Who in the World is Paolo Zampolli?

He called ICE on the mother of his child. Epstein called him ‘trouble.’ And now he is a US Special Envoy.

A smattering of Zampolli’s Instagram Posts / Credit: @paolozampolli / Google Gemini

Once in a while, a character comes along whose story is so outrageous, it simply defies imagination. Such is the case with Ambassador Paolo Zampolli, an Italian-American socialite, businessman, and modeling agent who befriended Trump in the 1990s. His claim to fame is that he introduced the future president to a Slovenian model named Melania who would go on to be the First Lady of the United States.

Now Zampolli sits on the Board of Trustees of the Kennedy Center. He is the president’s Special Envoy for Global Partnerships. And he has embraced the pithy catchphrase “$20 billion in 20 minutes,” because he has claimed that’s all the time it took for him to close an aircraft deal between Boeing and Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev.

Who is this man of intrigue? Zampolli, who claims to be related to Pope Paul VI, spent part of his childhood living in a castle outside of Milan. He sold his father’s business to a group controlled by Silvio Berlusconi, the media tycoon and Italian Prime Minister whose career was defined by scandals centered on tax fraud, corruption, and his notorious “bunga bunga” parties. In the mid-1990s, Zampolli moved to New York City, where he became a fixture on Page Six of the New York Post. He then secured a visa to the US for model Melania Knauss and introduced her to her future husband, Donald Trump, in 1998.

In 2002, a 17-year-old Brazilian model named Amanda Ungaro flew from Paris to New York aboard Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane. Zampolli, then 32, wooed Ungaro—first as a client, then as a romantic partner. (Zampolli says they did not become romantically linked until Ungaro was 19.) They later had a child together, but never married, and Ungaro remained in the United States on a string of temporary visas. By 2018, Zampolli and Ungaro had split up and their custody battle over their son unfolded publicly.

Zampolli continued to make headlines during Trump’s first administration for hosting extravagant parties at his mansion in Washington D.C. He also drew attention to himself when he shared explicit text messages describing sexual encounters with a woman he described as a “working girl.” He then left Washington when Biden was in the White House, but when Trump returned in 2025, Zampolli came back, too.

Then Zampolli called in a favor. In June of 2025, with the custody battle over her child still unsettled, Ungaro was arrested. She was charged with fraud, practicing medicine without a license, and other crimes. After learning of Ungaro’s arrest, Zampolli reached out to David Venturella, a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and explained that Ungaro was living in the United States illegally as her last temporary visa expired in 2019.

Lacking legal status, Ungaro was placed in ICE custody. Fearing that she would lose custody of her and Zampolli’s son if she remained at the detention center, she asked the immigration judge to send her back to Brazil. Her son later joined her, but then returned to the United States to live with his father while his parents continue fighting in court.

Donald Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and staff his administration with “the best people.” Instead, he handed out jobs to people like Zampolli. What jumps out from Zampolli’s life is not just the cascade of outrageous actions, deporting your ex-parter to win a custody battle being first and foremost. It’s the fact that this is a person that Trump put into a government position of influence upon reentering office.

Even Jeffrey Epstein, an objectively despicable human, had unkind words about Zampolli. In a 2011 email to an Emirati businessman, Jeffrey Epstein wrote (in his typically typo-ridden form): “Be careful , zampoli [sic] is trouble . Lots.” Epstein added, “He tells stories to the press.”

In an attempted sleight-of-hand, Zampolli tried to spin his run-ins with Epstein into a positive. He said that his name didn’t appear very frequently in the Epstein files. But he couldn’t help but add, “At least I was included, because if you’re not on the list, you’re a loser, right?”

Should such a person really be entrusted with conducting diplomacy on behalf of the United States?

Zampolli has flown under the radar—in part, because Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner have done much of the heavy lifting in diplomatic negotiations with Iran. But, recently, Zampolli has been busy stumping for autocrats in European elections, lobbying Fifa to replace Iran with his native Italy in the upcoming World Cup, and otherwise monetizing access to his friend, the president. His hyper-active, unquestionably bizarre Instagram keeps the world informed of all this and more.

He stylizes himself as a political insider who operates with the president’s blessing. He called himself, “Boeing’s number-two salesperson in the world, right after the president.” And he didn’t mince words when he explained the mechanism that drives his dealmaking: “Whenever people see me, they want something. They want access to the president … I tell them: ‘Buy Boeing.’ If you want to make the president happy, buy Boeing. It’s the simplest thing in the world.” Sounds like he’s saying that US foreign policy is up for sale.

The appointment of people like Zampolli to positions of power in our government undermines our national credibility. Zampolli—whose qualifications are simply that he is loyal to Trump—doesn’t represent the best of America. He represents its antithesis.

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