An associate of disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his Paris jail cell on Saturday, according to French authorities.
Jean-Luc Brunel, 75, was found hanging overnight — very much like his friend and fancier of underage girls Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was also found to have hung himself with a bedsheet in Aug. 2019 in New York while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges.
Brunel was also in jail awaiting trial for raping an underage girl.
His lawyer claims that Brunel killed himself because he was innocent.
“His decision was not guided by guilt but by a deep sense of injustice,” his lawyers said in a statement. He added that Brunel had “never stopped claiming his innocence.”
One would think that if someone felt a “deep sense of injustice,” they’d be chomping at the bit to prove their innocence in court rather than ending it all in a grimy Paris jail cell at the end of a bedsheet.
Brunel was a despicable human being who deserved a far worse and more painful death.
In filings in a federal court in New York, Ms. Giuffre said that Mr. Brunel would offer modeling jobs to girls — some as young as 12 — and take them to the United States to “farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein.”
But Mr. Brunel has faced direct accusations of abuse himself. Ms. Giuffre said that Mr. Epstein sexually trafficked her to Mr. Brunel on “numerous occasions and in numerous places,” including the south of France, according to court records.
Dante’s lowest circles of hell were reserved for those who committed fraud and those who committed treachery. Dante lacked the imagination — or perhaps a sense of propriety and good taste restrained him — to place Epstein and his associates in their own circle of hell: the one reserved for those who seek to betray children and steal their innocence from them.
Related: Of Course: Giuffre Settles With Prince Andrew, Epstein-Related Case Will Not Go to Court
One such victim was devastated that Brunel would not stand trial. Thysia Huisman told the AP that she had been looking forward to a verdict in the case.
“It makes me angry, because I’ve been fighting for years,” Huisman, a Dutch former model who told police she was raped by Brunel as a teen, told The Associated Press. “For me, the end of this was to be in court. And now that whole ending — which would help form closure — is taken away from me.”
A lawyer representing Huisman and other victims, Anne-Claire Lejeune, said other women involved in the case feel the same.
“Great disappointment, great frustration that (the victims) won’t get justice,” she told The AP.
The conspiracy theories about the death of Brunel on the heels of Epstein’s suicide are inevitable and expected. Several powerful men — some yet to be exposed — were involved in Epstein’s flesh market, and no matter what evidence emerges from the investigation into Brunel’s death, many have already concluded that Bill Clinton or some other political heavyweight who didn’t want to be exposed could be involved.
If that’s the case, we’re unlikely to unravel the mystery of what happened.
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