What happened
French professional model recruiter Daniel Siad, who introduced Jeffrey Epstein to young women and teenage girls, was found dead in his home near Paris, French prosecutors said Wednesday. Siad’s name “appears more than 2,000 times” in the Justice Department’s Epstein files, which also document the deceased Epstein paying him “tens of thousands of dollars,” CNN said.
Who said what
Siad, 69, had been the “subject of special investigative techniques,” including phone taps, as part of an ongoing investigation of Epstein-related human trafficking and tax fraud, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said in a statement. But nothing had “produced evidence justifying his immediate arrest.”
The Epstein files exposed not only the sex offender’s “cozy relationships with high-profile and powerful” people, The Washington Post said, but also a “network of lesser-known associates — including those from the modeling industry — who offered to bring women into his orbit,” often via “crude and sexualized” emails in which the “purpose of the introduction was not explicitly stated.” Siad is the “second man publicly linked to Epstein who has died in France,” Reuters said, after modeling agent Jean-Luc Brunel, who was “found hanged in his prison cell in 2022.”
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What next?
Siad died of a heart attack, his lawyer Ménya Arab-Tigrine told Reuters, though “we must await the autopsy results to confirm.”
