Beauty and the beast
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1985, 22-YEAR-OLD MARIANNE SHINE WAS INVITED TO PARIS to try her hand at modelling. A confident and academic young woman, she had graduated in classical art and archaeology from her college in Pennsylvania, having spent several summers in Greece on archaeological digs, and was excited to visit Europe again. Her Danish mother, a travel agent, and Hungarian father, a gynaecologist, encouraged her to go, convinced that the modelling agents there would take good care of her.
But after six months of modelling in Paris, Shine returned home a different person. “Before Paris I was this playful, creative girl, but that part of me vanished,” she tells me now. Her mother found her a job at a travel agency in their suburb of New York, but Shine wasn’t interested. She says: “It was like this deadening. I couldn’t fall asleep at night, and then I couldn’t wake up in the morning. I could barely trudge through the day.”
What Shine knows now but didn’t have the words for at the time is that she was experiencing a “deep, deep depression”. In Paris she had been sexually assaulted multiple times by men in the fashion industry. This culminated in being raped by her agent, Jean-Luc Brunel, then one of the most powerful men in the business, and the person entrusted with her care.
“I didn’t understand how deeply it affected me and I blamed myself,” says Shine, now 58, from her home in Mill Valley, California. “I felt like this dirty, vile, horrible thing.” She didn’t tell anyone, not even the therapist her mother arranged for her to see. “I just kept burying it,” she says. “I was so alone in that darkness.”
Three decades later, as #MeToo reverberated around the world, Shine opened up to friends and relatives, but rarely went into details. In October 2020, though, she read the Guardian’s investigations into abuse in the fashion industry, drawing on accounts from former models who had had similar experiences in Paris in the 1980s and 90s, including some with allegations against her alleged rapist, Brunel. “I thought: how many other women out there, like me, had buried it?”
Two months later, Brunel was arrested on suspicion of trafficking and raping underage girls. The investigation was being led by police investigating the paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. It emerged that the pair had been close associates, and that Brunel was accused of supplying more than 1,000 girls and young women for Epstein to have sex with. “That blew my mind,” Shine says. “I had no idea what I had been a part of.”
Shine is speaking now for the first time, and has contributed to a three-part Sky documentary. The series was developed from my Guardian investigations into sexual abuse in the fashion industry, and follows former models and whistle-blowers. In the final episode, Shine is filmed recounting her experiences over the phone to a lawyer in France as a witness in the growing criminal case against Brunel.
On 19 February this year, though, news broke that Brunel had killed himself in prison – mirroring the fate of Epstein. The 75-year-old had spent 14 months in custody, awaiting trial on charges of rape of minors and sexual harassment, which he denied, along with any participation in Epstein’s sex trafficking. Shine says she felt “this whole rollercoaster of emotions. I had buried it for so many years and then to have it just go ‘pfft – not possible’ … it was crushing.”
For Shine and the five other Brunel accusers who spoke to me for this story – four of whom are sharing their experiences for the first time – his death has been a trigger to speak out. All say their careers were affected by what they allege took place in Paris. They say Brunel was at the heart of a network of
