A model scout accused of rape and trafficking with links to the late American sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his Paris home on Monday.
Daniel Siad was under investigation by Paris prosecutors for accusations of rape and organizing human trafficking. The criminal investigation into Siad was launched based on complaints from women who came forward after his name appeared nearly 2,000 times in files on Epstein released by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Siad, 69, had denied all of the accusations.
An autopsy report has not been issued to confirm his cause of death, but his lawyer said that if he died of a heart attack, it may have been due to stress caused by the ongoing investigation.
“Daniel Siad never stopped proclaiming his innocence,” said his attorney Menya Arab-Tigrine. “If he died of a heart attack, this unbearable wait, the opprobrium cast upon him, and by extension on those close to him, the pressure and anguish with which he lived daily, will have played some part in it. We must wait for the results of the autopsy to know whether it was indeed his body that gave out. Let us not forget that he was never prosecuted, and therefore never implicated judicially.”
U.S. Department of Justice
Siad recruited models for leading French modeling agent, Jean-Luc Brunel, who was a close associate of Epstein.
Brunel, who denied charges of rape and human trafficking, was found hanged in a Paris prison cell in 2022 while he was awaiting trial.
The Paris prosecutor’s office said its investigation into sex trafficking linked to Epstein, launched in February amid revelations in the documents released by U.S. authorities, “is continuing in order to identify all individuals likely to be implicated, notwithstanding the termination of the public prosecution concerning Daniel Siad.”
Former Swedish model Ebba Karlsson, who is now in her 50s and had accused Siad of rape, told the French news agency AFP that his death was “very frustrating,” as he “was very close to be arrested. We worked so hard for this, trying to have justice.”
Just last week, six women, mostly American, filed legal complaints in France accusing another former top modeling agent, Gerard Marie, of rape and human trafficking in the 1980s and 1990s.
Those allegations pre-date the current statute of limitations in France, which is 20 years for alleged crimes against adults and 30 years for crimes against minors, but there is a major debate in France underway about whether the country should abolish the statute of limitations for the rape of minors entirely.
Lawmakers are expected to debate the proposal this year.