Paris prosecutor counts 26 Epstein-case victims in France and new recruiter names

Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on Thursday, 10 September 2026, that French investigators have identified 26 alleged victims in the Jeffrey Epstein trafficking inquiry and have received further names of potential recruiters. She spoke to France Inter. Thirteen of the 26, she said, had never appeared in any previous case file, including the files on model agents Jean-Luc Brunel and Gérald Marie.

Twenty-four of the 26 are clearly identified. Eight still need to be interviewed. Some live abroad. Beccuau said the work runs to New York and "towards Saint-Tropez, toward Cannes." She described the network as a labyrinth in which investigators have to pull "dozens and dozens of threads," not one.

The comments followed the death of Daniel Siad, a French model scout accused of recruiting women for Epstein. Siad was found dead at his home in Colombes, west of Paris, on 20 July, before detectives could question him in this round. He had earlier denied the public accusations. Beccuau said other names of possible recruiters had arrived since then. She did not publish them.

France reopened a preliminary inquiry in February after the U.S. Department of Justice released a new set of Epstein records in January. Epstein died in a New York jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking girls. Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a U.S. sentence. Brunel died in a Paris jail in 2022 while under investigation. The French case is a trafficking file that can cover acts by French nationals against victims abroad as well as acts on French soil.

Beccuau's 13-of-26 figure is the information gain in Thursday's interview. It means half the people now counted by Paris were invisible to earlier French and American dockets. That is a statement about the size of the unrecorded pool, not about any newly named suspect. The recruiter names sit in the file. They are not in the radio clip.

Modelling agencies in Paris have been a recurring setting in this story for twenty years. Saint-Tropez and Cannes are the summer geography that sits on the same flight paths as New York and the Virgin Islands. The prosecutor's list of cities is a map of where statements will be taken next. Eight interviews remain. Until those are done, the 26 is a working total, not a closed victim list.

No charges were announced on Thursday. The public record from the briefing is the count, the share of new names, the death of Siad before a new interview, and the promise that no lead will be dropped. That is enough to keep the French file open through the autumn. It is not a verdict on anyone Beccuau declined to name.