I can write this now that these men are dead and cannot sue me for libel. Lucy Pilgrim would want me to, and would want you to know the despicable agents in her story and my first novel, Lucy, go see., were real-life characters whose names are in the Epstein Files. I used some of my own experiences in the modeling world in the novel, and Lucy would also like it that I ask you to scoundrel-hunt these characters in the pages of Lucy, go see.
I often remember when I heard the news that Jean-Luc Brunel had hung himself in his prison cell in Paris, and how strange it felt. I had been close to this man for some hours in the summer of 1988, a morning and an afternoon, a sort of overnight time, a lunch, a couple of dinners. It was and still is weird to remember the proximity and humanness of him, his elf-like expressions, agility, and hyperactivity, and then to imagine this slight, arrogant trickster preparing to hang himself, then prison guards finding his limp body dangling in dank darkness. It had been weird, too, over a year earlier, when I read he had been arrested in an airport. I imagined his knee-jerking movements and nonchalant expression as he was approached and taken away. I could see him nervously lying, smiling, twitching, his wounded-animal blood-shot eyes pleading. He was never a friend, yet I would call the time we spent together intimate, especially because he revealed a spark of his vulnerability to me during it. He was honestly despicable and that clarity was part of why I hung around for a while. I had a good hunch about what I was getting into when I agreed to go to his home, and I went as a curious writer gathering fodder because I wanted to see how far he would go. I think he sensed with me his usual shtick might require something more and maybe he was too tired for that and happy for the company. Maybe he hadn’t started slipping Mickies in drinks yet, or was out of them. It was August in Paris and perhaps it would never have happened if there had been more unoccupied teenaged models in town. Instead, he would get nowhere with me, other than at least avoiding what he proclaimed he loathed most–being alone. In the end, it was a shame-filled experience for both of us, for different reasons, or maybe the same, depending on how you look at it.
I hesitate to write more though there is so much I’d like to say about sexual abuse in our society. John Casablancas also comes to mind. Another agent, also deceased, also fictionalized in Lucy, go see., also unsurprisingly in those files. The one who said straight to my face when I was 19, “You are already old for this business. I like to get girls when they are fifteen, before they have a mind of their own.” It is also uncanny to think of the moments I spent with him and how his interest in me moved my life toward places I wanted to go, and how my subsequent disinterest in him moved it again, in yet other interesting directions.
And another, whose name I try to recall, who is possibly still alive, also in Lucy, go see., and whose name I also would be unsurprised to see in those files.
Oh, the trouble Lucy got into and out of!
Enough for now. This morning I went to see the film, Nuremberg, (go!) and am thinking about Dr. Douglas Kelley, the psychiatrist who interviewed the war criminals, and his disturbing revelations that they were not monsters, they were humans, shaped by extreme circumstances, and this line: “The only clue to what man can do is what man has done,” attributed to British philosopher R.G. Collingwood,
I am thinking about it because of what I wrote in the first paragraph above, and how I was able to feel sad and sorry for someone even while knowing he has done despicable things which I in no way condone. I knew some of those things then, from what he told me, and what I could imagine, but later learned the extent of the network and the depravity.
I am following the news and praying for justice, for accountability. Over all, I’m praying for abuse to stop, praying for people to see it and call it what it is.
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Marianne
Marianne Maili 