French investigators have expanded an investigation into accusations of sex trafficking linked to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender, identifying 13 new possible victims, the top Paris prosecutor has said.
All told, 26 victims may have been trafficked for Mr. Epstein by recruiters in France, according to the prosecutor, Laure Beccuau. She said in a radio interview on Thursday that the French authorities had “obtained other names of potential recruiters,” though she did not give further details.
France opened the investigation in February, after the U.S. Justice Department released more than three million pages of files on Mr. Epstein, some of which documented his life in France.
Mr. Epstein was a part-time resident of Paris for nearly two decades, living in a sumptuous apartment on Avenue Foch, one of the city’s grandest boulevards. He cultivated relationships with some of France’s most influential cultural and political figures.
The French authorities have investigated figures in the French modeling industry who worked with or befriended Mr. Epstein. Those include Jean-Luc Brunel, a modeling agent who was found hanged in his prison cell in 2022, while facing rape charges. (Mr. Epstein also died in prison, in 2019. His death was ruled a suicide.)
The prosecutor’s announcement on Thursday followed the death this summer of Daniel Siad, a modeling scout who was accused of repeatedly recruiting young women for Mr. Epstein. Mr. Siad was found dead in his home before the French authorities had questioned him. Prosecutors said at the time that an autopsy had not revealed the cause of Mr. Siad’s death but that investigators had found no signs of violence.
Mr. Siad’s death caused outrage among victims of sex trafficking, who were frustrated that he had died before being fully investigated and condemned what they described as the French justice system’s slowness. Ms. Beccuau acknowledged that frustration in her interview on Thursday, saying she understood why the victims were sad that Mr. Siad had died before officials had interviewed him.
But she justified the length of the investigation by noting its scale. “We’re covering a very wide area,” Ms. Beccuau said, noting that the authorities had followed leads in New York, Cannes and Saint-Tropez, in addition to Paris.
“The Epstein network, as far as we’re concerned, is a labyrinthine network,” Ms. Beccuau said. “You have to pull on dozens and dozens of threads.”
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