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French modelling agent friend of Jeffrey Epstein arrested at Paris airport, accused of rape and human trafficking
17 Dec 2020 16:35
A French former modelling agent and ex-associate of American pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has been arrested after being accused of rape and human trafficking, the Paris prosecutor's office said on Thursday.
Paris-born Jean-Luc Brunel, who is also accused of sexual assault and sexual harassment in US legal documents, was reportedly held at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris on Wednesday as he attempted to fly to the Senegalese capital, Dakar.
Brunel's arrest comes after he was placed under investigation by French authorities, as part of an inquiry launched last year into the alleged sexual exploitation of women and girls by Epstein and his other associates.
The wealthy American had been awaiting trial after he was jailed for trafficking underage girls for sex, including at his properties in Manhattan and Palm Beach, Florida.
Brunel has denied all the accusations against him, and in 2015 he sued Epstein, claiming that his legal difficulties had unfairly damaged the reputation of the Frenchman's agency.
"The victims have long awaited the arrest of Jean-Luc Brunel," said Anne-Claire Lejeune, a lawyer representing several of his alleged victims.
"They welcome this custody with relief, and confidence in the legal consequences that will be given. Their word finally takes on a meaning."
Ex-model Thysia Huisman, who accused Brunel of drugging and raping her when she was 18, said: "This is huge news. I cry with joy."
Brunel founded agencies MC2 Model Management, which was funded by Epstein, and Karin Models, which had its offices raided by French police last year.
Epstein was known to travel to Paris, where he owned a luxury apartment which police also searched last year. He was arrested and charged in July 2019 for sex trafficking and conspiracy after allegations he'd abused dozens of girls as young as 14, including on his private island in the Caribbean.
This week his ex-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, proposed a $28.5m bail package in order to be freed this year from a jail in New York, where she is awaiting a trial which is set to begin in 2021.
The former British socialite was arrested in July following claims she had sourced underage girls for Epstein to abuse in the mid-1990s, and if convicted she could face 35 years in prison.
'Cheer' star Jerry Harris pleaded not guilty to
child pornography and sex charges
LAUREN EDMONDS
EXECUTIVE LIFE
DEC 27, 2020, 8:06 AM
One month later, federal prosecutors alleged in an indictment that Harris “exploited and violated” at least five to 10 minors, as well as sexually assaulted a 15-year-old boy.
Court documents viewed by Insider showed Harris entered a not guilty plea to all seven counts on December 17 at an arraignment hearing he attended via telephone.
Harris first made headlines in January after he appeared in the Netflix reality series, “Cheer,” which followed the Navarro College cheerleading squad’s journey to the National Cheerleading Championship held each year in Daytona Beach, Florida.
He quickly emerged as a fan favourite for his “mat talk,” and had just begun parlaying his cheerleading career into larger opportunities. In February, he interviewed several celebrities while acting as an Oscars correspondent for The Ellen DeGeneres Show.
Harris is currently facing seven charges connected to allegations concerning five minor boys
Jerry Harris emerged as the breakout star of ‘Cheer,’ a Netflix docuseries featuring his teammates,
La’Darius Marshall and Gabi Butler, and head coach Monica Aldama Jim Spellman/Getty Images
An indictment filed earlier this month and reported by CNN alleged that Harris persuaded a minor “to engage in sexually explicit conduct for the purpose of producing a visual depiction of such conduct.”
The charges referred to alleged interactions with four minors between August 2017 and August 2020 in Illinois, Florida, and Texas.
One charge said Harris travelled from Texas to Florida with the intention of engaging in sexual acts with a 15-year-old at a cheerleading competition in May 2019.
The US Attorney’s Office alleged that Harris sexually assaulted the minor, saying Harris “followed him into the bathroom and sodomized the boy, court documents said.
“Harris’ sexual assault of this boy in such a public place, in an unlocked public bathroom, during an event attended by dozens of responsible adults demonstrates that Harris either does not care about being caught committing his offences, or simply cannot stop himself,” the court document said.
Harris’ arrest came after 14-year-old twin brothers accused him of sexual abuse and filed a complaint. In the USA Today report, Charlie and Sam claimed they were 13 years old when they first encountered Harris, then 19, in 2018.
The complaint and report alleged that Harris solicited child pornography images and videos from the brothers on several occasions.
“It was just eating me alive,” Charlie told USA Today. “It was just making me so gross and uncomfortable. Every time I saw his name or something like that, I was just cringing about it.”
Harris has remained in the Metropolitan Correctional Centre in Chicago without bond. An official trial date has not been set. Harris’ lawyers have requested that he be released while awaiting trial.
In October, Harris’ lawyers argued that the “nature and circumstances of the offence” is not “persuasive enough to merit” his detainment, court documents said. Attorney Todd Pugh also asked the court to consider the “weight of the evidence” against Harris and his “history and characteristics.”
Pugh’s motion added that Harris lost his mother to lung cancer, became homeless after the motel he lived at was shut down, and was “relentlessly ridiculed, mocked, and bullied” in high school.
“It is important to recognise, however, that Mr. Harris had barely reached the age of majority when the purported criminal conduct occurred,” Pugh said in the October filing.
Justice Heather McShane in October declined to issue a ruling on whether Harris will remain in custody or be given bail.
Mountbatten’s paedophile abuse: letter from definitive biographer Andrew Lownie not published by Sunday Independent
26 December 2020, 3:14 pm
By Andrew Lownie
A few weeks ago the Irish Times ran an article on the death of Mountbatten linked to the new series of The Crown in which the murder features in the opening episode.
As the author of the most recent biography ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves’, I was interviewed for the piece on the discrepancies between the reality and the drama, telling the paper the programme left out “some significant details about the killing, most notably that Mountbatten had ignored the advice of his personal security officer not to go to Ireland that year and that his security had been reduced”.
The paper then raised some of the other discoveries from my book namely the FBI file which revealed Mountbatten as a “homosexual with a perversion for young boys” and my interview with two men, one of them from the Kincora Boys Home, who claimed to have been abused by him in the summer of 1977. In passing, I mentioned there were rumours that Mountbatten had not been killed for political reasons but because of his paedophile activities.
The article ended with references to my problems securing the release of the car logs for Classiebawn for August 1977 and the continuing closure of papers relating to the murder and also the Kincora Boys Home in archives in Britain and Ireland. Some 40 years after Mountbatten’s death, there were details the authorities clearly did not want the public to know.
Shortly afterwards Colin Armstrong popped up in the letters page of the Sunday Independent suggesting, as he has done in previous similar letters to papers, that the abuse could not have happened because no one reported it. A former staff member at Classiebawn joined in the debate saying no-one at Classiebawn had seen anything and my assertions were pure fiction.
This followed comments from Jeffrey Dudgeon that my interviewees were fantasists like Carl Beech and inferring that as they hadn’t appeared at the Hart enquiry they couldn’t be legitimate, and a story in the Sligo Champion/Weekender of “ignoring the facts”. In all this coverage, no journalist asked me to respond.
I was quite happy to defend my research and contacted various journalists at the Irish Times, Sunday Independent and Sligo Weekender. No response. When I chased, I was told the story had moved on – after five days.
So to set the record straight here is the letter I sent:
Dear Sir,
It is natural and admirable that John Barry should seek to defend Lord Mountbatten, who employed him, his mother and brother but, just because Mountbatten’s ‘family, friends, staff and local staff’ saw no paedophile activity, it does not mean that it did not happen. By its very nature such proclivities are kept private. In fact my research shows that only one member of staff was well aware what was happening but chose to remain silent.
If he reads my book ‘The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves’, rather than dismiss my findings as “implausible fictional claims”, he will see I have produced extensive evidence to back up my claims of Mountbatten’s paedophilia.
Stories about Mountbatten’s proclivities have circulated in the media for over forty years including accounts in Private Eye and the International Times where the newspaper proprietor Cecil King described Mountbatten as a “sexual pervert”. There was also a report in Now Magazine in 1990 where the Northern Ireland author Robin Bryans claimed that “leading British establishment figures were in a vice ring which abused boys from the notorious Kincora Home in East Belfast” and named Mountbatten as one of them. It also reported that Mountbatten “was particularly attracted to boys in their early teens”. Bryans in private correspondence, which I have seen, wrote that “Kincora and Portora Boys’ Schools were used as homosexual brothels by many prominent figures, including Lord Mountbatten”. Joseph de Burca in Village Magazine has written extensively about Mountbatten’s paedophile networks.
In my book I reproduce FBI files going back to 1944 with interviews with people in Mountbatten’s circle. One, the American writer and society figure, Baroness Decies, when interviewed on another matter reported ‘that Lord Louis Mountbatten was known to be a homosexual with a perversion for young boys’. Interestingly I was told that other FBI files I had requested under Freedom of Information legislation had been destroyed – after I requested them.
Mountbatten’s wartime driver Norman Nield is on record saying he “was ordered to take young boys who had been procured for the admiral to his official residence in Lord Mountbatten’s Humber car” . According to Nield, Mountbatten, known as LL, used brandy and lemonade to help seduce the boys, who ranged in age from 8 to 12.
I interviewed two boys who said they were abused by Mountbatten. Knowing of the controversy their testimony would generate, I was particularly keen to ensure what they said was true. Everything I could check was found to be accurate but clearly these were recollections over forty years after the event. One boy was abused in Classiebawn’s boathouse, away from the house, another in a local hotel where before the days of cctv it was very easy for a visitor to nip briefly upstairs. I have never suggested that boys stayed at Classiebawn castle itself let alone overnight.
Contrary to claims, one has gone public with his claims and has brought legal action which is almost concluded. I am hoping he will shortly appear in a television programme on Mountbatten.
Likewise my interviewee had agreed to participate in the HIA Inquiry but the Inquiry served several hundred pages of information on his solicitors just before the weekend prior to his appearance at the Inquiry. His solicitors rightly told the Inquiry that, in the time allowed, it was impossible for them to read and study all the documents, let alone advise him properly.
In ‘The Mountbattens’, I reveal that Mountbatten was probably himself abused as a teenager by a bachelor clergyman Frederick Lawrence Long who acted as a private tutor.
On legal advice, some material was removed from my book, referring to Mountbatten’s paedophilia and murder, which further supported my paedophilia claims. I hope at some stage that material can be restored.
Various people have contacted me since my book was published last year providing fresh evidence of Mountbatten’s activities and I also hope to incorporate that testimony in future editions.
One has to ask why so many files from Kincora still remain closed after all this time, why files scheduled for release several years ago are still held by government departments and were not supplied to the relevant abuse inquiries and why the Garda have refused to supply the car logs for Classiebawn for August 1977 when the boys were abused. Why not? What is there to hide?
Many files on Mountbatten’s murder remain closed forty years later and questions remain. Why was his security reduced in 1979 and his boat no longer watched when it was known there was an enhanced threat that year and there had been recent attempts on his life, including an attempt to place a bomb on Shadow V? Why was the bodyguard Graham Yuill’s security audit warning of threats in July 1979 ignored and he quickly reposted to Hong Kong? Might it be possible, for whatever reason, that Mountbatten did not want too much security?
For years friends, family and staff claimed Mountbatten was not bisexual. My book, drawing on dozens of sources, shows that was not true. I fear the same campaign by supporters is being mounted again on another issue trying to smear Mountbatten’s two brave victims with the Carl Beech brush. I have always dismissed Beech as either a complete fantasist or someone who received a large amount of money to invent his absurd stories to discredit genuine survivors of sex abuse. It is now well known that Beech had massive funds available to him, far more than he could have earned or saved.
I am a Cambridge-trained historian who follows the evidence and stand by what I have written.
Yours sincerely, Dr Andrew Lownie
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