They were 17. No one protected them.

Carré Otis and Stacey Williams are 57 today. They waited for decades, not because they wanted to stay silent, but because the system they are speaking about functioned long enough to enforce silence.

Now they are speaking.

Otis was 17 when Gérald Marie, then head of Elite Model Management, began raping her in his Paris apartment. Often in his daughter’s room. The agency kept her passport, for safety, as they said. Every dollar she earned flowed back to the agency. She had no freedom to decide, no way out. She calls it today what it was: human trafficking. Marie is now in his seventies. French authorities have closed the investigation against him due to the statute of limitations.

Williams met Jeffrey Epstein in 1993, when she was about 25 and he was around 40. They dated for a few months. During that time, Epstein admitted to her that he had secretly filmed her naked. She believes it was a method of control. During that relationship, Williams says, she was groped by Donald Trump - openly, while Epstein watched. Trump’s representatives have denied the allegations. The White House left a request unanswered.

Trump knew Epstein well. Epstein once called him his closest friend. Photos show both of them together with Ghislaine Maxwell at Trump’s Mar a Lago estate. More than two dozen women have accused Trump of sexual misconduct. He has denied all allegations.

Stacey Williams about Donald Trump:

”His hands were all over me. They were on my breasts, they were on my butt,my hips up and down.They were back and forth smiling and grinning and carrying on a conversation while Donald ran his hands all over me.”

What Otis and Williams describe is not an isolated case. It is a system. There were structures, networks, people who worked together, again and again, over years. Otis says: it was far more organized than any of us could grasp at the time. It was not just a Jeffrey Epstein, not just a Jean Luc Brunel.

Women were also part of it. Williams names Faith Kates, co founder of the agency Next Model Management, who introduced her to Epstein. Kates left the company in 2019 after the Department of Justice released friendly emails between her and the convicted Epstein. It is not only the men in these agencies, Williams says.

Williams remembers one of her first appearances in Paris. They were sitting at a table, other underage models and the respected photographer Patrick Demarchelier. He asked them, one by one, to describe what underwear they were wearing. He stared at them. No woman in that situation could have said that his behavior was acceptable, Williams says. She still normalized it at the time. Like many others. Because the system was built exactly for that.

Patrick Demarchelier - died March 31, 2022

There are people who carry power as something self evident. Who never ask whether they are allowed, because no one ever said no. Or because no had consequences. Epstein, Marie, the networks behind them - they did not operate in secret. They operated openly, in studios, at parties, in agency offices, at tables with underage girls. What was hidden was not their behavior. What was hidden was the absence of any objection.

Otis says she feels that something is changing. The fog is lifting. People are looking, and it is truly ugly.

Ugly. Yes.

And treated as normal for far too long.