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An email in the DOJ files, from Fuller to Epstein, makes clear the close ties between the agency and the financier.
“Had it not been for you, we would have fired her months ago,” Fuller writes of another model in March 2012. “And I would be careful as she blabs about things,” he says.
A month after Epstein’s second arrest in 2019, MC2’s US branch was dissolved and Fuller opened a new agency, The Source Models, which is still operating. The BBC has found that 50 models from MC2 were transferred to his new agency.
We asked The Source Models to comment on our findings – it did not reply.
Model agencies were useful to Epstein, says Sigrid McCawley, the lead lawyer for more than 100 of Epstein’s victims.
“Epstein said to many people he wanted three different girls a day. Think about those numbers… The [model] scouts were really critical because they were the ones who were identifying the type of woman that Epstein liked.”
In the case of former agent Ramsey Elkholy, BBC Eye has discovered he tried to connect 34 women to Epstein, including an 18-year-old who was still in school.
The experience of one of the women highlights how assistants would be co-opted into the structure of the abuse.
Elkholy, the DOJ files show, suggested to Epstein that one of the financier’s female assistants befriend this woman, before introducing her to Epstein.
We spoke to this woman, and she revealed that at her first meeting with Epstein, aged 19, he sexually abused her in his New York townhouse.
Ramsey Elkholy told the BBC: “I completely reject any allegation that I knew of or facilitated abuse of any kind… At the time, I had no knowledge of any abuse and I knew only his own [Epstein’s] account of his 2008 [legal] case, which I misguidedly believed.”
He continued: “The record and published reporting show that women were often groomed by other women in his inner circle. I was never part of that circle, or indeed of any such activity… my intention was to help models find professional opportunities by introducing them to an extremely well-connected individual.”
Lawyer Sigrid McCawley says these female assistants would have had “no choice” in how they conducted themselves.
“These young survivors were being abused regularly. Their livelihoods were being threatened… They had to do what they were being told to do.”
Another model we have spoken to, Simona (not her real name), from eastern Europe, told us Epstein had raped her more than 200 times.
“People think that we gained something, that we agreed on this abuse in order to gain something, whether it’s monetary or influential, but it’s not true. We’re left with deep trauma,” says Simona.
She says the first time she met the financier, aged 20, she was already signed with a model agency in New York, and he offered to introduce her to his “good” friend Faith Kates.
At the time, Kates was the head of Next Management, one of the world’s biggest model agencies. She stepped down from that senior executive position in December last year, but is still legally listed as a director of the company.
