15
Now I realize I didn't exactly have a money making look at the time. I had the french look or a Euro look.
I didn't have a portfolio or a coat. Doug loaned me giant oversized full length wool mens coat.
I walked miles and miles daily for auditions and casting to strange mens private apartments and lofts in seedy areas, up crooked old tenement buildings covered in spray paint. Shivering in the cold blasting wind alone I was homesick and alone. No one was interested in me. Not clients, not my agency.
Just men everywhere I went. I started socially smoking, light drinking and clubbing nightly with Lara.
Luckily I was cautious, always the lightweight and I consumed very little. While those around me drank heavily, snorted cocaine, and shot heroin. With the extreme amount of drugs and booze being handed to me every day and everywhere I went I even had to pretend at times to be too wasted for more as I turned down offerings, or pretended to take some as not to appear too good for the crowd.
NYC was gritty still. Peepshows all around Times Sq, hookers fighting over crack pipes, purse thieves,
and dirty old men everywhere I went 2x and 3x my age. Every day I was sent on go-sees to meet clients, auditions, and castings for modeling jobs as well as many photographers, all men. Sometimes I would see 8-12 appointments in a day walking miles and miles along the Manhattan streets.
Model Life
“Every street I walked I scanned it for men and potential harassers. Every casting, go see and audition carried risk, every unvetted person called my agency could be a model fucker”
As a model in the streets of Manhattan all day, attending meetings with men the agency often had never even met I was at risk and I knew it. I had already heard the stories. The wispers, the gossip, the warnings. I had been told by a close model friend of her model contract with Karens Paris, with model agent Jean Luc Brunel, head of Karens Paris.
Jean Luc Brunel #jeanlucbrunel
When my freind left Oregon and headed to Paris on a contract with Karen models I admit I was a bit jelous but mostly I was thrilled for her. What surprised me most is when she promtly returned home to Oregon after 3 weeks. She was different. Changed. She was 16. Finally the day before I left for NYC, with my own offer from Karens Models she confided in me her story in Paris and a warning about Jean Luc Brunel. She told me how he had drugged and raped her. A story I would hear over and over for the next few decades. (#Jeanlucbrunel #karensparis #modeling) She explained through tears how she found herself in a nightclub unable to speak, walk or see straight with her agent at Le Bain Douches, the legendary nightclub in Paris. Then she shared how she woke up tired to his bed posts, naked with womens scarves. How he kicked her out of the agency as she left his apartment after his failed attempt to gas light her as to what had happened. #metoo #maxwell #Epstein #Princeandrew
The Model Fuckers #Modelfucker #Modelfuckers
“Little did I know Jean Luc Brunel would haunt me.”
When I heard the first story about Jean Luc Brunel I was 13 and this was 30+ years ago. What I didn't know was that Jean Luc Brunel would haunt me for the next 30+ years everywhere I went. There was the constant stream of stories among models about the"model fuckers" #Modelfuckers and the men and women who enabled or "introduced" them to models. #Modelfucker was how we all refered to them. It was a very well known, commonly used loose term which covered just about every male we met. From those just enamoured by models, those who wanted to marry one as a trophy wife, the ones looking for side chicks or arm candy, to the model agents, and the rapists we wispered about. There were powerful ultra wealthy ones, #Epstein#Weinstein to the starving but cool artists and musiciaones. The gallery owners, club owners, photographers, club promoters, doctors, lawyers, diplomats, royalty, celebrities etc. Perceived beauty was in high demand among men of all walks of life but with the title of "Model" it was a golden ticket and a curse.
My first year
I made it my first trip to NYC for 3 months. It was brutal. Between the freezing winter, loneliness, and constant verbal and groping assault by males in my orbit daily I just couldn't hack it. You see I had been sheltered and protected although I was a teen runaway and 9th grade drop out I had intelligently surrounded myself by, and raised by amazing gay men and women #gay#LGBTQ#Lesbian and now I was in a very different world of men and women.
