Daniel Siad, 69 years old, a recruiter of models for Jeffrey Epstein, was found dead in his home on the outskirts of Paris on Tuesday night. The Nanterre prosecutor's office has decided to open an investigation to determine the circumstances of his sudden death, initially attributed to a heart attack, according to the newspaper Le Parisien.
Siad was mentioned up to 2,000 times in Epstein's "files" and had received five rape complaints. Among them, the one from the former Swedish model Ebba Karlsson, who claimed to have traveled with him to Monaco under the pretext of a contract for a swimwear company. Karlsson claimed to have been raped by Said in a friend's pool house.
Although he had managed to evade justice for years, his name was well known to investigators since 2013, when a model testified against him: "He wanted me to be completely at his disposal. He saw me as a sexual possession. He always told me that I was his slave."
"I have never dated a model and I have never raped anyone in my life; I am a family man," Siad once declared to the BFMTV channel. His lawyer, Ménya Arab-Tigrine, had recently expressed his willingness to appear before the court: "He wants to be heard as soon as possible. The right to defend oneself is a constitutional principle of great value that should never be forgotten."
According to several testimonies, Daniel Siad referred to Epstein as "the boss" and was linked to Jean-Luc Brunel, founder of several modeling agencies and a recruiter of young people and minors for Jeffrey Epstein on both sides of the Atlantic. Brunel was convicted of rape in 2020 and was found hanged in the La Santé prison in Paris in 2022, three years after Epstein's death in prison under similar circumstances. The French prosecution recently decided to reopen the investigation into Brunel's death in prison.