Who is Paolo Zampolli?

From catwalks to closed‑door deals, his story is stitched together in whispers and court filings.

Paolo Zampolli has spent the better part of three decades perfecting the art of being in the room where it happens, but never the one sitting under the interrogation lamp. Milan-born, impeccably tailored, and endlessly photographed in the company of presidents, diplomats, and women half his age, Zampolli built his reputation in the 1990s as the man behind ID Models, a New York agency that specialized in importing beauty from Eastern Europe and South America. It was through this pipeline that he brought Slovenian model Melania Knauss to the United States in the late 1990s. Multiple outlets have credited him with introducing her to Donald Trump, though in a 2005 interview Melania told her story without ever mentioning Zampolli. That omission has never quite erased his fingerprints from the scene.

As Trump rose in New York society, Zampolli was there—holiday gatherings at Mar-a-Lago, nights in Manhattan clubs, social events where the right model appeared at the right investor’s elbow at exactly the right time. Former associates have alleged that Zampolli used models as bait for real estate investors tied to Trump Organization projects. No paper trail proves it, but anyone who has spent five minutes watching how power actually circulates in these worlds can picture the choreography. He wasn’t just a guest in Trump’s life; he was the man who could populate a room, broker a deal, and keep the flow of champagne and beauty exactly where it needed to be.

By 2011, Zampolli had traded some of the runway glare for the quieter glow of diplomatic status. Appointed as the United Nations Permanent Representative for Dominica, and later for Grenada, he acquired the kind of access that comes not from a ballot box but from backroom agreements with small nations happy to have a well-connected advocate in New York. It was during this period that Ghislaine Maxwell launched the TerraMar Project in 2012, an ocean conservation nonprofit with lofty language, slick branding, and—critically—no measurable conservation results. Zampolli sat on its board of directors alongside Maxwell, shipping magnate Scott Borgerson, and other members of the global elite. TerraMar’s donor list was undisclosed, its structure opaque, and its networking potential beyond reproach. For years, the organization floated in the same rarefied waters as Epstein’s social circle, with Maxwell at the helm and Zampolli comfortably on deck.

The end came with a crash of timing too neat to ignore. On July 6, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was arrested on sex-trafficking charges. On July 12, TerraMar shut down without warning. Five days separated the arrest from the dissolution, five days that saw Maxwell vanish from public life and Zampolli maintain his studied silence. No law enforcement agency has accused him of wrongdoing. No charges have touched his name. But the proximity is impossible to ignore: years on the board of Maxwell’s nonprofit, constant presence in Trump’s social sphere, and a sudden vanishing act by the organization as Epstein’s empire collapsed. If it was coincidence, it was the kind that makes career cynics nod and say, “Of course.”

The shadows lengthened in 2016 when Slovenian magazine Suzy alleged that Zampolli’s modeling agency operated as an escort service for wealthy clients. The Daily Mail repeated the claim in August of that year during the presidential campaign, only to retract it under legal pressure, insisting there was “no support” for the allegation and including denials from both Melania Trump and Zampolli himself. In the strict legal sense, the story was dead. In the court of public opinion, it lived on, sustained by the long and sordid history of modeling agencies that doubled as “arrangement services” for the rich.

Then came March 2025. Donald Trump, back in the White House, appointed Zampolli as “Global Ambassador,” a title with no grounding in U.S. law, no formal standing in international relations, and every appearance of being a political favor or symbolic protection. Officially, it meant nothing. Symbolically, it meant everything—a public reaffirmation of loyalty between two men whose histories are entwined in ways neither has ever fully explained.

Zampolli has never been called to answer in court for anything tied to Epstein, Maxwell, or TerraMar. He has never faced a trafficking charge, never seen his face on a mugshot. But his résumé reads like the itinerary of someone who knew exactly how the system worked, from the grooming pipeline of modeling agencies to the rarefied circles of diplomatic receptions, from the glitter of Trump’s empire to the murky waters of Maxwell’s doomed nonprofit. He is what survival looks like in this world: close enough to touch the power, far enough to avoid the fall. And if Jeffrey Epstein was the public scandal, Paolo Zampolli is the private reminder that the machine never stopped—it just learned to smile for the cameras.

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Paolo Zampolli’s name rarely makes headlines, but his fingerprints are on some of the most questionable deals of the last three decades — and his proximity to Trump, Maxwell, and offshore money trails is too tangled to ignore. Closer to the Edge followed the paper, the lawsuits, and the photo ops to connect dots the mainstream press leaves untouched. Support us so we can keep digging where others won’t.