No obvious provocation motivated Melania Trump to suddenly take a podium earlier this month to deny any relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and voice sympathy with survivors. It’s clear she took issue with an unsubstantiated rumor that won’t die quietly: Epstein introduced her to her husband, the president of the United States. The next day, Melania got backup for that point from the man who has stood beside her since before she met Donald Trump.

In the Daily Mail, Paolo Zampolli—Melania’s former modeling agent and a onetime Trump Organization real estate broker, currently serving on the Kennedy Center board and in an undefined State Department role as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Partnerships—offered to testify before Congress that he, in fact, introduced Donald to the woman then known as Melania Knauss at a party at the Kit Kat Club in New York in 1998. At the time, Zampolli was the founder and president of ID Model Management, and he has long claimed credit for sponsoring an H1-B work visa for Knauss when she was still an unknown model looking for a better future than her native Slovenia offered.

If Melania doesn’t take up Zampolli on his offer, it may not only be because it would only highlight his past circumstantial connections to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. The two men discussed buying, but ultimately failed in their bid to acquire Elite Models following its 2004 bankruptcy. And he later partnered with Maxwell on the TerraMar Project, a paper-tiger environmental nonprofit Maxwell promoted at the United Nations; that shuttered project predates Zampolli’s current initiative, We Are The Oceans, which he’s since celebrated at the Kennedy Center.

But Zampolli’s continued relationship with a lesser-known fashion media magnate in Epstein’s orbit named Michel Adam Lisowski may prove even more problematic, beginning with a time in 2002, when the three men each worked with the model and Epstein scheduler Adriana Mucinska.