Where Is Alexia Palmer
Bruce Fanger
Trump Model Management, a seventeen-year-old foreign model, and questions that were never answered
August 14, 2026
I have written about Alexia Palmer many times. The first time was in 2016, when she had the pluck to do something few seventeen-year-old immigrant models would have dared to do. She went up against Donald Trump’s modeling company and demanded the money she said she had been promised.
Ten years later, I am still asking questions about her.
Not Jeffrey Epstein. Not photographs of Trump at parties. Not guilt by association. Trump Model Management. Donald Trump’s company. Alexia Palmer’s experience. The immigration documents. The money.
Palmer was recruited in Jamaica when she was seventeen years old. Trump Model Management brought her to the United States through the H-1B visa program. According to court documents reviewed by Reuters, the agency represented in connection with her visa that she would receive at least $75,000 per year for three years.
Palmer said that was not remotely what happened.
She alleged that after three years with Trump Model Management, she received only a few thousand dollars after commissions, expenses and other deductions. ABC reported that the agency took roughly 80 percent of her earnings in expenses and fees and obtained only 21 shoots for her during those three years. Her visa also meant she could not simply walk across town and work for another employer while remaining legally employed in the United States. Palmer described the experience herself in brutal language: she said she felt “like a slave.”
Think about the power relationship here.
A seventeen-year-old girl is recruited in Jamaica by an American modeling company owned by one of the wealthiest and most famous men in the United States. The company participates in bringing her across an international border under an employer-sponsored visa. Immigration paperwork represents employment worth $75,000 a year. She arrives in New York dependent upon that employment arrangement and later says that virtually none of the money she expected ever reached her.
Somebody should have investigated this as possible labor trafficking and exploitation of a foreign minor.
That is the part I am no longer interested in saying politely.
Trafficking does not require somebody chained in the back of a truck. Federal labor-trafficking law concerns obtaining labor through force, fraud or coercion. Whether Palmer’s circumstances satisfied every element of a trafficking offense is precisely the kind of question an actual investigation could have examined.
Where was that investigation?
Instead, Palmer attempted to fight Trump Model Management through civil litigation. Her complaint alleged violations involving wage law, immigration law, fraud, breach of contract, unjust enrichment, conversion and RICO.
People sometimes dispose of this story with four words:
“She sued and lost.”
That is an extraordinarily misleading description of what happened.
There was no trial. There was no jury. Palmer never received an evidentiary hearing in which she took the stand, Trump Model Management’s representatives took the stand, witnesses were cross-examined, the competing accounts were tested and a finder of fact determined what actually happened to her.
Judge Analisa Torres dismissed the federal lawsuit at the pleading stage. On Palmer’s labor claim connected to the H-1B program, the court ruled that she had failed to exhaust the administrative process through the Department of Labor and therefore could not pursue that claim in federal court. Other claims were dismissed because the court concluded that Palmer had not sufficiently alleged or supported the legal elements necessary for those particular causes of action.
The underlying facts were never adjudicated at trial.
That distinction matters.
Nobody heard Palmer testify and then found her testimony false. No jury examined all the evidence and declared Trump Model Management innocent of exploiting her. No evidentiary hearing tested the entire story and produced a factual finding that everything described by Palmer had been legitimate.
The lawsuit was dismissed.
The questions were not.
Palmer did what the judge said the H-1B process required. She went to the Department of Labor. Bloomberg Law reported in April 2016 that her attorney confirmed she was continuing the fight there. Later reporting indicated that the Labor Department complaint was also dismissed and that Palmer was appealing that decision.
Then something else happens to the Alexia Palmer story.
It goes quiet.
Very quiet.
I have been looking for this woman for years. I have followed leads. I have searched the internet and social media. I have written about her repeatedly. I have contacted people who have resources and political reach far beyond mine, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others, hoping someone would take an interest in finding her and determining what happened after those proceedings.
My writings on this subject have reached substantial audiences.
Still, I cannot find Alexia Palmer.
That does not mean Donald Trump made her disappear. I have no evidence of that, and I am not going to invent some Hollywood ending because the actual story is disturbing enough.
It does mean I want to know where she is.
Palmer was hardly invisible in 2016. She spoke publicly. She appeared on national television. She challenged Trump Model Management in federal court. She spoke directly to reporters about her treatment. Then the public trail becomes exceedingly difficult to follow.
So where is she?
What became of the Department of Labor appeal?
Did she return permanently to Jamaica?
Did she receive money through some later arrangement?
Was there ever a settlement?
Was there a confidentiality agreement?
Did she simply decide she had endured enough and wanted nothing further to do with Donald Trump, modeling, lawyers, reporters or the United States?
Was she pressured by anybody?
Is she alive, healthy and happily living a private life somewhere?
I hope that last answer is the answer.
Then let us find her and hear it from Alexia Palmer.
There is another reason these questions deserve attention. Palmer’s allegations were not the only allegations concerning Trump Model Management. Other former foreign models later described questionable immigration practices, crowded agency housing, large deductions from their earnings and working arrangements that left them with remarkably little money. In September 2016, Senator Barbara Boxer called for federal immigration authorities to investigate allegations concerning Trump Model Management.
Trump Model Management eventually shut down in 2017.
Alexia Palmer’s questions survived it.
This is why I get irritated when every discussion of Trump and young women immediately gets dragged back to Jeffrey Epstein.
There are serious questions about Epstein, certainly.
I do not need Epstein for this one.
Donald Trump owned Trump Model Management. Palmer was recruited into Trump Model Management at seventeen. Trump Model Management participated in securing the visa that brought her from Jamaica to the United States. The immigration paperwork represented substantial annual earnings. Palmer said the promised money never materialized. She said deductions consumed most of what she earned. Her ability to work legally in America was tied to the employer who had brought her here. She fought the company in court and then through the Department of Labor.
That record stands on its own.
If you stripped Donald Trump’s name from the story and told Americans that a wealthy American businessman operated an international modeling company that recruited a seventeen-year-old girl in Jamaica, brought her across an international border under employment paperwork representing $75,000 a year, placed her into an arrangement where she claimed she ultimately received only a few thousand dollars, and controlled the employment upon which her legal work status depended, I suspect people would have a very different reaction.
They might even use the words possible international labor trafficking.
They certainly ought to use the words possible exploitation of a foreign minor.
Somebody should have investigated exactly that.
Not a civil judge deciding whether a complaint satisfied the technical elements of several causes of action.
Investigators.
People empowered to subpoena records. Follow the money. Examine immigration submissions. Interview every model housed by the agency. Determine who made the representations contained in visa applications. Compare those representations with actual bookings and payments. Determine how housing and other charges were calculated. Interview the people who recruited teenage models overseas. Determine what management knew and when they knew it.
That is what I mean by investigation.
Perhaps such an investigation would have found no trafficking crime at all.
Fine.
Then we would have an answer.
Instead, we have a seventeen-year-old girl, an international recruitment operation, employer-controlled immigration status, enormous discrepancies between projected earnings and money allegedly received, allegations of exploitative conditions, a lawsuit dismissed without the underlying factual dispute ever being tested at an evidentiary trial, an administrative fight that disappeared from public attention, and a woman who seems to have largely vanished from the public record.
Those are not answers.
Those are reasons to ask harder questions.
I have been asking them since 2016.
I will ask the simplest one again.
Where is Alexia Palmer?
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