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Topics: Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, World News, no-article-matching
Hannah Smith
Topics: Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, World News, no-article-matching
A woman who was allegedly trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein and his recently-deceased associate Jean-Luc Brunel has said that the opportunity for her and other victims to get 'closure' has been 'taken away'.
Brunel, 75, a French former modelling agent, was found dead in prison on Saturday, February 19, in an apparent suicide. He was being held on suspicion of supplying underage girls to Jeffrey Epstein, with several top models having also come forward to accuse him of sexual assault and rape.
In comments made following his death, Dutch former model Thysia Huisman has spoken out about her alleged abuser, saying, 'It makes me angry, because I’ve been fighting for years.'
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Huisman says that she was drugged and raped by Brunel when she was a teenager, and had been hoping to see him convicted of his alleged crimes at trial. '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,' she told AP.
A lawyer representing Huisman and several other of Brunel's alleged victims said her clients felt 'great disappointment, great frustration that [they] won’t get justice'.
Brunel was arrested at Charles De Gaulle airport in December 2020 as he attempted to board a flight to Senegal, more than a year after he disappeared from public life following Epstein's death in prison in August 2019.
After spending 11 months in custody, he was released on bail in November last year before being returned to prison after only a few days to await trial. Brunel denied the allegations against him, with his legal team claiming his suicide was 'not driven by guilt but by a deep sense of injustice'.
An inquest into Brunel's death has been opened by French police, with prosecutors saying that the legal case will now be closed unless other suspects are placed under investigation, per The Guardian.
Huisman said that she hoped that Brunel's death would not discourage other victims of abuse from coming forward, saying that the case had 'freed up women to talk about it'.
'It’s a difficult step that requires a lot of courage and strength,' she said, while adding that she feared Brunel's death would prevent his accusers from being officially recognised as victims of sexual abuse.
'To rebuild yourself [after abuse], that is one of the essential steps,' she said.
If you have been affected by any of the issues in this article and wish to speak to someone in confidence, contact The Survivor’s Trust for free on 08088 010 818, or through their website thesurvivorstrust.org