A voice memo released on X by Anthony Andrews, a longtime confidant of Amanda Ungaro, contains explosive allegations against Melania Trump and Paolo Zampolli. In the recording, which appears to capture Ungaro speaking directly to her ex-partner Zampolli, she tells him to stop pretending he introduced Melania to Donald Trump. She claims it was Jeffrey Epstein, alleging Melania was an escort of Epstein, and that is how she met Trump. Zampolli has dismissed the claims as disgraceful and suggested the audio could have been manipulated or AI-generated, though he has offered no evidence for that assertion.
Amanda Ungaro spent approximately 20 years inside the Trump social circle, largely alongside Zampolli, who is now a sitting Trump administration official and has been publicly credited with bringing Melania Knauss to New York and introducing her to Donald Trump. Zampolli founded the modeling agency ID Models, where Melania worked, and his name appears multiple times in the DOJ’s released Epstein files, including as a reported potential business partner with Epstein and as a listed partner in Ghislaine Maxwell’s Ocean Charity. The recording was deleted within hours, but screenshots and reposts had already spread widely, and Ungaro had also previously posted social media messages directly to Melania’s archived First Lady account, suggesting interactions she witnessed over two decades. Ungaro’s background adds significant context.
She grew up in Londrina, Brazil, and left home at 13 to pursue modeling. In 2002, at around 16 or 17, she was in Paris, where her modeling agent was Jean-Luc Brunel, whom the DOJ later identified as Epstein’s primary recruiter. Brunel placed her on a private flight with friends to New York, but the plane turned out to be Epstein’s Boeing 727, later dubbed the Lolita Express. Ungaro has described the flight as full of girls as young as 14, 15, and 16, and said she was scared.
She has said she never saw Epstein again after that flight. Brunel was arrested in 2020 and died while awaiting trial in a Paris prison cell in 2022. These details have been documented by credible reporting, positioning Ungaro as a survivor of Epstein-adjacent trafficking rather than a political operative. Ungaro’s personal history with Zampolli has also been fraught.
She left him in 2023, after reports he had made headlines over explicit messages sent to an ex-worker. She moved to Florida, married a Brazilian doctor, and became involved in a bitter custody fight over their teenage son. In June 2025, she was arrested in Miami on fraud charges connected to a medical spa business. According to the New York Times, Zampolli reached out to a senior ICE official, flagged that his ex-girlfriend was in the country on an expired visa, and during a call to ICE’s Miami field office, it was noted that her case mattered to someone close to the White House.
Agents picked her up before she could post bail, and she spent roughly three months in ICE detention, which she described as horrific. She was deported to Brazil in October 2025, arriving in a prison uniform. Her green card-holding husband was released, and a New York court had already allowed her son to relocate to Brazil. Zampolli later brought the boy back to the U.
S. , leading Ungaro to file a kidnapping complaint. Zampolli has called the ICE report absurd, and DHS has denied any political targeting, pointing to the visa overstay and the fraud case. The controversy escalated when, two months before the voice memo went public, on April 9th, 2026, Melania Trump walked into the White House grand foyer and held an impromptu press conference, reading a prepared five-minute statement.
She said she had never known Jeffrey Epstein, that Epstein did not introduce her to Donald Trump, and that she met her husband by chance at a New York City party in 1998. She condemned the “lies” linking her with Epstein. She left without taking questions. President Trump told an interviewer that day he had not known she was going to appear and said she did not know Epstein.
Multiple outlets now report that Ungaro’s escalating social media threats were the likely trigger for Melania’s statement. At the time, most of the public was not actively discussing Melania and Epstein in any serious mainstream way, but Ungaro had already been posting, saying things like”I’m going to expose everything I know” and claiming she had witnessed highly compromising interactions. By pre-denying a story that had not yet fully circulated, Melania inadvertently drew more attention to the Epstein files at a politically sensitive moment. The statement backfired, making her the story.
Several facts in this saga are verified. Emails between Melania and Ghislaine Maxwell, released by the DOJ, include an October 2002 message in which Melania praised a New York magazine profile of Epstein, wrote”You look great on the picture,” and asked about Palm Beach. Maxwell replied warmly, calling her”Sweet Pea. ” Snopes rated these emails genuine, and Melania confirmed she sent them, calling them casual correspondence.
Documented photographs also show Melania and Trump at events with Epstein and Maxwell, including a 2002 Dolce & Gabbana opening and an event at Mar-a-Lago. Epstein was also confirmed present at Zampolli’s modeling agency during casting sessions, reviewing model portfolios. However, the central escort claim rests entirely on Ungaro’s voice memo, and she does not claim to have personally witnessed it. Her consistent account is that she saw Epstein only once, on the plane at age 17, and that she is repeating what Zampolli told her over their 20 years together.
An FBI proffer document does contain a typed line saying”Epstein introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump,” but handwritten notes from the same interview appear to point to Zampollli as the matchmaker, making the document self-contradictory. Separately, biographer Michael Wolff made a claim about Melania’s involvement on a podcast, but The Daily Beast retracted its article based on that claim in July 2025, saying it did not meet editorial standards after receiving a legal letter from Melania’s attorneys. Wolff himself later clarified he never actually said Melania was involved in Epstein’s crimes. After the voice memo surfaced, Melania began trending again.
She skipped Trump’s May 2026 state visit to China, with Eric and Lara Trump attending instead, and reports surfaced that her East Wing office had been demolished to build a new ballroom, fueling online conspiracy theories. However, Melania has consistently been the most absent modern first lady, having skipped most of the 2024 campaign trail and Trump’s hush money trial. On June 10th, 2026, Trump’s 80th birthday, she appeared publicly at a historic UFC event staged on the White House grounds, which largely deflated the speculation. The honest bottom line remains ambiguous.
Ungaro is a documented survivor with clear personal grievances, including a deportation and a custody dispute involving an ex who now holds a White House position. That does not automatically make her credible, nor does it dismiss her. The full truth appears to remain buried within the heavily redacted Epstein files.
