Epstein Files - What if . . .

[AntiFascist]

14. There's also Trump's other friend, John Casablancas...

Teen models, powerful men and private dinners: when Trump hosted Look of the Year
...
Another contestant, who was 15 at the time, also remembers being asked to walk for Trump, Casablancas and other men on the boat in September 1992. She says an organizer told her that if she refused, she would be excluded from the competition. “I knew in my gut it wasn’t right,” she recalls. “This wasn’t being judged or part of the competition – it was for their entertainment.”

While Elite’s official brochure stated that contestants were aged between 14 and 24, all of those the Guardian has spoken to, competing in both years, were aged between 14 and 19. Some had come to New York with parents or chaperones in tow; others were alone. Many were away from their families for the first time. For them, the stakes were high, and the pressure to impress the judges great. As Casablancas had warned them at the outset of the competition, in a scene recorded by TV cameras: “You are going to be judged, constantly judged.” (In 1991 and 1992, the Elite contest was filmed for a 60-minute glossy television special, featuring interviews and behind-the-scenes footage, and later screened on Fox – an early foray into reality TV.) Casablancas was a powerful figure in the industry, and to many of the new crop of would-be supermodels, this seemed an opportunity too good to miss.
...
Journalists have scoured almost every corner of the 45th president’s life, but his friendship with Casablancas, and his involvement in Look of the Year in 1991 and 1992, have been largely overlooked. Yet the competition is more than a footnote in the Donald Trump story. In time, it would prove to be the foundation of his pivot into reality TV. He even married a former Look of the Year contestant: the current first lady, Melania Trump, narrowly missed out on a trip to New York in 1992, after coming second in the Slovenian heat.
...
Four years after Weil’s conviction, in 2002, Casablancas faced his own set of accusations in the civil courts. A former Look of the Year contestant, known only as Jane Doe 44, filed a lawsuit accusing him of repeatedly sexually abusing her, beginning when she was 15. The abuse began, according to the lawsuit, at Look of the Year 1988 in Japan, where Casablancas told Doe he was “falling in love” with her. At the end of the competition, the lawsuit states, “contestants drank and partied late into the evening” and Casablancas told the teenager to come to his hotel room. There, Casablancas sexually abused the girl “several times over the evening”. The abuse allegedly continued the following year; when the girl became pregnant, Casablancas told her “she would be having an abortion”. The abortion was allegedly “arranged and paid for” by Elite. Casablancas was 46 at the time.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/mar/14/teen-models-powerful-men-when-donald-trump-hosted-look-of-the-year