PARK Magazine

‘‘The music pounds, the champagne flows,”
Carré Otis, now
Carré Sutton
went the opening lines of my 1995 book, Model: The Ugly Business of Beautiful
Women. “There is brimstone in the air along with Poison, Obsession and Vendetta.
It is the smell of a factory that feeds on young girls.” In the century since the
fashion modeling industry was invented by a failed actor named John Robert
Powers, it has shrugged off scandal with supermodel-caliber suavity. But in the
six years since agent Jean-Luc Brunel’s name was first associated with that of
pedo-perv Jeffrey Epstein, the fashionably-connected money manager with a
heavy jones for young female flesh, it’s become more difficult for the industry
to ignore the smoke and flames.
Brunel went into hiding in 2019 and was arrested by French authorities in
December 2020, at Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, while trying to
board a flight to Dakar, the capital of Senegal. The next fall, he was indicted for
raping a 17-year-old model, a charge he denied; then, in the early hours of February
19 th , the 75-year-old was reported to have hung himself in the prison outside
Paris where he was being held pending trial. Questions swirl, as they did over
Epstein’s “suicide,” and may never be answered.
Meantime, in August 2021, Carré Otis, now Carré Sutton, who’d made headlines
in 1994 when she was stalked during New York Fashion Week by her estranged
husband, the actor Mickey Rourke, grabbed the spotlight again. She sued Gerald
Marie, another notorious French model agent, and the longtime head of the
Paris office of Elite Models, alleging he’d repeatedly raped her when she was 17
years old, and trafficked her “to other wealthy men around Europe.” More than
a dozen other models promptly came forward with similar allegations of their
own in a criminal investigation against Marie in Paris. He’d been regularly
accused of being a sexual predator, first in the pages of Model, then in a 2000
BBC documentary. But Marie has steadfastly denied the charges and has not
been arrested; he is reportedly still living the good life on the Spanish island of
Ibiza, where Elite’s elite all had homes. Yet, even his ex-wife, Linda Evangelista,
has reportedly spoken out in support of her fellow models, saying, “I believe
they are telling the truth.”
Evangelista was standing beside Marie at a Vogue party in Paris in the 1990s
when he threatened my life for writing about the couple. “Paris is my town and
if you ever write another word about me or wife, you will never take another step
here,” he spat at me, shoving a warning finger in my face. Yet, not long afterward,
he consented to an interview for Model, as did Brunel, and their role model,
Elite founder John Casablancas, who successfully danced away from charges
of sex with underage girls for decades before his 2013 death. None of them was
willing to admit, in 1994, when they sat for those interviews, that they’d ever
done much wrong. Indeed, they smirked with pride over the notches on their
belts, as long as specifics like the age of their conquests were left vague.
Lately, it’s me who’s been interviewed, by innumerable journalists and filmed
for about a half-dozen documentaries about these men and others. And Sony
Pictures Television and Neil Meron, who produced Hairspray, Chicago, Footloose,
and most recently, Annie Live! on NBC are developing a limited series based
on Model. This time, it seems, the bad boys of modeling won’t be dancing away
from their deeds quite so easily. For now, meet the men, one dead, one still very
much alive, behind the latest scandal, in these excerpts adapted from Model.