein. But instead of closing the door on the controversy, the renewed attention has only highlighted how many people around the Trumps once overlapped with Epstein’s world — and Zampolli is now squarely in that spotlight.

In the early 2000s, Zampolli reportedly discussed buying a modeling agency with Epstein. He was also later listed as a partner in Ghislaine Maxwell’s now-defunct TerraMar Project, the ocean charity that collapsed under the weight of Maxwell’s criminal scandal. Zampolli insists none of that means what critics think it means.

He told the outlet that dealing with Epstein was simply part of doing business at the time because of Epstein’s ties to Victoria’s Secret and billionaire Leslie Wexner. According to Zampolli, the relationship was never warm.

“We never get along, thank God,” he said. “But I had to have a very cordial relationship.”

That may be his version, but it does little to quiet the questions. Zampolli has not been accused of wrongdoing in connection to Epstein or Maxwell, yet his name reportedly appears multiple times in the millions of Epstein-related records recently released by the Justice Department.

Those records include an FBI interview from 2020 involving an alleged Epstein victim who had once worked as a model at Zampolli’s agency. Another document reportedly includes Epstein warning an associate to be careful of Zampolli, calling him “trouble” and accusing him of selling stories to the press.

Now serving as Trump’s special envoy for global partnerships and holding a seat on the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, Zampolli remains firmly planted inside Trump’s political universe. He has been photographed with top administration officials, travels in MAGA power circles, and appears to have maintained unusually close access to the president’s inner world.

That proximity is exactly why his role in this latest saga is drawing so much attention.

The drama took another turn when Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model who had a long relationship with Zampolli and shares a son with him, suddenly surfaced online with cryptic threats to “expose everything that I know.” The posts appeared as direct replies to Melania’s archived first lady account just as Melania was addressing the Epstein issue publicly from the White House.

It is still unclear whether the account is authentic or what, if anything, Ungaro meant to reveal. But the timing was explosive.

Ungaro’s own history has added another layer of intrigue. She previously said she was just 17 when she boarded Epstein’s private jet in 2002 alongside French modeling scout Jean-Luc Brunel, a figure closely tied to Epstein’s trafficking network. In a recent interview, she described the experience as deeply unsettling, saying many of the girls on board looked “very young.”

More recently, Ungaro has accused Zampolli of using his influence in Washington during a custody dispute to help trigger her arrest by immigration authorities — a claim he flatly denies. Zampolli fired back by calling her a criminal and a psychopath, while also dismissing the idea that Melania would care about anything involving his ex.

Still, for critics watching from the outside, the larger picture is hard to ignore.

This is not just a story about who introduced Melania to Donald Trump nearly three decades ago. It is a story about the same tight, glamorous, ultra-wealthy social circles that kept placing powerful people in the same rooms, at the same parties, and around the same deeply compromised figures. The names may shift, the excuses may change, and the denials may get louder, but the pattern remains disturbingly familiar.

Melania may want the Epstein story far away from her name. But as long as the people defending her are themselves tangled in that world, the questions are not going away anytime soon.