Daniel Siad, recruiter of models and alleged tout of women for the American child criminal Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead Monday evening at his home near Paris.
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His body was discovered in his house in Colombes (west of Paris), said the Nanterre prosecutor’s office. An investigation has been opened and “an autopsy will be carried out”, he said.
Targeted by several complaints, notably for rape, Daniel Siad was the subject of an investigation in Paris entrusted to the office specializing in the fight against human trafficking.
Daniel Siad, model recruiter and alleged woman tout for Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead on Monday at his home near Paris
SCREENSHOT/CNN
The 69-year-old man, who presented himself as “born French and a Swedish citizen”, contested the accusations.
“He died and he was innocent,” his lawyer Menya Arab-Tigrine told AFP. “He, through me, asked Justice to hear him! She didn’t do anything about it. If he died of a heart attack, this unbearable wait, the pressure and the anxiety with which he lived daily will have had something to do with it,” she accused.
The first complaint against him was filed on February 10 in Paris by a former Swedish model, Ebba P. Karlsson.
The fifty-year-old did not know his identity before recognizing him in the declassified archives linked to Jeffrey Epstein – where Daniel Siad is cited in more than a thousand documents.
“Devastating”
In her complaint, she accused Daniel Siad of having raped her when she was 20 and then of having sexually exploited her, by introducing her to Gérald Marie, former director of the prestigious Élite modeling agency, to whom she accuses of another rape.
Daniel Siad and Gérald Marie have denied the accusations against them.
“I am in shock,” reacted Ebba P. Karlsson on Wednesday, contacted by AFP. “Daniel Siad was very close to being arrested. We worked so hard to get justice, and now… It’s extremely frustrating.”
SCREENSHOT FROM Ebba P. Karlsson’S INSTAGRAM ACCOUNT
“We were all afraid that he would be killed to prevent him from speaking out about other criminals… I hope that a thorough investigation will be carried out into the circumstances of his death,” she said.
The Swede co-founded, with Lisa Brinkworth – a British journalist who accused Gérald Marie of sexual assault in 1998 – the collective “Victorious Angels – WE RISE”.
This collective, bringing together twenty women, has for several years denounced sexual violence in the modeling world, attributed in particular to the modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel. This relative of Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide in 2022 in detention, three years after the American child molester’s own suicide, found hanged in his cell in the United States.
“It’s devastating that the survivors of the Brunel affair were first deprived of justice, and now those of the Siad affair,” insisted Lisa Brinkworth to AFP.
“Serious fault”
“The police should have arrested Siad, given the many women who had accused him of rape and human trafficking,” lamented Lisa Brinkworth.
Colomba Grossi and William Bourdon, lawyers for Ebba P. Karlsson and Lisa Brinkworth, denounced a “serious error” by the Paris prosecutor’s office, accusing it of “making fun of the victims of sexual crimes”.
The declassification by the American government of thousands of files belonging to Jeffrey Epstein had relaunched investigations concerning his relatives in France, including Jean-Luc Brunel, with the opening at the beginning of the year of a vast investigation by the Paris prosecutor’s office.
In May, the public prosecutor indicated that around twenty victims had come forward, notably regarding Jean-Luc Brunel or Gérald Marie, and that he was again analyzing Epstein’s “computer”, “telephony”, “address books”, but that he had not yet heard from anyone accused.
Daniel Siad was a valuable lead for the justice system, reports Juliette G., a 43-year-old former French model who says she was recruited in Paris by Mr. Siad to be presented to Jeffrey Epstein in New York in 2004.
In June, the judicial police summoned her as a witness to collect “additional information” on Daniel Siad, she told AFP. With the death of the latter, “a new link disappears to clarify the story and find those responsible,” she lamented.
