Last week, we interviewed Amanda Ungaro, the deported former model haunting Melania Trump. RAI, the Italian broadcast network, has since broadcast a lengthy interview in which Ungaro shares more harrowing details of her longtime partnership with Melania’s former modeling agent – Trump’s current “Special Envoy for Global Partnerships” – Paolo Zampolli.
Ungaro’s is a voice from the Trumpworld demimonde: a familiar saga of youthful beauty defiled by early grooming, followed by an adult life lived in semi-servitude and physical fear, the glossy veneer of high fashion masking the dark truth.
Domestic violence was already on my mind when I watched Ungaro’s interview on Sunday. The Washington Post had, that morning, published a police bodycam image of Texas Rep. Cory Mills, a MAGA Republican, taken after his visibly bruised girlfriend called DC police. Mills is seen casually lounging, blaming the woman’s “easily bruised” skin and a fall for her injuries. The spectacle of relaxed posture, entitled impunity and a cop standing by listening without intervening is the quintessential image of the domestic abuser, re-enacted daily all over the country and probably the world.
In the RAI interview, Ungaro accuses Zampolli of drug use – specifically cocaine – and domestic violence.
He would beat me constantly, and if I didn’t want to have sex with him, he’d punch me. Once he smashed my laptop over my head. The last physical assault was between 2017 and 2018, when we separated. Paolo came home completely out of his mind, and I said to him: ‘Paolo, you’re wasted — go to sleep, I have to go to work tomorrow.’ But he kept coming at me. So I pushed him off and tried to lock myself in the bathroom. I tried to close the door, but he came in and started hitting me everywhere. Here, here — I have all the photos. My arms, my face, down here too. For a second I couldn’t feel anything at all...
When shown images of her bruises, Zampolli denied, and speaking his native Italian to the broadcaster, was dismissive, suggesting they were the result of her sportiness. “On her legs – she did kickboxing … She had a bruise here – this one did kickboxing every day.”
When the interviewer corrected him – “She did CrossFit, not kickboxing” – Zampolli changed course and went on the attack. “So these abuses – she made them up. I’ve never laid a finger on a woman.”
His attacks then devolved into a stream of racist and misogynist remarks, blaming Brazilians, Latin soap opera upbringing, Amanda’s background, and even her friends.
“It’s the Brazilian woman” – someone named Lidia – who he said tried to “cause trouble … this Brazilian whore. This one’s crazy. Brazilian bastard [breeds], they’re all the same. Oh, that one’s a nice piece of ass, we were together, we were getting to know each other. What a nut job she is. These models–”
These models. Fun to frolic with but mamma-mia, what a pain in the ass!
Zampolli once almost bought a modeling agency with Jeffrey Epstein, but the deal fell through. Like his buddy Donald, Zampolli says he was never pals with the Coney Island conman. “I knew he had the girls,” Zampolli told RAI. “I knew. But they weren’t mine, because they weren’t even models. They were young girls, minors, masseuses. The models were a cover-up for this Epstein.”
But like Jeff and Donald, Paolo really likes pretty girls and he too likes them young – if not illegal. His Instagram feed is a skein of selfies with dozens of gorgeous young women at Cipriani restaurants all over the world (He is pals with Giuseppe Cipriani).
The images of this haggard Lothario surrounded by sylphs brings to mind a scene in Loro, Paolo Sorrentino’s film about Silvio Berlusconi. A flabby old man with dyed black hair and immense worldly power is surrounded by dozens of young beauties on the lawn of a Sardinian palazzo. In a concupiscent tableau straight out of Nero’s court, they preen and dance for him. But when he finally lures the youngest of the beauties to his bedroom and tries to kiss her, she recoils, saying, “Your breath smells like my grandpa’s.”
I met Zampolli when I was writing my book on the Trump women, at his townhouse on 17th Street, which he had managed to designate a “diplomatic residence.” He had persuaded officials of the small Caribbean nation of Dominica that he was enough of a New York macher to prove useful as their UN “Ambassador.” He used that connection to, among other things, engage in the island’s Citizen by Investment industry, in which people with shady pasts, or from countries on no-fly lists, pay six figures to get a passport with easy entry to the Schengen Area or the USA. Zampolli participated in a passport-sale-financed deal with Dubai-based developers, and later went to court to extract a $7 million finders fee commission from them.
His sketchy business history includes founding an ocean conservation project “We Are The Oceans” (WATO) that in timing, topic and method almost exactly matched Ghislaine Maxwell’s “Terra Mar” – the latter literally a do-nothing front cooked up by crisis PR experts to try to salvage her reputation as things were going south for her former boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein.
Zampolli is reportedly in the process of eluding a 2023 roofie rape charge reported to the NYPD by a woman named Victoria Clarke, who says she was 23 when he lured her to his townhouse after a UN party. The sordid details appear in a disturbing report by Bekah Day, titled “Someone Was Always Watching.” Apparently, Zampolli shares the Epstein habit of wiring his residences with cameras. A rape kit confirmed rape and drugging, but the NYPD never carried the case forward reportedly because of his “diplomatic” status. Day claims she has heard from other women with similar stories. (Zampolli has called it extortion.)
Zampolli has since left little Dominica behind, now adding Trumpian impunity to the perk of diplomatic immunity.
Trump always kept the man who “discovered” his lovely wife close, but in Trump 2.0, he is locked in a bear hug. Cameras caught his perma-tanned mug next to Vice President JD Vance, striding across a tarmac in Hungary to a meeting with the soon-to-be electorally defenestrated Viktor Orbán a few weeks ago.
Last week, the Financial Times published a story about Zampolli’s work as Trump’s envoy. His catchy personal pitch these days is “$20 billion in 20 minutes,” referring to a “deal” he brokered with the government of Uzbekistan to buy Boeing jets. He also tried to sell nuclear energy in Hungary and talked the Romanians into opening a Donald J. Trump Park.
Yesterday, he posted a photo of himself in the backseat of a car, dashing through Belgrade, pointing to the flashing lights in his motorcade. The FT described him as an example of Trump’s “transactional” governing style. “Zampolli’s evolution from New York socialite and former modeling agent to globetrotting Trump envoy offers a window into how … loyalists are deployed as intermediaries in a system where access, relationships and deals often blur into one.”
But there is another darker way of looking at it. Ungaro told RAI:
I started asking myself: how is it that before, you weren’t that close to Trump, and now you’re best friends? Behind all of this, there’s a deal he made with Melania. Because he isn’t close to Trump – he’s close to Melania. Plain and simple. His relationship with Trump goes through Melania. [He says to Melania:] ‘Melania, I want to be the ambassador to Italy. Melania, you have to give me a position, a title.’ But I ask – how can Trump appoint as US ambassador someone who does drugs, someone who isn’t even American, but an immigrant? So it’s Melania who’s supporting him; it’s Melania who’s pushing him.
The FT is a proper British paper. It would never describe what Trump is doing with Zampolli in the language and with references to the social structure Mario Puzo understood, but we will: Keep your friends close and your mysterious wife’s old friends even closer.
Substack Live this Thursday 4/23
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I agree with Lucian. Indispensable. And we need to know more about Z and Melania.