The Dead Model and the Dirty Billionaire

This much we know: Late Sunday evening on Aug. 26, 2012, a party promoter and former male model named Pedro Gaspar left his apartment above the MC2 modeling agency to go out clubbing. It was a fairly typical night for the 29-year-old Brazilian. Along with his model girlfriend, Gaspar started out at hotspot 1Oak and ended up at the Meatpacking District nightclub SL. At every turn, they ran into fellow models and friends. Then something went terribly wrong. Six hours later, after ingesting cocaine and alcohol, Gaspar was in an ambulance heading to a hospital. Later that morning, he died.

His death went unnoticed by the media—just one more overdose in a shadowy world of party promoting and cutthroat modeling. It’s a world that feeds off good-looking kids like Gaspar and the girls he hung out with, some of whom worked for his downstairs neighbor, the modeling agency MC2. A world rife with drug abuse, alcohol addictions, and eating disorders—and, sometimes, sex crimes. Lately, this nightlife has been metastasizing into all models-and-bottles, an engineered free-for-the-filthy-rich domain where fat cats demand that their bubbly be poured from gilded magnums and that their girls be younger and younger.

MC2 has been back in the news lately thanks to court filings against billionaire and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. An alleged victim of Epstein’s has claimed that he pimped out underage girls to wealthy and powerful friends like Prince Andrew. She also claimed that Epstein got many of his girls from MC2 co-founder Jean-Luc Brunel, who “would bring young girls (ranging to ages as young as 12) to the United States for sexual purposes and farm them out to his friends, especially Epstein.” (Brunel has denied these claims. Epstein’s lawyers did not return requests for comment. Prince Andrew has previously denied the underage-sex allegations.)