A model scout who was likely to be questioned by prosecutors in France for his connections to Jeffrey Epstein was found dead this week in a house near Paris, French officials said on Wednesday.
The man, Daniel Siad, was in regular contact with Mr. Epstein about a decade ago, according to files released in January by the Justice Department. Their texts suggest that Mr. Siad repeatedly tried to connect Mr. Epstein, a disgraced financier accused of running a sex-trafficking ring, with people Mr. Siad described as female models, including one who he said was 15 and others who were under 18.
Mr. Siad later acknowledged his work for Mr. Epstein but denied wrongdoing. His body was found on Monday in a house in Colombes, a northwestern suburb of Paris, according to the local prosecutor’s office. The authorities are still assessing how Mr. Siad died, the prosecutors said.
He was named in February by Laure Beccuau, the chief Paris prosecutor, as “one of the people who could be questioned” as part of a pair of broader inquiries into people connected to Mr. Epstein that opened that month. Ms. Beccuau said in May that no one had been questioned yet because the investigation was still at an early stage.
In a broadcast interview that month, Mr. Siad denied the accusations against him and said he was waiting for justice to take its course.
In that interview, Mr. Siad said he had worked as a model scout for 30 years and was introduced to Mr. Epstein in the early 2000s.
Over 15 years, Mr. Siad connected Mr. Epstein to about a dozen models, Mr. Siad said. None of them ever gave him “negative feedback” about Mr. Epstein, he said. “My relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was strictly professional,” he added.
Mr. Siad’s lawyer, Ménya Arab-Tigrine, said on Wednesday that her client had “consistently proclaimed his innocence.”
Separately, prosecutors said this year that they had also received a complaint from a Swedish woman accusing Mr. Siad of committing “sexual acts that she describes as rape” in 1990 in France.
The woman, a former model named Ebba P. Karlsson, wrote on a website that she co-founded to publicize testimonies from abuse survivors that Mr. Siad “raped me in a pool house behind a villa on the French Riviera.” In the May interview Mr. Siad said, “I never raped a woman in my life.”
Mr. Siad is the second person connected to Mr. Epstein who has been found dead in France. In 2022, Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and Epstein associate who had been charged with the rape of minors, was found dead in his jail cell.
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