By Julie K. Brown and Grethel Aguila, Miami Herald
Paolo Zampolli, a special envoy for President Donald Trump, was part of a United Nations passport-selling scheme that led to the death of a former U.N. president, according to Amanda Ungaro, an ex-Brazilian model and former U.N. diplomat who had a 20-year-relationship with Zampolli.
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In an interview she gave to a Brazilian journalist livestreamed Sunday on YouTube, Ungaro, 41, did not implicate Zampolli in the official’s death, but she claimed she presented documents and other evidence about the scheme to members of Congress, whom she did not identify. She said in the interview that the former president of the U.N. General Assembly, John w. Ashe, was murdered by Chinese nationals who were also involved in the scheme.
Ashe’s 2016 death was ruled an accident after the medical examiner said a barbell fell on his neck as he was lifting weights at his New York home. He was 61.
The Miami Herald has not been able to corroborate Ungaro’s allegations. But the Herald did confirm she has been in contact with the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.
Ungaro set off a firestorm in April when she claimed on social media that she had damaging information about Zampolli, President Donald Trump, first lady Melania Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. At the time, Melania held a rare news conference to denounce rumors that she had any association with Epstein, the late New York multimillionaire whose sex crimes have become a scandal that has roiled the Trump administration.
The Herald reached out to obtain comment from the White House, which directed the newspaper’s query to the State Department. The State Department Press office forwarded a link to a form to fill out to obtain comment for this story. The Herald has not yet received a response to its request.
Ungaro, who was deported from the U.S. in October following her arrest in South Florida, now lives in Brazil. She gave the interview in Portuguese to prominent Brazilian journalist Hildegard Angel. The Herald had the interview transcribed into English.
Also present for the interview was Ungaro’s husband, João Batista Cunha de Araújo, a Brazilian plastic surgeon who is facing charges in South Florida in connection to a med spa he and Ungaro were operating in Aventura in 2025. On Aug. 1, three days before his trial in Miami-Dade Criminal Court, he disappeared.
Court records show authorities reported “a tamper alert” with his ankle monitor and were unable to locate him or the monitor. Even though he had turned over his Brazilian passport to U.S. authorities, he was able to return to Brazil. Araujo’s escape was first reported by the New York Post.
The couple said in the interview that they believe their U.S. arrests were orchestrated by Zampolli, who had been engaged in a contentious child custody dispute with Ungaro over their teenage son. Zampolli has denied he had anything to do with their arrests, or Ungaro’s subsequent detention in ICE facilities for three months before she was deported back to Brazil.
However, The New York Times earlier found that Zampolli did reach out to a top ICE official to report Ungaro was in the country illegally and suggested that she be detained.
In Sunday’s interview, Ungaro mentioned her time in an ICE detention in Miami before being transferred to a detention center in Louisiana.
“The ICE facility in Miami was like a five-star hotel compared to Louisiana, where I was sent later. Louisiana was a warehouse with 122 three-tier bunk beds, a permanently wet floor and no daylight. I spent four days there before being deported and never saw the sun.”
Flew on Epstein’s private plane
Ungaro’s journey from a young, aspiring model to the wet floors of a detention camp began when she was 13. At first accompanied by her mother, she traveled all over the world modeling, eventually landing in Paris where she met modeling scout Jean-Luc Brunel, an associate of Epstein’s.
In 2002, when she was 16, she flew with Brunel, Epstein and Epstein’s then-girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, on Epstein’s plane to New York.
She recalled there were some 30 girls on the plane, none of whom appeared to be models.
“They looked like students, regular girls. I was in shock,” she said in the Sunday interview.
She said became involved with Zampolli when she was 17 — and they remained together for two decades but never married.
They worked as diplomats in the first Trump administration. She was a U.N. ambassador to Grenada, and Zampolli was ambassador to Dominica, both Caribbean nations. Ungaro said she took her job seriously, and documents show she appeared in sessions on the International Criminal Court and on nuclear non-proliferation.
After their son’s birth, she said Melania Trump was the first person who called every year on his birthday. She and Zampolli spent many holidays with Donald and Melania Trump prior to her leaving Zampolli in 2023. She moved to South Florida and met her husband.
The Herald was unsuccessful in reaching Ungaro and Araujo.
Zampoli, now a special envoy for Global Partnerships for the president, remains close to Trump and the first lady. For years, he has said that he introduced Trump to Melania, although recent emails from the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice show Epstein claimed it was he who made the introduction.
Ungaro said in the interview she worked at the U.N. for 10 years, and during that time she obtained knowledge of corruption involving a “group” of diplomats she claims included Zampolli.
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Alleged U.N. passport schemes
She explained that Zampolli helped her obtain a diplomatic passport, which gave her tax exemptions that she said he exploited for his own benefit. She claimed he made purchases on her accounts so that he would not have to pay taxes on those items. At the same time, she said he was running another scam: selling passports.
“They ran diplomatic passport schemes, selling them; countries paying one another for votes on the Security Council. It’s all corrupt there, it’s like a game,” Ungaro said.
“(Zampolli) started selling diplomatic passports for $250,000 with this group … John Ashe, who was president of the General Assembly, he was killed,” she said, explaining “he died because of the scheme.”
A former U.N. ambassador from Antigua and Barbuda, Ashe served as president of the U.N. General Assembly from 2013 to 2014. At the time of his death, he was under indictment for taking bribes from Chinese businessmen. Seven others were charged in the scheme.
Ungaro said she was told that Ashe was killed by “the Chinese,” but she provided no other specifics.
A spokesman for the office of the current president of the U.N. General Assembly declined comment. But the spokesman emphasized that U.N. diplomats are not employed by the United Nations; they work for the countries they represent.
Ungaro admits that part of her motivation for speaking to U.S. representatives is her anger at Zampolli.
“I came forward publicly after I was arrested because this guy wouldn’t let me live my life. That’s why I came forward with this,” Ungaro said in the podcast interview.
She said she also remains angry at Melania Trump, whom she said failed to intervene to help her.
“She has known me since I was 17,” Ungaro said. “She knows exactly who I am and who Paolo is, yet she said nothing.”
In April, Ungaro caused a stir in the White House when she suggested that she had dirt about Melania Trump and additional unspecified evidence of government corruption.
“I will tear down your corrupt system, even if it’s the last thing I do in my life. I will go all the way — I am not afraid. Maybe you should be afraid of what I know … of who you are, and who your husband is,” she said in a post that was dated April 8 and tagged the first lady’s X account. She threatened legal action against the first lady “and your pedophile husband.”
Within days, Melania Trump called an impromptu news conference at the White House to deny that she had any relationship, intimate or otherwise, with Epstein — and had no knowledge of his sex trafficking crimes.
“The lies linking me to the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” the first lady said in the rare public statement. She went on to emphasize that she was not an Epstein victim and that Epstein did not introduce her to Trump.
Ungaro noted in Sunday’s interview that she subsequently received a letter from Melania Trump’s lawyers threatening to sue her for defamation if she didn’t apologize.
Ungaro also said that the letter referred to another interview she had given on Substack where she talked about Zampolli’s connections to Russia, including emails she claims she has to back up Zampolli’s Russian ties.
“So all the emails I had because Paolo used to forward all the emails to me at that time, most of them I didn’t read.”
Angel asked Ungaro whether she had received threats, and whether she felt safe in Brazil.
“Listen, I’m not sure,” she said. “I’m protected by God. That’s how I survived ICE.”
(Former Miami Herald staff writer Adriana Brasileiro contributed to this report.)
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