PARK Magazine

INSIDE STORY
BRUNEL SAID THAT
TEENAGE GIRLS SHOULDN’T
BE ALLOWED TO GO TO
PARIS BY THEMSELVES TO
MODEL. “I’M AGAINST IT, IT’S
CRAZY, IT’S NUTS,” HE SAID.
“I DON’T LIKE HAVING GIRLS
WHO ARE FIFTEEN, SIXTEEN.
THE ONLY THING THEY GIVE
YOU IS TROUBLE.’’
A 60 Minutes investigation wiped the
smile off her face. John Casablancas told
reporter Craig Pyes he was covering “a
conspiracy of silence, greed, and fear,”
and then declined to go on camera. But
Eileen Ford agreed to an interview that
turned into a sneak attack.
Pyes had found models who called
Brunel’s parties a “meat market … for the
purpose of somebody wanting to take
you home to bed.” Brunel was “the
matchmaker … he’s got the girls.” And if
a girl said no, she got no work. “I was
personally proposed to … by Jean-Luc,”
one said. “I laughed in his face, and I had
no more appointments and I never worked.”
Another model said Jean-Luc had given
her cocaine and taken it himself. “He’d
always give me a little vial of cocaine,” she
said. “He did that with all the girls.” Finally,
an fourth model said Brunel gave her a
drink at his house that made her pass
out. She awoke the next morning in his
bed, positive she had been raped.
Christy
Turlington
“American Models in Paris” aired in December 1988. Within
months Ford cut off its relationship with Karins. But Brunel
survived and remained a power in modeling, a partner in
Next, an agency in New York and the owner of Karins, where
he received me in an office he shared with a woman who’d
been made his partner after the 60 Minutes broadcast.
Brunel was, as advertised, a charmer, small, with hollow,
Gallic features, a broken nose, long, wavy brown hair, and a
slightly dangerous air, softened by a blue cashmere sweater
and a pair of tortoise-framed glasses. “I’m no saint,” he said
by way of introduction. “But I never messed with the girls of
the agency, and not one girl left me.”
He readily allowed for another difference: that he had a
problem with cocaine for half a decade. “I admit it,” he said.
“So, big deal! I never did it in the day. I was not mixing it; it
never happened in the agency. I did it as an experiment. Fine,
it lasted maybe a bit longer than it should. I started to do it
for a few years, and then I stopped it; it was ruining my life.”
Brunel said he’dlived the night life in Paris since he was a
teenager and admitted that models have passed through his
bed. “You get laid tonight with a model, is that a crime?” he
asked. “I don’t understand why people go into your personal
life, what you do yourself, and to yourself, and they don’t look