The Photographer Who Launched Melania Trump’s Career—and His Ties to Epstein

The Epstein files show how a key figure in Melania Trump’s early modeling career remained connected to Epstein long after his conviction.

Welcome to The Red Letter.

I have a new piece out in Vanity Fair examining the one degree of separation between Melania Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.

Before she was first lady, Melania moved within a tight, rarefied modeling circuit in the late 1990s — a world she was launched into by celebrity photographer Antoine Verglas, known for his sensual, natural-light portraits of supermodels like Cindy Crawford, Stephanie Seymour, Tyra Banks, and Naomi Campbell.

Verglas played a pivotal role in making Melania’s American career, including photographing the now-iconic nude British GQ spread shot aboard Donald Trump’s private plane.

But Verglas also remained connected to Epstein long after his 2008 conviction. The Justice Department’s files show him sharing nude image files, conducting photoshoots of Epstein’s girlfriend Karyna Shuliak and others, and even helping to secure Shuliak’s visa documentation.

What first caught my attention was a disturbing email shared by Verglas that was forwarded to Epstein about scopolamine — a drug associated in some reporting with memory loss and extreme suggestibility. The subject of the e-mail is an article titled “Scopolamine: Powerful drug growing in the forests of Colombia that ELIMINATES free will.” Epstein, according to two separate correspondences, appeared to be cultivating the trumpet plant from which the drug is derived in his nursery. Verglas says he does not remember the context in which the article was sent.

“I do know that at the time it was a subject of great concern and that everyone was talking about it with horror,” he said in a statement. “How could I have imagined that Mr. Epstein was secretly cultivating them, as I recently discovered in the files made public by the US government?”

So while the files do not allege wrongdoing by Melania Trump or suggest she had knowledge of Epstein’s crimes, the recurring presence of Verglas in the files — who photographed her roughly a dozen times at the start of her U.S. career — underscores how close Epstein remained to the same professional ecosystem that propelled her rise, and which he repeatedly leveraged and exploited.

Check out the article and let me know what you think in the comments below.