I was shocked at what I saw and I suppose a bit scared: Model reveals horror after witnessing Jean-Luc Brunel’s abuse as a teenager in Paris

A former model has broken her silence on witnessing the abuse of girls by a notorious modelling agent after leaving Scotland to work in Paris as a teenager.

Lynn Wales was just 17 and living in an apartment in the French capital when she saw agency boss Jean-Luc Brunel preying on other young girls. Horrified, she left the next day.

Wales, one of Scotland’s most successful models who worked for some of the biggest fashion labels in the 1980s, told how she contacted Scottish police two years ago after learning Brunel had been arrested to tell them what she had witnessed. Police Scotland said yesterday her statement had been passed to investigators in France.

Brunel once ran model agencies in Paris, New York and Miami, but was found hanged in his cell in La Santé prison in Paris in February. The 76-year-old had been held for more than a year on suspicion of the rape of minors and trafficking of minors for sexual exploitation.

He kept an apartment in Paris and Wales was one of the young models who worked for his agency that he invited to stay there.

Speaking to the Guardian, Wales, 55, from Cumbernauld, was one of six models to recount their experiences of Brunel and accuse the fashion industry of turning a blind eye to his behaviour.

Wales told the paper: “My room was down the hall from the salon, which was where it was going on and what I saw that night was horrific.

“These poor girls were just kids, and there were piles of cocaine. It was like a Renaissance painting: underwear, nudity, cocaine, definitely sex going on.”

She added: “I just went into my room. I was shocked at what I saw and I suppose a bit scared.”

The following day she confronted Brunel, had “a big fight” and she left his agency and returned to London.

Brunel and American financier and paedophile Jeffrey Epstein were close friends. Brunel was accused of supplying more than 1,000 girls and young women for Epstein to abuse.

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The Epstein scandal and revelations that former movie producer Harvey Weinstein paid off sexual harassment accusers for decades spurred the Me Too movement, triggering a flood of sexual misconduct toward women by men abusing positions of power in their industry.

Brunel was arrested at Paris’s Charles de Gaulle airport in December 2020 as he was trying to board a flight to Senegal.

His arrest was part of a French probe into sex trafficking and sexual assault allegations against Epstein, focusing on potential crimes committed against French victims and suspects who are French citizens.

Prosecutors suspected Brunel of raping, assaulting and harassing multiple minors and adults. They also suspected him of transporting and housing young girls for Epstein, who was found dead in a New York prison in 2019 as he awaited trial over allegations he ran a network using underage girls for sex.

Wales said that a number of young girls who worked for Brunel’s agency in 1982 lived in his apartment and often shared bedrooms. She said his apartment “was on one of the big avenues near the Arc de Triomphe. He had a maid and a cook. It was all so foreign to me.

“I was like the weirdo in those days, I didn’t drink or smoke. I was sewing a patchwork quilt, they thought I was from Mars.

“I’m from a wee village in Scotland, they must have thought I was mad.”

One night, she answered the phone in Brunel’s home. She said: “It was an American mother worried about her 14-year-old daughter who was coming to Paris.”

When the girl and other young women from the US arrived, Brunel promised them high-paying jobs including a Benetton campaign and several pages in Vogue. They joined one of the notorious parties that Wales witnessed, which she said were “filled with old, fat men.”

On December 20, 2020, after learning of Brunel’s arrest, Wales reported what she saw to officers at Cumbernauld police station.

Wales, who has since returned to Scotland to set up her own cleaning company, has previously revealed details of her life as a naive teenager on the high-fashion catwalks of Paris and Milan.

She shared a flat with another rising modelling star, Yasmin Le Bon, in Paris and went on to feature in glamorous photoshoots in exotic locations across the world. A teacher launched her modelling career after he submitted her picture to a competition and she won the prize – to join the elite Select Model Agency.

Wales said: “At 16 I set off for London with a huge suitcase, wearing a red leather trouser suit and caked in make-up. I wanted to be as glamorous as the girls on the Tennent’s lager cans. That was the dream. When I walked into Select they took one look at me and said ‘Get out, change, never wear that again, and get that make-up off’.

“My parents had a newsagent’s in Cumbernauld – it was my great great-grandfather’s – where I bagged the rolls and then did my milk and paper run. I learned a good work ethic but nothing prepared me for London. I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time.

“I’d be sent to Vogue, Harpers & Queen, Cosmopolitan and Elle for a casting. It was terrifying, like in the film The Devil Wears Prada.”

Police Scotland said yesterday: “We did receive a report from a witness in December 2020. However, it did not relate to offences in Scotland and the information was then passed to the relevant authorities in France and Spain. There was no further Police Scotland involvement.”