MOSCOW | A Belarusian model who claims to have information on ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s election campaign told The Associated Press on Friday that she has turned that material over to Russian billionaire businessman Oleg Deripaska.
Anastasia Vashukevich fueled speculation around possible ties between Trump and the Kremlin last year when she posted a video from a police van, saying she had 16 hours of audio and video proving ties between Russian officials and the Trump campaign that influenced the 2016 U.S. elections.
Deripaska denied the allegations and even went to court to seek to remove the video Vashukevich posted in which he discusses U.S.-Russia ties with a senior Russian government official.
Vashukevich, who is also known as Nastya Rybka, returned to Russia last month almost a year after she was detained in Thailand on charges of soliciting sex, in what some believe was an attempt to silence her.
Vashukevich, 28, told the AP in an interview Friday that, contrary to earlier reports that she had destroyed the recordings, she had given them to Deripaska because it “relates to him” and that she “did not want any more trouble.”
Vashukevich rose to prominence in February last year when Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny published an investigation detailing dealings between Deripaska and Sergei Prikhodko, then-Russian deputy prime minister who played a prominent role in shaping Russia’s foreign policy.
Navalny drew on Vashukevich’s video from summer 2016 when Deripaska was hosting Prikhodko on his yacht and was caught on tape saying that relations between Russia and the U.S. were bad because of then-Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland.
Deripaska is close to Putin and also had a working relationship with Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager. Manafort was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of the probe into the 2016 election and was convicted last year of tax and bank fraud.
Deripaska’s representative at the time dismissed the reports as “scandalous and mendacious assumptions.” He promptly filed and won a lawsuit against Vashukevich for breach of privacy and secured a court ruling to delete the videos of him and Prikhodko.
Vashukevich and her teacher, self-styled sex guru Alexander Kirillov, were in Thailand shortly after Navalny’s investigation came out, conducting a sex training seminar when they were arrested for working without a permit. Vashukevich, Kirillov and several others ended up being charged with soliciting sex and spent 11 months in a Thai jail.