Amanda Ungaro: From sharing soirées with the Trumps to being deported by ICE

After spending nearly half her life in the United States, 41-year-old Brazilian Amanda Ungaro was deported from the country last October. She endured three hellish months in a detention center until she was expelled, like more than 600,000 immigrants since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 and set out to carry out “the largest deportation in history.”

What is unusual in the case of this former model who worked at the United Nations is that, alongside her former partner and the father of her son, businessman Paolo Zampolli, Ungaro had in the past shared evenings with the Trumps at the family’s Mar-a-Lago mansion, including a party to ring in 2022, which she now recalls as one of those “incredibly boring six-hour events.”

The two couples also spent other New Year’s Eves together, a White House Easter children’s party, a Fourth of July celebration… All meticulously documented on Instagram by Zampolli, the man who introduced Melania to the president and who was appointed special envoy for global partnerships by his friend. The Brazilian woman and the Italian American, who separated in 2023 after two decades together, are engaged in a bitter custody battle over their 16-year-old son, G.

“Now it’s war. We’ll see who wins. I kept quiet for years, and because of that, people judge me. They ask me, why are you speaking now? Because the man would not let me live in peace! I tried. I left the relationship with nothing, left my son at boarding school, and went to work,” Ungaro said last Tuesday in an interview at her new home, a penthouse in Rio de Janeiro. “It was not enough for him to destroy me during 20 years of relationship: he wanted to destroy me again when I started a new life, when I got married.”

Ungaro left New York and Washington behind. Having settled in Aventura, Florida, with her husband, everything fell apart last June. “Ten police officers stormed into our home, arrested me, and took my son to the police station,” she says. She and her husband, a Brazilian doctor, were arrested and charged with fraud at a cosmetic clinic following anonymous tips. She denies the charges, emphasizing that her deportation from the U.S. prevented her from defending herself. She insists that “the truth will come to light.” They put her in a cell, “with child murderers!” “Me, who has no criminal record. I was terrified,” she recalls.

When Zampolli learned that his ex-girlfriend was being held in custody, he contacted a senior official at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) so that she would remain jailed and be deported, thereby allowing him to secure the custody of their son that he had long sought, according to The New York Times. ICE complied with his request. Zampolli, reached by phone by EL PAÍS, denies any wrongdoing.

Deportation

Handcuffed at the hands and feet, she was transferred to an immigration detention center in Miami, where she spent three and a half months in complete horror. Her husband, who had a green card (permanent residency permit), was released. “I volunteered to scrub the floors at six in the morning so I wouldn’t go crazy. I spent the whole day crying; I read the Bible from beginning to end,” she says. She helped others, sharing with them her phone credit to make calls. She claims that there were detainees with residency permits, an octogenarian handcuffed in a wheelchair, and a young woman who had just lost a baby and had to wait a long time to receive medical care…

To proceed with the deportation, she was taken to Louisiana. “It was a hall with more than 120 people, the floor was wet, there were no windows, four days without seeing the sun… I came out infested with lice,” she recounts. She landed in Brazil wearing the prison uniform, with nothing, not even a cell phone. “I spent a month depressed in a room.”

Ungaro regrets not having left Zampolli sooner — and not having reported him. “I was living at the mercy of a sick psychopath who abused me psychologically, sexually, and physically. I asked many people for help. No one ever helped me. But I couldn’t leave without my son, and he would not sign [the authorization],” she says.

Zampolli denies the allegations: “I made her an [alternate] ambassador; we were invited to the White House… What kind of abuse is that? We had a telenovela-style relationship — a very toxic one,” he says.

Ungaro had left her hometown of Londrina, Brazil, at the age of 13 to become a model. She traveled extensively: São Paulo, Milan, Germany, Japan, South Korea… At first, her mother accompanied her, but she soon struck out on her own and set her sights on making it big in New York.

A flight with Epstein

In 2002, when she had not yet turned 17, she flew from Paris to New York on the Lolita Express, the private plane of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “My agent told me, ‘We’re going with a couple of friends, a private plane just for us.’ There were around 30 very young women there, 14, 15, 16 years old. I said, ‘What is this?’ And he replied, ‘Don’t worry.’” That is how she recalls a trip she first revealed to the Brazilian newspaper O Globo.

Ungaro claims that she didn’t interact with anyone on the flight, except to greet the hosts, Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, his accomplice, who is currently serving a sentence for sex trafficking. “Amanda, let me introduce you to Jeffrey,” her agent said. “He came over and asked, ‘Where are you from? How old are you? Which modeling agency do you work for?’ And he introduced me to Ghislaine.” She claims she never saw Epstein again; he was found dead in his cell in 2019. The same fate befell the modeling agent who put Ungaro on that plane, Jean-Luc Brunel, who was arrested in connection with the Epstein case and died in a Parisian prison in 2022.

United Nations

When she became a mother in 2010, she left the fashion industry. Her husband secured her a position at the United Nations, where, for a few years, she served as a diplomat for the island of Grenada, and he represented another small Caribbean island: Dominica. That’s where their titles as ambassadors come from. Two tiny countries, each with barely 100,000 inhabitants, that each hold one vote at the U.N. — just like China.

“At first, I didn’t understand anything. But I started making contacts, building a professional network. And it went very well for me,” she recalls. She appears in U.N. documents as Grenada’s representative in sessions on the International Criminal Court or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

She exchanged her model visa for a tax-exempt diplomatic passport. At the time, Zampolli preferred that his then-girlfriend retain that status because it was more advantageous from a tax perspective, according to an apparent out-of-court settlement to which this newspaper has had access. “Paolo used to tell me, ‘Wait for Trump to win the election [for the second time], and we’ll sort out your papers and he’ll give you an American passport,’” she says.

After several years with an expired residence permit, Ungaro was applying for a visa linked to her husband, the doctor, when she was arrested. He remains in Florida, trying to reach a legal settlement.

Zampolli, a well-known figure in New York’s nightlife scene for decades, was the owner of ID Models. And in that milieu, he occasionally crossed paths with Epstein. His name is mentioned a handful of times — in press clippings and an email he sent to the sex offender via a third party with a link to a luxury magazine — among the millions of documents released by the U.S. Department of Justice. Zampolli told The New York Times that they were not close.

The sun is setting over Rio de Janeiro as Ungaro finishes recounting her story, with all the countless twists and turns of the legal cases she is dealing with, including the bitter custody battle over her teenage son. While she continues to hold endless meetings with her lawyers, she dreams of reuniting with him and with her husband.

It is time for the photographs. She puts on her jacket, slips into a pair of heels, and poses with a serious expression.