Which modeling agencies represented Melania Trump in the 1990s and were any involved in disputes or lawsuits?
Executive summary
Melania Trump worked with several modeling agents and firms in the 1990s: European agencies early in her career, Paolo Zampolli’s New York operation (often described as Metropolitan Models) which helped bring her to the United States in 1996, and she was later listed as a recruit of Donald Trump’s Trump Model Management when that firm launched in 1999 [1] [2]. Coverage and archived ledgers from a defunct New York firm show she was paid for U.S. modeling assignments before her official work visa, and the firms connected to her U.S. work were later involved in legal disputes and media-defamation suits that touched on their histories [3] [4] [5].
1. Which agencies represented Melania in the 1990s: a short chronology
Records and multiple contemporary accounts show Melania began with European agencies in the early 1990s, accepted a Milan contract in the early 1990s, and then worked with Paolo Zampolli—who ran a New York modeling operation and has been identified as sponsoring her U.S. immigration in 1996—before she was associated with Trump Model Management after meeting Donald Trump in 1998 and the agency’s February 1999 founding [1] [2].
2. Documentary evidence that ties her to a specific New York firm
Accounting ledgers and contracts produced to the Associated Press and reported by The Guardian and PBS indicate a New York firm’s records list Melania (as Melanija Knaus / Melania Knauss) with ten paid U.S. assignments and roughly $20,000 in gross earnings in the weeks before her October 1996 work visa; those documents were authenticated by a former employee and were later found among materials connected to a legal dispute about the firm’s dissolution [3] [4] [5].
3. What disputes and lawsuits involved the agencies that represented her
The New York firm whose ledgers mention Melania was part of a late-1990s legal dispute tied to the business partners who ran it; many of the accounting pages that show payments were discovered amid that dissolution litigation and storage of firm records [3] [4]. Separately, Donald Trump’s Trump Model Management has been the subject of reporting and former-model allegations about immigration-skirting and abusive agency practices, and the wider modeling industry has faced class-action suits alleging excessive fees and exploitative “agency debt,” though those suits implicate multiple major agencies rather than proving specific unlawful acts tied to Melania’s individual files [6].
4. Defamation suits and media retractions connected to allegations about agencies
When media outlets and bloggers published allegations that a modeling agency Melania worked for doubled as an escort service, Melania sued for defamation; the Daily Mail retracted the claim, apologized and agreed to pay damages, and other bloggers settled or faced suits, demonstrating that sensational claims about agency activities were litigated and in at least one high-profile instance legally repudiated [7] [8] [9] [10].
5. How to read the evidence: contested facts and open limits
Primary-source ledgers and AP/PBS reporting establish she was paid for modeling in the U.S. before her formal work visa in October 1996 and that those ledgers came from a firm later involved in partnership litigation, but reporting does not establish criminality tied to Melania herself nor does it uniformly identify a single “escort” or trafficking enterprise connected to her work; high-profile allegations were litigated and retracted in court settlements, and some industry critics say immigration-skirting was once common—an industry-level critique separate from the settled defamation claims [3] [4] [6] [7].
6. Bottom line: which agencies and what legal entanglements
The most consistently documented associations are with Paolo Zampolli’s New York modeling operation (linked to Metropolitan Models in many accounts) and later appearance as an early recruit of Trump Model Management; documents from a defunct New York firm tied to her early U.S. work were produced in connection with that firm’s dissolution litigation, and media reports that sensationalized the firm’s activities led to defamation suits and retractions rather than definitive public findings of criminal conduct regarding Melania’s work [2] [3] [4] [7].