A former Brazilian model who says first lady Melania Trump's lawyers threatened her has accused an ally of President Donald Trump in a United Nations passport-selling scheme she claims turned deadly, according to a new report.
Amanda Ungaro, 41, who had a 20-year relationship with special envoy Paolo Zampolli, made the allegations against him in a livestreamed interview with a Brazilian journalist, transcribed into English and reported on by the Miami Herald.
Ungaro claimed the passport scheme led to the 2016 death of a former U.N. General Assembly president, according to the Herald.
The former model stopped short of directly implicating her former partner in the death of John Ashe, the former General Assembly president, but claimed Ashe was killed by Chinese nationals also involved in the scheme. She offered no further specifics to support that claim, the Herald noted.
Ashe's 2016 death was officially ruled an accident, with a medical examiner determining a barbell fell on his neck while he was lifting weights at his New York home. The Herald said it has not been able to corroborate Ungaro's allegations, though the newspaper confirmed she has been in contact with the House Oversight Committee's investigation into Jeffrey Epstein.
The dispute traces to April, when Ungaro posted on social media claiming to have damaging information about Zampolli, the president, the first lady and Epstein, and she threatened legal action against Melania Trump and her husband.
Days later, Melania Trump held a rare White House press conference denying any relationship with Epstein. Ungaro told the Herald she subsequently received a letter from the first lady's lawyers threatening a defamation lawsuit unless she apologized.
Ungaro said she and Zampolli both served as U.N. ambassadors during Trump's first term – she to Grenada and Zampolli to Dominica – and that the couple socialized with the Trumps for years before she left Zampolli in 2023.
She alleged Zampolli exploited her diplomatic tax exemptions for personal purchases while separately profiting from selling diplomatic passports for $250,000 as part of a group that included Ashe. Zampolli has denied wrongdoing.
Ungaro was deported to Brazil in October following an arrest in South Florida. She told the Herald that Zampolli, amid a custody dispute over their teenage son, had reported her to a top ICE official as being in the country illegally — a claim the Herald noted the New York Times had previously reported.
She described spending months in ICE detention, including at a Louisiana facility she called "a warehouse with 122 three-tier bunk beds, a permanently wet floor and no daylight."
The Herald said the White House directed its request for comment to the State Department, which provided only a form to submit inquiries, and that it received no response by publication.
A U.N. spokesperson declined to comment on the passport-scheme allegation, noting that U.N. diplomats work for the countries they represent rather than the U.N. itself.