A blue and white sign. La Place aux Herbes. Holiday snapshots filed between thousands of pages of court documents.
Among the millions of pages released by the US Department of Justice in the Epstein case, photographs dating from the summer of 2002 place the American financier in Saint-Tropez, alongside Ghislaine Maxwell. The captions on images extracted from a CD-ROM leave no room for doubt: the village is named. Sources who have analysed the archive say Epstein and Maxwell rented a villa on the peninsula for several weeks that summer.
None of this arrives from nowhere. Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modelling agent long identified as a close Epstein collaborator, had been a regular presence on the presqu'île for years. Testimonies gathered well before the scandal broke already described repeated stays in the area, parties, very young women.
Brunel died in his Paris prison cell in 2022, before standing trial. Epstein, in 2019, in a Manhattan jail. Both deaths officially ruled suicides. But the files keep moving.
In February 2026, the Paris prosecutor's office set up a dedicated team to comb through the American documents and identify any implications for French nationals. The village asked for none of this. It simply appears in the archive, somewhere between a jet-ski and a market stall, under a July sun.
