Ambassador Paolo Zampolli told the Daily Mail on Thursday that he is prepared to testify before Congress, under oath, that he was the person who introduced President Donald Trump to First Lady Melania Trump, and that he could produce as many as fifty witnesses to back him up.
The declaration came hours after the First Lady made a rare public statement from the White House addressing the Jeffrey Epstein matter and pushing back against long-circulating rumors that Epstein played a role in bringing the couple together. Zampolli, an Italian-American diplomat who now serves as Trump's Special Envoy for Global Partnership, wants the record set straight, and he's willing to do it in front of lawmakers.
In a phone interview with the Daily Mail, Zampolli laid out his account plainly:
"I'm ready to testify in Congress, in front of Congress, to say who introduced the First Lady, and I'm ready to even bring another 50 witnesses to say they were present that night."
He added: "The whole world knows this. This is old news."
Zampolli's version of events places the meeting at a New York Fashion Week party in September 1998, held at the Kit Kat Club. He hosted the gathering. At the time, he was working as a modeling agent, not yet a diplomat. Donald Trump was a fixture of the New York social circuit. Melania Knauss, as she was then known, was a young model.
That account has been part of the public record for years. But the Epstein saga, and the steady drip of file releases, has given new oxygen to alternative theories about how the Trumps met. Those theories have circulated freely in left-leaning media and on social media, despite no confirmed evidence linking Epstein to the introduction.
The First Lady evidently decided she had heard enough. Her office sent a press release to the media on Wednesday announcing she planned to make remarks, though it gave no hint of the subject. On Thursday, she delivered a brief statement from the White House. She ignored reporters' shouted questions after speaking.
Marc Beckman, senior adviser to the First Lady, told the Daily Mail that Melania Trump spoke out because "enough is enough" and "the lies must stop."
Zampolli offered his own read on her decision. He said he believed the First Lady genuinely cares about the people harmed by Epstein.
"I'm sure she cares about the victims and everybody that has been a victim has a right to expose this animal. I think the First Lady has the biggest heart in the world, she's a family woman, and she's our marvelous First Lady."
He continued: "I honestly think, deep in her heart, she cares about the victims. I know she's not a victim. We know that."
President Trump, for his part, told MSNOW that he did not "know anything about" Melania Trump's plans to address the Epstein matter, suggesting the First Lady acted on her own initiative. That detail is worth noting. Melania Trump has shown a pattern of making independent public statements on her own terms, without advance coordination through the West Wing press apparatus.
Zampolli is not a bystander in the broader Epstein story. His name appears in the Epstein files, a fact the New York Times has confirmed. He acknowledged it himself in the Daily Mail interview: "I'm in the files, you know?"
He described the Trump-Epstein social overlap in casual terms. "They met randomly, they met socially, everybody knew Epstein," Zampolli said. That framing, that Epstein moved through a wide orbit of New York power players, is consistent with what has emerged from years of document releases and depositions. It does not exonerate anyone, but it does complicate the narrative that any single social connection to Epstein implies complicity.
One detail from the files stands out. In a 2011 email to an Emirati businessman, Epstein himself warned: "Be careful, [Zampolli] is trouble. Lots. He sells stories to the press." Whatever that says about their relationship, it suggests Epstein did not regard Zampolli as a reliable ally.
A separate thread in the story involves Amanda Ungaro, a Brazilian model and Zampolli's ex-girlfriend. The New York Times reported that Zampolli allegedly outed Ungaro for being in the country illegally. Since her deportation, Ungaro has spoken to Brazilian media, including O Globo, about her own brush with Epstein's world.
Ungaro said she flew on Epstein's private jet in 2002, when she was seventeen years old. She described the experience as deeply unsettling.
"All I wanted was to get off that plane. I knew something was wrong, I just didn't know what. At the time, it never crossed my mind that it could involve abuse."
Zampolli flatly denied using his government connections to have Ungaro deported. "At no time did I request any favors from my colleagues," he said. "My inquiries were solely aimed at understanding the situation, and any advice I sought was strictly in relation to my son's safety."
He also dismissed any suggestion that his personal history with Ungaro had anything to do with the First Lady's decision to speak publicly. "There's no way. This is the First Lady of the United States. Do you think she cares about my ex?"
The public is left to evaluate those denials on their own merits. But the question of Ungaro's deportation and her subsequent Epstein-related claims is now part of the broader Capitol Hill conversation, one that touches the Trump orbit whether the White House likes it or not.
Meanwhile, an ongoing battle on Capitol Hill centers on whether former Attorney General Pam Bondi must sit for an Epstein-related deposition. The details of that dispute remain fluid, but it adds another layer of political pressure to a story that refuses to stay buried.
Democrats have treated the Epstein files as a weapon against the Trump administration, hoping to draw lines between the president's past social world and Epstein's criminal conduct. Republicans have pushed back, arguing that the left is selectively weaponizing the files while ignoring prominent Democrats who also appeared in Epstein's orbit.
Zampolli's willingness to testify under oath is, at minimum, a direct challenge to those who have promoted the Epstein-as-matchmaker theory. If he is telling the truth, and he says he can produce fifty people who were at the Kit Kat Club that night in 1998, then one of the most persistent insinuations against the Trumps collapses under the weight of eyewitness testimony.
Several questions hang over this story. The exact words Melania Trump used in her White House statement have not been fully reported. No specific congressional committee has been named as the forum where Zampolli might testify. And the broader Epstein file releases continue to generate new leads, new names, and new political friction. The First Lady's willingness to step into public controversy on her own terms is itself a signal that the White House sees the Epstein narrative as a threat worth confronting head-on.
The left has spent years trying to use Jeffrey Epstein's crimes to tar the Trump family by innuendo. When someone steps forward and says, "Put me under oath," the honest response is to take him up on it, not to keep whispering.