Who were the ‘two playmates’ Ghislaine offered to Naomi Campbell – and why did the supermodel stay so close to Epstein after he was jailed? ALISON BOSHOFF

Naomi Campbell has long been drawn to powerful mentor figures. A psychologist might look to her childhood for explanations – she never knew her father and left London for Paris to start her modelling career at the age of just 16.

Indeed, she called the late Tunisian-French fashion designer Azzedine Alaia ‘Papa’ and said he ‘guided’ and ‘protected’ her as she rose to the top of the fashion industry.

The late statesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela was another hero and close friend. She called him ‘Madiba Tata’ or ‘father Madiba’ and referred to him as her ‘grandfather’.

But whether by bad luck or something darker, there have been other mentors in her gilded life who have been corrupt, amoral and criminal, including, as this newspaper revealed last week, the paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Recently released files show that Epstein was invited by her to three parties, including her Fire & Ice party in St Tropez in 2004, plus a Fashion for Relief party in 2010 and a tribute party hosted by Dolce & Gabbana in Paris in the same year. That, of course, was two years after Epstein had been convicted of sex offences with an underage girl.

Campbell is also pictured with Epstein’s victim Virginia Giuffre, later Roberts, at the model’s 31st birthday party, which was held on a boat in the South of France in 2001. Before her death by suicide, Giuffre recalled that she flew out for the party with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and was sexually abused that night by a man introduced to her by Epstein.

Soon after, Giuffre, who was only 17 then, was introduced to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in London.

That Campbell, now 55, knew of Epstein’s 13 months in jail from 2008 to July 2009 seems a reasonable assumption. After leaving prison, the serial rapist was placed on probation under house arrest for a further year, and Campbell was among those invited to a celebratory dinner in New York just four months after his release, when the then Prince Andrew was visiting.

An email from party organiser, publicist Peggy Siegal, notes that December 6 is ‘Andrew’s last night’ and adds that Naomi and her boyfriend are ‘coming for dinner at 9’.

However, that’s not the most jaw-dropping link between Epstein and the south London-born supermodel. That comes in this exchange back in April 2002 in the form of emails between Naomi and Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell writes: ‘Hey – why are you not in NY? Remember I have two playmates for you.’ Campbell does not even ask her what she is referring to but simply replies: ‘I’m in Miami heading to LA in a few. Lets meet up somewhere soon to [word redacted].’

In 2021, Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking and other offences including recruiting and grooming teenagers for Epstein between 1999 and 2007.

When asked for comment, a friend of the supermodel said that, to her recollection, the reference to ‘playmates’ referred to male and not female companions.

The friendship between Epstein and Campbell – who has in her time notched up four convictions for physical assault – is traceable throughout the files released by the US Department of Justice last week and statements previously given by others, including Virginia Giuffre and his housekeepers on Little St James, his Caribbean island now known as ‘Paedo Island’.

Having reviewed the 200-plus mentions, however, little is more damning than the ease and warmth of her interactions with Epstein throughout the 15-year period covered by the emails (from this latest tranche) from 2001 up to 2016. Naomi’s characteristic sign-off, for example, is ‘Love & Light’.

They are so close that her boyfriend in 2010, the married Russian billionaire Vladislav Doronin, invites Epstein to join him and Naomi on a private boat trip they are about to take up the Nile in Egypt. In another email, Doronin refers to Naomi as ‘Omi’ and informs Epstein of her dietary requirements, though it’s not clear why. ‘Omi also likes cook [sic] fish and chicken wings.’

That same year, Epstein has a favour of his own to ask – can two of his female friends come to Doronin’s party in Moscow?

‘Vlad, when are you coming back,’ he writes. ‘How is N? My two friends [name redacted] and [name redacted] are in Moscow can they attend your party, thanks.’ He adds that the pair ‘work for my foundation’. It is entirely possible that these two are Epstein victims, though there is no suggestion that Campbell or Doronin knew this.

Meanwhile, Epstein is seen sympathising with Naomi when she has to appear before the war crimes trial of Liberian warlord Charles Taylor, also in 2010. Highly embarrassingly, Naomi has to admit to the court in The Hague that she took possession of a paper bag full of ‘blood diamonds’ from the dictator after they had dinner together.

‘Well she did look good on the stand,’ Epstein tells Doronin, adding: ‘I know how unpleasant it was.’

Taylor was convicted of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 50 years in jail.

There is so far only silence from Campbell herself on the links just revealed, which go beyond what has previously been reported. In the past Epstein has been described as a ‘business adviser’ to her, but the plentiful messages appear to show a closer and deeper relationship than that.

A friend now says: ‘She was definitely in touch with him and you can see that it was a more cordial relationship than purely professional. That said, she was not the only supermodel on his jets and in his orbit.

‘The most important thing is that her thoughts are for his victims and she is horrified by his offending. She wishes she had never met him, and has said this.

‘She did not know at the time what was going on at all. She had no idea. People were fooled by him as he covered up the true nature of what the conviction was for in 2008. He pulled the wool over people’s eyes. There was a facade of respectability because famous people would introduce him to other famous people.’

Campbell has always denied knowledge of Epstein’s sex crimes. In a video posted on YouTube in 2019, just after the financier’s death in August, she said: ‘What he’s done is indefensible. I stand with the victims. They’re scarred for life.’

In an interview in November that year with The Guardian, she was positively combative about her links to him. ‘I’ve met thousands of people at events and been photographed with them – there are pictures of me with everyone,’ she said. ‘Are you going to single me out, when there are hundreds of people pictured with the same people, who you don’t care to mention? Do me a ****ing favour. I won’t sit there and roll over and take that s***.’

Campbell’s one-time fiance, the former Formula One boss Flavio Briatore, must be counted as one of her grubbier mentors – and by her account it was Briatore who introduced her to Epstein. By the time she met and started dating him in 1998, Briatore had multiple convictions for fraud. They were engaged in 1999 and split in 2003. Yet it’s clear that Naomi’s association with Epstein and Maxwell continued for years afterwards.

Miles and Cathy Alexander, Epstein’s housekeepers on Little St James, recalled in an interview in 2011 that Campbell arrived for a visit at some point between 1999 and 2004 carrying a trunk the size of a ‘coffin’ for a two-day stay.

In court documents relating to a 2017 defamation case, Virginia Giuffre said that Epstein was proud of his friendship with the supermodel and had pictures of her around his house in Florida.

She said on a hall table at his home there were ‘at least 50 photographs, some with nude photographs, some with girls in raunchy – I mean lingerie – photos mixed in with Jeffrey and some of the privileged people he’s met, such as, you know, I don’t know, like old girlfriends or models or Naomi Campbell or whatever the case is’.

Maxwell seemed to agree that the pair were friends. In an interview released last year but done before she was jailed, she said of Campbell: ‘I believe she may have gone to the island and she may have gone to see his house in New York . . . They were friends. Her friendship with Mr Epstein was independent of me.’

Campbell also apparently flew on Epstein’s Boeing 727 plane – once to Miami with the financier in 2000, and on another flight in 2002.

The documents in the Epstein files do not provide a full account of his associations, business dealings and crimes, and any email trail is likely to be far from the complete picture. They only include files gathered by the FBI investigation into Epstein, court records and grand jury documents.

Many of the files relating to Campbell are just snippets of emails. ‘Please send my love to JE’, she writes in 2009 to Epstein’s PA. A series of emails the following year show Epstein setting up a meeting between Campbell and US retail tycoon Linda Wachner at his home in New York.

In 2016, there is a flurry of contact as Campbell apparently seeks to get a lift on Epstein’s private plane. ‘Naomi is following up on using the plane . . . she said she spoke to you about this and hopes you can call her soon . . . she needs to know,’ writes Epstein’s PA.

A follow-up email says: ‘Naomi has called back twice now saying she doesn’t have any back up plan as she really thought from you this would work. Says she has booked the hotel and car and driver and mentioned something about [name redacted] mom. She is wondering if the plane can take you to where you are going then go back and take her to where she needs to be.’

A few days later the PA gets in touch with Naomi saying: ‘I hope all worked out the other day. Jeffrey wanted me to let you know he will be in New York tomorrow Wed Jan 27th and Thu Jan 28th . . . might you be around?’

Her name is also mentioned in the accounts of two alleged Epstein victims, whose names have been redacted, one of whom says she first met Epstein at a party at his New York mansion at which Campbell was present. The other says that Epstein told her he could get her work with the lingerie label Victoria’s Secret because ‘he knew Naomi Campbell’.

What the contact does appear to show is that the pair had a long association, which was enough of a friendship to include socialising and shared holidays. Why did she get drawn in? Epstein was, perhaps, an unavoidable monster. His many friends found him charming even after the FBI’s investigation revealed the abuse of minors.

Naomi’s friend, model and socialite Annabelle Neilson who died in 2018, even seems to have offered to find Epstein sexual playthings when he came out of prison.

A series of stomach-churning emails written between 2010 and 2012 show Neilson offering to set up Epstein with a number of women. She wrote: ‘So I am putting a little group of girls together. Hopefully, one of them will have all the right qualities you desire.

‘Wish I was 20 years younger and could speak French!!! I have to say that a few of my girls, who would be perfect for the job but are unfortunately past their sell-by date, would of [sic] all dropped their husband and almost children for the job when I asked them.’

In later correspondence, dated November 2012, Neilson was asked by the paedophile whether she had ‘any cute friends’ in Paris, to which she responds: ‘Non in Paris. Let me know if you come over. How about Davina?’

Epstein simply replies: ‘shes eduardos [sic]’. Neilson responds: ‘Oh yes, so she is. If I think of anyone suitable will let you know. X.’

Naomi Campbell’s great friend Kate Moss gets a mention in dispatches. An aide to Bill Gates, Boris Nikolic, crows in an email to Epstein about attending a wild party thrown by the global Aids charity amfAR in Sao Paolo, Brazil, in April 2013, at which Moss was a guest. Epstein seems to have attended a number of these and to have enjoyed the gossip.

While no one is suggesting that Moss or any of those she partied with knew of Epstein’s heinous abuse of teenage girls, the trove of emails certainly show how deeply he infiltrated British high society and the fashion world in the 2000s and 2010s. Epstein’s malign presence, it seems, was everywhere.