No obvious provocation motivated Melania Trump to suddenly take a podium earlier this month to deny any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and voice sympathy with survivors. It’s clear she took issue with an unsubstantiated rumor that won’t die quietly: Epstein introduced her to her husband, the president of the United States. The next day, Melania got backup for that point from the man who has stood beside her since before she met Donald Trump.
In the Daily Mail, Paolo Zampolli—Melania’s former modeling agent and a onetime Trump Organization real estate broker, currently serving on the Kennedy Center board and in an undefined State Department role as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Partnerships—offered to testify before Congress that he, in fact, introduced Donald to the woman then known as Melania Knauss at a party at the Kit Kat Club in New York in 1998. At the time, Zampolli was the founder and president of ID Model Management, and he has long claimed credit for sponsoring an H1-B work visa for Knauss when she was still an unknown model looking for a better future than her native Slovenia offered.
If Melania doesn’t take up Zampolli on his offer, it may not only be because it would only highlight his past circumstantial connections to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The two men discussed buying, but ultimately failed in their bid to acquire Elite Models following its 2004 bankruptcy. And he later partnered with Maxwell on the TerraMar Project, a paper-tiger environmental nonprofit Maxwell promoted at the United Nations; that shuttered project predates Zampolli’s current initiative, We Are The Oceans, which he’s since celebrated at the Kennedy Center.
But Zampolli’s continued relationship with a lesser-known fashion media magnate in Epstein’s orbit named Michel Adam Lisowski may prove even more problematic, beginning with a time in 2002, when the three men each worked with the model and Epstein scheduler Adriana Mucinska.
Lisowski has had an upward trajectory as unlikely and unwarranted as Epstein’s and Zampolli’s improbable success stories, but has avoided closer examination despite his propensity for being under investigation for allegations that call to mind sexual assault and trafficking complaints against Epstein, and a bottomless appetite for self-promotion and aggrandizement that matches Zampolli’s.
Never one to hide in plain sight, Lisowski sported an unkempt moptop of bushy hair, Coke bottle glasses, and a mix of fatigues and dashikis that rarely covered the weight he liked to throw around from a young age. Born in Warsaw, he defied Princeton’s preppy aesthetics until he was arrested on drug possession charges ahead of his senior year for attempting to smuggle $120,000 worth of hashish from London to New York with two other men in 1970. He bounced between African and European hippie communes before returning to the United States in 1975 to work with the State Department as a government contractor during the unfolding energy crisis. After he failed to implement his vision for a reinvented zeppelin as a useful alternative for cheap and clean transportation, he left the United States for good, while under investigation for securities fraud. In 1977, the SEC won an uncontested injunction against Lisowski and his partners for misstating the value of the company’s patents, contracts, and capital necessary to construct its zeppelins. Soon after, he reinvented himself. He failed in his attempt to open a hot-air balloon amusement park in Pattaya, Thailand, and sold T-shirts on the beach to survive. Just a few years later, his Eden Group was a manufacturing juggernaut, producing T-shirts under license from Disney and Warner Bros.
Fashion has long been a predatory industry; on the manufacturing side, low-paid, overworked garment workers lack the advocacy to improve their working conditions, while in advertising and editorial work, models can go far with a pretty face so long as they remain voiceless on the way up. For Epstein and Zampolli, this was not a bug, but a feature to be exploited. Lisowski came to the same conclusion after a decade spent exploiting sweatshop labor in Thailand. After a labor reform movement swept across Southeast Asia in the 1980s and drove him out of business, he turned his gaze to the next most vulnerable class of fashion laborers: insecure young girls in pursuit of stardom.
By the 1990s, he had become Michel Adam Lisowski, the slick-haired international media mogul behind FashionTV, an MTV for supermodel and designer fandom so far-reaching—the channel reaches 400 million households worldwide today—that Epstein sought to purchase but ultimately failed to acquire the company in 2010. If FashionTV isn’t a household name, it’s because Lisowski is not pursuing paid subscribers, or targeting demographics sought by prescription drug manufacturers and insurance companies. FashionTV is focused on capturing the imagination of teenage girls who long for a more glamorous life but can’t afford to access it.
The brand has long used social media to entice flocks of aspiring models across Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to participate in FashionTV-branded modeling competitions in Eastern Europe, where judges lack the earned respect possessed by the industry leaders who crowned new talent on Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model. These pageants, which do not air on FashionTV and frequently award countless vague titles like Miss Star and Miss Tourism, continue today, even as the judges have become the recent target of investigations into sex trafficking abroad. Yet Zampolli, a repeat past pageant judge himself, has remained one of FashionTV’s most unwavering ambassadors.
In response to questions from the Prospect about his relationship with Lisowski, Zampolli responded by text: “Michel Adam was a pioneer in the fashion media space, having created the first Fashion TV channel, which reached hundreds of millions of viewers worldwide at a time when even leading publications such as Italian Vogue operated with comparatively limited print circulation.”
An Epstein-Zampolli-FashionTV Relationship
Zampolli’s profile has risen over the past year, as he boasts about cutting deals with countries for nuclear energy and airplane sales. He’s also made headlines for allegedly seeking to get his longtime partner and mother to his son, Amanda Ungaro, a former model and ambassador to the United Nations, detained and deported to her native Brazil amid a bitter custody dispute. But Ungaro and Knauss weren’t the only women signed to Zampolli’s modeling agency who had their careers sidetracked by relationships with powerful men.
Adriana Mucinska served as Jeffrey Epstein’s scheduler and assistant prior to his 2008 conviction for solicitation of prostitution from a minor. Mucinska was named as a co-conspirator but never charged. She shared little about her work history during a 2010 deposition with federal prosecutors. Zampolli’s name never came up in questioning, but she did acknowledge being signed to ID Models, in between invoking her Fifth Amendment rights more than a hundred times.
Previously unpublished notes from a July 2019 proffer Mucinska made to the FBI were released by the Department of Justice last December as part of the Epstein files. Bold red lettering at the bottom of each page warns paragraphs mentioning Zampolli are “subject to protective order.”
In this 2019 interview, Mucinska identified Zampolli as her agent when she arrived in the United States in 2002. At that time, her career highlight was an appearance on a reality TV series, ModelFlat, which followed the working lives of a United Nations of aspiring international models cohabitating in a London apartment as they auditioned for photographers and designers. The show was similar to ModelLife.com, a website Zampolli launched in 2000, broadcasting the home life of his ID Model clients residing in a SoHo loft “as a way to promote the girls, the agency, and its website,” he told New York magazine at the time.
ModelFlat aired on FashionTV, which for nearly three decades has aired a string of designer runway shows, video editorials, and long-form commercials, broken up with station ID supercuts of A-list stars on red carpets in Cannes, and front row and backstage at Fashion Weeks around the world. Hailey Baldwin [Bieber], Matthew McConaughey, Tommy Hilfiger, Philipp Plein, Bryanboy, and supermodel sisters Bella and Gigi Hadid have all appeared to send kind words and kisses to viewers throughout the years, which has given the station an air of undeserved legitimacy that’s never been challenged by the industry it promotes.
Mucinska told the FBI her then-husband, FashionTV U.S. director Duncan Ross, put her in contact with modeling agents including Zampolli, “who organized [for her] to come to NY to model.” In Manhattan, she lived in a Varick Street model apartment down the block from ID Models’ SoHo office. Because she couldn’t afford rent, she resided there with ten other women. She eventually received a job offer from Epstein, after he viewed a topless photo in her portfolio while “casting for models” at Zampolli’s office.
Asked if he had any recollection of Mucinska, and her time with ID Models, Zampolli replied to the Prospect by phone, providing multiple responses in a single breath: “I remember that girl, I don’t even remember. She was one of them. If you say so, you know, we have so many models. People ask me this name, sometimes models go with a different name. You know, an owner of an agency does not need to know every single model of his agency.” Zampolli claimed he was unaware she had discussed him with the FBI, and he denied having ever searched for any mention of himself in the Epstein files. “I’m not joking. You might think I’m crazy, but I didn’t.”
After reviewing Mucinska’s past statements, Zampolli responded hours later by text:
Regarding model Adriana [Mucinska] Ross, our agency has represented numerous international talents and has always operated within the highest professional and ethical standards of the industry.
With respect to Jeffrey Epstein, it is a matter of public record that he had connections within the fashion and modeling sector. He did visit our headquarters; however, any implication of involvement, collaboration, or endorsement is categorically rejected. Any suggestion otherwise is false and will be addressed accordingly.
After joining Zampolli and Epstein at a nightclub, Mucinska said that she received a call to visit Epstein at his East 71st Street town house, where she claimed she shared her life story, rebuffed his sexual advances in his massage room, and cried on the car ride home.
Soon after, for reasons that went unexplained in her FBI interview, she gave up her modeling career and moved to Florida, where she worked for Epstein until 2006. Mucinska resided there with Ross and his family, while he promoted FashionTV at local parties and events. In 2007, Ross opened a South Beach photography studio with the intention of livestreaming photo shoots on the channel. However, by the time of Mucinska’s 2010 deposition, he had left the fashion industry to pursue a Ph.D.
As Mucinska and Ross moved to Miami, FashionTV was on its way to becoming one of the four most widely distributed television channels in the world, despite several warning signs about its founder. Before the French government issued FashionTV a broadcast license in 1997, the French embassy in Thailand warned the regulating board against it. The embassy alleged Lisowski had involvement in money laundering and prostitution, as well as a substantial debt owed to Thai workers. In 1996, after a workforce of 4,000 was reduced to 400 as Lisowski sought cheaper labor in Burma, former employees burned him in effigy in the streets of Bangkok, and industry trade Textile Asia noted a local security firm advertised they would kill him for $300,000. In a 2007 interview with the Polish newsmagazine Duzy Format, Lisowski was pushed on his lack of corporate ethics, which at the time included documented instances of child labor. Lisowski responded, “A good capitalist must use the working class. Did you read Karl Marx? Man cannot be moved by ideologies, only material incentives.”
The regulatory board delayed FashionTV’s application for one year, during which time Lisowski was arrested for cocaine possession and held in jail for nine days. In May 1998, he received a three-month suspended sentence. Four months after his arrest, the French government granted him a five-year broadcast license. Then another incident nearly triggered FashionTV’s downfall as soon as it launched.
Lisowski assaulted Eva Cyankiewicz on September 22, 1997, inside his Paris apartment at 22 Avenue Foch, the same building where Epstein owned a residence at the time of his death. Lisowski had pursued Cyankiewicz, a 21-year-old Polish model, since she was cast in a nightclub runway show in Berlin to celebrate the launch of FashionTV in Germany. He invited Cyankiewicz to stay with him with the promise of helping her career, and she testified how it wasn’t long before Lisowski struck her, tore off her dress, threw her on the bed, and attempted to rape her before she escaped.
Three years later, in 2000, Lisowski was convicted and sentenced to one year in prison, but by then FashionTV was thriving. Even an Interpol Red Notice for Lisowski’s flight from France did nothing to impact the channel’s success. By the time he was convicted, FashionTV reached 30 million households worldwide.
Post-Prison, Epstein Pursues Acquisition of FashionTV
A decade later, on February 10, 2010, Jeffrey Epstein, six months out of prison, and David Stern, a London-based German-French businessman and aide to the former Prince Andrew, sought to acquire FashionTV, according to documents released by the Department of Justice. Epstein received a proposal from former Sony Music CEO Tommy Mottola about an idea for a new company that would develop and distribute digital fashion content for the iPad generation through various outlets, including FashionTV. Epstein emailed the notorious modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, instructing him to reach out to “Michel Adam [Lisowski]” about selling FashionTV to an interested “private investment firm in London.” Brunel reached out moments later, advising Lisowski he found him a “serious buyer.”
One day later, the prospective buyers were already growing wary of Lisowski’s lack of response. Three weeks passed before Stern connected with FashionTV’s then-CEO Yaron Jakubowicz, who told him the company was open to acquisition while simultaneously in the process of going public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange. Despite the documentation an IPO required, Jakubowicz claimed he had no financials handy for Stern to examine; he offered his informal appraisal instead. He claimed the company was having a break-even year after settling a lawsuit and investing in HD technology, but nonetheless received an independent valuation of “245Mil Euro.”
“Basically FTV could be a money printer—given the sufficient amount of paper to print on …,” Jakubowicz wrote. His comment read like the kind of hyperbole ingrained in Lisowski from a young age. A declassified 1960 CIA cable about his father’s role representing Poland at the International Atomic Energy Agency described Witold Lisowski as an untrustworthy double agent and pimp whose only ambition was “money, money, even more money and then again money.” Lisowski further shared with Duzy Format the origin of his own economic epiphany: “I didn’t have money then, so it was easy for me to enter the hippie communes. We shared—they, money, and I, intelligence. But when I started making money myself, my ideals changed.”
Epstein eventually lost interest in the acquisition, as Stern determined that FashionTV “looks too expensive and a bit odd.” On April 30, 2010, the company indeed went public on the Frankfurt exchange; a press release marking the occasion reported FashionTV reached 400 million homes worldwide via cable and satellite. That would get to 500 million, in 192 countries, by 2016, according to Le Monde’s investigation into the Panama Papers in 2016, which noted that Lisowski and his older brother Gabriel had created a complicated structure to evade taxes on $250 million in annual revenue.
FashionTV’s Newest Ambassador
In October 2010, six months after FashionTV went public, the company was implicated in a major police investigation into Romanian modeling agencies. Two agency managers charged with trafficking women and forcing them into prostitution at a nightclub and brothel in Vienna were sentenced to four and a half months in prison after two years of trials. The indictment claimed the traffickers met at a party hosted by Ion Mirea, the future president of FashionTV Romania, and the brothel, a local FashionTV advertiser at the time, was recommended to the men by FashionTV marketing head Max Posch, who was not charged in the incident.
But FashionTV kept rolling on, and it had a new subject to turn its cameras on: Paolo Zampolli.
While Epstein was foremost interested in buying FashionTV, Zampolli has been happy to celebrate the brand under Lisowski’s control. He made every effort stateside to promote not just FashionTV, but Lisowski in absentia, in whatever corridors of power Zampolli occupied, despite there being no obvious upside. He wasn’t marketing the channel so much as celebrating it, a vestige representing the worst values of his past life that most aspiring politicians would race to shed. Zampolli didn’t.
By this point, Zampolli had shifted away from modeling and toward a career in international diplomacy. He first claimed the title of ambassador in 2011, in a party column he wrote for luxury magazine Haute Living, where he identified himself as United Nations Association ambassador-at-large to Brazil. That title is wholly honorific; the UNA is an nongovernmental organization that supports the mission of the United Nations. In 2012, he was appointed U.N. ambassador for the Caribbean commonwealth of Dominica.
Almost overnight, parties featuring models and diplomats dancing the night away at the Trump SoHo hotel, Provocateur nightclub in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, and at Zampolli’s Union Square “ambassador residence” proliferated. Videos of these bacchanals would later be uploaded to FashionTV’s YouTube channel.
FashionTV cameras first rolled at a Zampolli party when he celebrated his 41st birthday at Provocateur in April 2011. A model worked the dance floor with a rhinestone mic in hand prompting guests like former Def Jam CEO Russell Simmons to send their love to Zampolli and FashionTV. Another party at Provocateur in 2013 featured unidentified beautiful women roaming a crowd of men that included a foreign general and disgraced ambassador important enough to be identified by chyron.
FashionTV was also there at a January 20, 2017, Trump inaugural afterparty at the W Hotel in Washington, co-hosted by Zampolli and the Forbes family. Ahead of the party, Zampolli told Politico he received RSVPs from Kanye West and Sylvester Stallone, and that at least one cabinet secretary would appear, but the cameras never found them. However, Lisowski’s wife, Russian former model Maria Mogsolova, worked the room, scoring a plug from Melania Trump’s immigration attorney. He endorsed the first lady’s “very good eye for fashion,” and his belief that “the president has already shown fine taste, in who he has chosen to marry,” before turning to the camera and primping: “My name is Michael Wildes, I love FashionTV.”
Like Stallone and West, Zampolli’s partner Amanda Ungaro was nowhere to be found. Page Six reported the couple’s relationship had collapsed that August. Untethered, Zampolli traveled that month to judge the Miss FashionTV Black Sea competition at the Phoenicia Royal Mamaia, a coastal resort in eastern Romania.
Dressed in a snug-fitting T-shirt promoting We Are The Oceans, Zampolli received a nautical-themed welcome at the airport, where he posed for pictures alongside a weathered-looking Lisowski and seven docile models, dressed in a mix of white gowns, peaked captain hats, and FashionTV-branded swimsuits.
Promotional materials promised the judges joining Lisowski would include “international personalities from the media and fashion,” but come Saturday night, Zampolli sat front and center to the right of Lisowski, alongside five other men, and one woman, a hotel manager.
The Prospect identified two other judges at the table. One was Wang Yan, a Romanian citizen and Chinese diplomat who served as head of the Chinese-Romanian Bilateral Chamber of Commerce. He was long inseparable in public at the right hand of Prime Minister Emil Boc, until his citizenship was revoked at the request of the Romanian Intelligence Service, Romania’s FBI, in 2013 for being a “threat to national security.” At the time, he was suspected of engaging in child sex trafficking and forcing minors into prostitution for clients including members of the judiciary and security services. Yet he was never prosecuted, and returned to Romania a short time later when his Chamber of Commerce co-produced Exodus to Shanghai, the first FashionTV film, shot in part inside Romania’s Chinese embassy. Wang himself played a consul acting opposite Mogsolova. The film was promoted by Chinese government state agencies, in celebration of “the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascism,” and Tablet magazine described the film as “the world’s first kung-fu Holocaust exploitation flick,” in a positive review published one month before the Mamaia pageant.
The Chinese embassy did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment. In 2021, Wang sued Romanian journalists who publicized the unprosecuted claims about Wang, including accusing him in headlines of being the “leader of an organized crime group” and connected to “pedophilia networks.” The court ruled against Wang’s defamation claims.
The Tablet review skimmed Lisowski’s biography, noting “Adam also has strong ties with Israel, where he was detained in 2005 after he was accused by a model of sexually harassing her.” In fact, Lisowski was arrested in Tel Aviv alongside Elite Modeling CEO Shai Avital after they were accused of forcibly kissing and touching a 20-year-old model in the bathroom of a FashionTV nightclub. The case was closed due to lack of evidence in 2009.
Avital, who served as the model casting agent on Exodus to Shanghai, would later be arrested in the Netherlands in 2022, in a joint investigation between Dutch and Israeli police and Interpol, and extradited to Israel to face sexual assault charges after being accused of sexual harassment and assault by 26 women. He was eventually convicted of two charges, supplying drugs to a minor and assault, sentenced to six months in prison, and ordered to pay restitution to two women. Avital sat on the judging panel along with Zampolli and Wang. The pageant was livestreamed on FashionTV’s Facebook page, which, alongside updates on the latest fashion news, frequently posts slideshows of Melania Trump and Amanda Ungaro, as well as videos celebrating Zampolli’s birthday.
The photos depicting Zampolli’s trip to Mamaia were posted to a website hosted by accused sex trafficker Ion Mirea, at the time president and CEO of FashionTV Romania. Mirea would later be named in an ongoing Romanian sex trafficking investigation into the Belgian action hero Jean-Claude Van Damme, an old friend from Lisowski’s Bangkok days, after a witness told Romanian state police Mirea and Lisowski supplied five women to Van Damme at a 2015 FashionTV party in Cannes. In 2009, Van Damme told the Austrian newspaper Kurier, “Adam and I met 25 years ago in Thailand. We give each other advice, he on my acting career, I on his business.”
In response to the allegations, Van Damme’s agent Patrick Goavec told People magazine last April that the reported facts of the investigation are “both grotesque and non-existent,” and the rumor is “as absurd as it is unfounded.” Goavec did not respond to the Prospect’s request for comment.
One year after the competition in Romania, Zampolli traveled to Turkey to judge a second FashionTV pageant. On August 17, 2018, FashionTV marketing director Natalya Menshikova posted a photo to Instagram captioned “The gang 🙂” which captured her night out with Lisowski, Zampolli, Exodus director Anthony Hickox, and one of the film’s stars, actor David Lipper, best known for his role on the 1990s ABC sitcom Full House. A few days later, the gang arrived at the Rixos Sungate hotel in Antalya, Turkey. That weekend, Lipper got in a few morning workouts with Van Damme, and participated in a daytime bikini contest, before Zampolli judged the official Miss FashionTV competition alongside Lisowski, Hickox, and Van Damme.
“I was friends with director Tony Hickox. He’s the one who really new [sic] Michel,” Lipper told the Prospect when asked about his relationship with all his fellow judges.
Asked about his own participation in these competitions, Zampolli responded by text, “During my time in Romania and Turkey, I was present strictly in a personal capacity following my career as a fashion executive and model agent. While there, I was formally invited to serve as a judge at recognized fashion and modeling events.” He added that he was “not authorized by the U.S. Department of State” to respond to any additional questions. His message ended “chat gbt” [sic].
A highlight reel of the event posted to the FashionTV Facebook page two months later identified him not as a fashion executive, but as “United Nations Ambassador Paolo Zampolli.”
Rixos Hotels hosted and promoted multiple FashionTV events at its Antalya properties between 2017 and 2019. And according to emails released by the Department of Justice, Epstein also paid to send his personal assistant to be trained as a masseuse, and teach massage, at a Rixos hotel in Antalya during this period.
More recently, FashionTV has improved its international profile through licensing agreements. The brand embarked on its own real estate empire in the United Arab Emirates, where former FashionTV vice president Romain Saint Gilles is currently a senior adviser and fund manager for the Royal Office of HH Ahmed Bin Faisal Al Qassimi. FashionTV’s “first branded restaurant and nightclub in Dubai,” FTV Dubai, opened at the Voco Hotel in January 2025, and two branded luxury high-rises are currently under construction, Fashionz by Danube in Dubai, and the BNW FashionTV Acacia at Al Marjan Island in Ras Al Khaimah. A third property, Orvessa Residences by Michel Adam in Dubai, is under development.
Its greatest success story may be the inroads it’s made in America, not on the airwaves but in the White House. A 2015 State Department report on sex trafficking in Moldova noted how a FashionTV director in Moldova, who previously served as a government minister tasked with combating organized crime and trafficking, was placed under arrest for his involvement in human trafficking. A decade later, and Zampolli, a man who has done nothing to hide his enthusiastic support for FashionTV, is now serving in the same State Department that made a pariah of Lisowski a half-century ago when they warned in one diplomatic cable that his failed zeppelin company “will hurt US interests and prestige” abroad.
In February 2025, Zampolli publicly declared himself the U.S. Special Envoy to Italy ahead of his official appointment to the State Department; at the same time, he visited Milan for Fashion Week, where FashionTV hosted a luxury gala at designer Philipp Plein’s eponymous nightclub. The night before the party, Zampolli dined with Lisowski and Mogsolova at Casa Cipriani. He posted two photos to Instagram with the caption “Soecial [sic] time with old friends.”
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