Ingrid Seynhaeve had just finished walking a Victoria’s Secret runway show in New York when a photographer waved her toward two men standing off to the side, and she stepped into frame. It was April 1997. The men were Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
That photograph has come back into the news three times since the summer of 2025. In July, it was mislabeled online as a different woman. In December, it turned up in a batch of congressional records. In February, it became the base image for a fake video. Seynhaeve has not been connected to any of it beyond standing in the original frame.
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Who is Ingrid Seynhaeve?
Seynhaeve was born on June 28, 1973, in Menen, a city in West Flanders near the French border, and turned 53 this summer. She had planned to study economics and languages at university, according to her own website, before winning the Elite Model Look of the Year contest in 1991 at 18, chosen from more than 150,000 entrants worldwide.
She went on to front campaigns for Guess, Ralph Lauren, and Saks Fifth Avenue, and appeared in Victoria’s Secret catalogs and on its runway in 1999 and 2000. Her magazine covers include Elle, the French edition of Cosmopolitan, Vogue, and Paris Match, and she shot the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue three times, including editions filmed in Alaska and South Africa.
In 2007, she hosted the Belgian edition of Topmodel, and in 2014 she joined the judging panel for Miss Belgique. She married French film producer Jean-Baptiste Iera in the early 2000s and has two sons with him. According to her own website, she also co-founded a clothing line called JUNE7.2 and still models under contract with agencies in New York, Paris, London, and Belgium.
| Born | June 28, 1973, in Menen, Belgium |
| Age | 53 |
| Best known for | Winning Elite Model Look in 1991; campaigns for Guess, Ralph Lauren, and Victoria’s Secret |
| Family | Married to producer Jean-Baptiste Iera; two sons |
| Current agencies | TheModelCoop (New York), Metropolitan (Paris), Dominique Models (Belgium), and others |
How did Seynhaeve end up in a photo with Trump and Epstein?
Trump was in the room in 1991 when Seynhaeve won the Elite Model Look contest. He and his then fiancรฉe, Marla Maples, were photographed looking on as she celebrated the win. Nothing more came of the encounter. Six years later, the two crossed paths again at a Victoria’s Secret “Angels” party in New York, where Epstein was also a guest. The photo from that night, credited to Getty photographer Sonia Moskowitz, is the one that keeps resurfacing.
Seynhaeve addressed it directly once it resurfaced in 2025. In a statement released through her agency, Dominique Models, and translated from French by La Libre, she described the photo as something that happened at a photographer’s request, right after she finished walking the runway, with the audience still in the room, over almost as quickly as it started. Her relationship with Trump, she said, “was always strictly professional, and never went beyond that.”
Why was the photo mistaken for a picture of Pam Bondi?
The mixup started in mid-July 2025. A version of the photo circulating on social media claimed to show Trump, Epstein, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, just over a week after the Justice Department, led by Bondi, released a memo on July 7 closing its review of the Epstein case. Snopes traced the image back to Getty’s archive and found that someone had swapped Bondi’s face into the photo Getty’s own records credit to Seynhaeve.
The New York Times ran the same photo, correctly captioned, in a timeline of the Trump-Epstein friendship it first published on July 17, 2025 and continued updating over the following months. Seynhaeve appears exactly once in that piece, named in a photo caption and nowhere else.
What was in the Epstein estate photos released in December 2025?
The photo surfaced again on December 12, 2025, when Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released 19 photographs from a trove of more than 95,000 images turned over by Epstein’s estate. The batch included Trump alongside Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Steve Bannon, and Woody Allen, along with the 1997 photo of Trump, Epstein, and the Belgian model. Asked about the release, Trump told reporters, “There are hundreds and hundreds of people that have photos with him. So that’s no big deal.” Forbes and CBS News both reported that none of the 19 images showed illegal activity.
Is the viral AI video of Seynhaeve, Trump, and Epstein real?
No. In February 2026, a manipulated video began circulating online that appeared to show Trump and Epstein with young children, built from the same 1997 photo. Snopes, AFP Fact Check, and Lead Stories each confirmed the video was AI-generated and that the real photo showed no children at all, only Trump, Epstein, and Seynhaeve at a fashion industry party.
Where does Seynhaeve’s story stand now?
LBC, one of the outlets that has covered the story in the most detail, reported in February 2026 that Seynhaeve has never been implicated or accused of any wrongdoing connected to Epstein. Every fact-check that has examined the photo agrees with that. Nearly thirty years after that runway show, the photograph still generates more attention than Seynhaeve’s actual career does.
Seynhaeve is currently based in France with her husband and their two sons. She’s still modeling, in a career that began with that 1991 contest and has nothing to do with the two men she happened to stand beside for one photograph in 1997.
