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Anyone who happened to have been near the striking baroque Church of Saint-Roch in Paris in April 2024 may have spotted a number of high-profile figures emerging from a funeral service there.

Among those attending were the former French First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy – 58-year-old wife of ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy – film director Luc Besson and Anthony Delon, son of the renowned late actor Alain Delon.

Also present at what is known as the ‘artists’ church’ in the impeccably smart 1st arrondissement that day – but perhaps less recognisable – were the statuesque former Dutch supermodel Karen Mulder, accompanied by her then 17-year-old daughter, Anna.

They were gathered to say goodbye to Karen’s former partner and longstanding friend, the property developer and publisher Jean-Yves Le Fur, who had died aged 59 the previous month after a battle with cancer.

With their manes of blonde hair and clad head to toe in black, mother and daughter cut a striking pair, although perhaps more striking was the fact that, outside her close-knit circle and the upmarket boutiques and cafes near her Paris home, this was the first time the woman who’d once graced hundreds of magazine covers had been filmed in a public setting for nearly quarter of a century.

For while she had undertaken one brief catwalk appearance in 2007, Karen’s last foray into public life was thought to have sounded a death knell for her career.

It’s hard to overstate how shocking it was. In 2001, appearing on the French TV chat show Tout Le Monde En Parle (Everybody’s Talking About It), the then 32-year-old made a series of devastating claims that she had been subjected to systemic abuse while working as a model – being drugged and raped by multiple powerful men, including politicians and police officers.

The interview was so shocking it was never broadcast, and the recording was then deleted after the show’s host called it a ‘paranoid delirium’. But the contents were leaked, making the findings all too public.

Model and singer Karen Mulder made a series of devastating claims that she had been subjected to systemic abuse while working as a model – being drugged and raped by multiple powerful men, including politicians and police officers

Shortly afterwards, Karen’s younger sister Saskia took her to a psychiatric clinic, from where the model emerged after a five-month stay firmly retracting her claims, referring to them as a ‘cry for help’.

She has barely been heard from since, and the desperate episode appeared destined to vanish into the ether along with the lingering question as to whether there had ever been any truth to her claims.

It has taken 25 years to answer that question: this week, Karen, now 57, unexpectedly broke her silence in an interview with German Vogue – which unveiled her as its surprise cover star, clad in red satin and posing alongside a sports car – claiming she had been speaking the truth all along.

‘I was forced to say I had made it all up,’ she told the publication, adding that she was exposed to ‘horrible, inhumane things’ during her time in the spotlight.

‘I thought that because I’m famous, people would believe me,’ she added. ‘All I wanted was for all these bad things to stop, for men to stop thinking they could do whatever they wanted.’

It is a bombshell claim, one which is certain to reignite troubling questions as to whether, far from being the ramblings of a young woman who had had a psychiatric breakdown, Karen’s statements all those years ago were a devastating – and prescient – insight into sexual exploitation in the entertainment industry at a time when, long before the rise of #MeToo, the world was not ready to hear them.

That, certainly, is the belief of the prominent Dutch celebrity photographer William Rutten, who worked with Karen just a few months after she left hospital and has stayed in touch.

This week he spoke of his belief that the model had been emboldened to speak out again by more recent exposures of the dark underbelly of the modelling industry and the outcry that had greeted the release of the government files relating to the sex-trafficking ring of disgraced paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein.

Karen, now 57, unexpectedly broke her silence in an interview with German Vogue – which unveiled her as its surprise cover star, clad in red satin and posing alongside a sports car – claiming she had been speaking the truth all along

‘Let’s not forget that this woman was the first woman to address abuse in the modelling industry, and because of this was forcibly committed and silenced,’ Rutten told Dutch TV.

‘She was declared to be crazy, and she was literally admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and she has paid a very, very heavy price for this. I didn’t see it coming.

‘I do think that she was strengthened by the whole Epstein files; that women are taken more seriously when they utter these kind of accusations.’

To understand just how extraordinary that reassessment is, however, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of Karen’s remarkable rise – and subsequent fall. Raised alongside Saskia – now a talent agent based in London – by parents Ben, a tax inspector, and Marijke, a secretary, in the small Dutch town of Voorburg, she was discovered aged just 15 after responding to a newspaper advert for the model agency Elite while on holiday in France in 1985 and sending in a photo.

Signed almost instantly, by the late 1980s her willowy 5ft 10in figure was appearing on catwalks for designers from Yves Saint Laurent to Valentino and Versace.

Throughout the 1990s – by now a fully anointed supermodel alongside other industry giants such as Linda Evangelista, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell – she appeared on hundreds of magazine covers including Vogue and the renowned Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Her best friend was fellow model Carla Bruni.

In a notoriously fickle industry, the ‘blonde with class’, as she became known, had a reputation for level-headedness.

‘She was very grounded and charming,’ the then Mail on Sunday fashion editor Brenda Polan recalled in 2001 in the wake of Karen’s hospitalisation, expressing surprise that it should be her, of all the models she’d met, who’d succumbed to this poignant fate. Later, Ms Polan remembered how Karen, unlike some of the other ‘supers’, had turned up on time for interviews and been ‘utterly charming, with no sign of a hangover and no evidence of bad habits of any kind’.

Nonetheless, when Karen retired from modelling in 2000, aged 31, she hinted all was not well. ‘I didn’t know who I was as a person,’ she said in an interview. ‘Inside I felt worse from day to day.’

Then, in October 2001, came those astonishing allegations.

Invited on to the French chat show to talk about whether the modelling industry exploited young girls, Karen claimed she’d been repeatedly drugged and raped by former members of Elite, and forced to sleep with people against her will in order to secure better contracts.

Among those named was a senior member of European royalty. Her agent was Elite owner Gerald Marie, former husband of Linda Evangelista – who today faces multiple accusations of rape and human trafficking. He has denied all the accusations.

Karen Mulde with models Carla Bruni, Nadja Auermann, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer and Helena Christensen in October 1994 in Paris, France

The claims were so explosive – and Karen’s appearance so fragile – that the programme producers felt they could not transmit the show and, fearful for the model’s emotional state, they contacted her family.

Within days, Saskia had taken her sister to that psychiatric hospital, and her distraught parents travelled to Paris, from where a clearly anxious and emotional Ben gave an interview to a Dutch journalist in which he suggested multiple factors – among them depression and cocaine use – had led to his daughter’s breakdown.

‘We had already begun to suspect something when we searched her house in Paris,’ he said, revealing that his daughter had contacted the police with her claims the previous month.

‘Everywhere there were exercise books and notepads full of notes in which she had written down the confused thoughts and delusions she was experiencing at the time. It was terrible, what we read there. She accused everyone and everything.’ Describing his daughter as ‘completely burnt out, not only mentally but physically’ by life at the top of the modelling world, he also suggested that her sessions with a psychiatrist had worsened, not helped, his daughter’s state of mind.

‘The treatment didn’t help her; instead, it sent her into a downward spiral,’ he said.

Those sentiments were subsequently echoed by Karen herself when, after leaving hospital, she gave an interview referring to her claims as a cry for help.

‘It seemed to me that the whole world was against me and I was trying to make myself heard,’ she told the respected French magazine Paris Match.

Yet her troubles did not end there: a year later, it was reported that Karen had attempted to take her own life, although Saskia insisted that media reports had been overblown. ‘Karen is doing OK,’ she told a British newspaper. ‘She is not unconscious and she’s not in a coma. We’ve been in contact. I have spoken to her a lot on the phone, and we have all been supporting her 100 per cent.’

Either way, it would mark the start of a gradual retreat from the spotlight for Karen.

Karen Mulder modelling Dior at Paris Fashion Week circa 1995

Although she released the eponymous pop album Karen Mulder in 2004 – which failed to make a significant impact on the mainstream music charts – she made only one surprise return to the Paris catwalk in 2007, modelling for the haute couture French fashion house Dior to mark its 60th anniversary.

Around the same time she was photographed on a yacht in the Mediterranean, holidaying with British model Kate Moss and her then boyfriend, the musician Jamie Hince.

Aside from Le Fur’s funeral in 2024, her only other excursion into the spotlight was unintentional, when in 2009 it emerged she had spent a night in police custody following an accusation of harassment by her female aesthetic surgeon.

Karen – then 39 – was said to have directed ‘vicious telephone calls’ at the medic, who has not been named, as well as sending text messages calling her the ‘anti-Christ’. It is understood that the calls referred to a cosmetic procedure about which she was unhappy and wanted it to be reversed.

Karen was eventually released under caution, although no further action was taken.

Since then she has kept a remarkably low profile, although she’s a regular sight at the upmarket cafes and restaurants in the ‘Triangle d’Or’ (Golden Triangle) of Paris, an expensive area around the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, where she owns a 19th-century apartment.

Her romantic life, meanwhile, has also remained largely under wraps. After a long-term relationship with Le Fur in the 1990s – the two remained close friends until his death – she embarked on relationships with financier Julio Santo Domingo, and then a music video director identified only as Martin.

She has never publicly named Anna’s father, stating after her daughter’s birth in 2006 that she wanted to bring her up away from media scrutiny.

Despite inheriting her mother’s striking good looks, Anna apparently has no interest in following in her footsteps.

‘The funny thing is that she says that her daughter, who is 19 and beautiful and looks just like her mother, absolutely wants nothing to do with the photography and modelling industry,’ Rutten said this week in the same TV interview in which he discussed his old friend’s Vogue cover and interview. ‘She won’t do it for sure.’

Today Karen remains close to Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, as well as film director Besson and the French actress Emmanuelle Seigner. ‘Karen is classily low-profile, but she’s still very much on the social and media scene in Paris,’ a source told the Daily Mail.

‘She has lots of celebrity friends, and enjoys spending time with them, just as she has always done.’

Quite what’s prompted her to break cover so spectacularly this month remains a puzzle. She is unlikely to need the money – alongside her home in Paris, she owns property in the South of France, as well as stakes in a property management firm.

Notably though, last November, she set up a new media content and publishing company called KM Development, leading to speculation that Karen’s decision to go public in Vogue could be the opening salvo in an ongoing campaign to call out wrongdoing in the modelling and entertainment industry.

‘There are those among us wondering whether she is going to write a book,’ one senior publishing insider in France told the Daily Mail this week.

Either way, whatever she intended, Karen’s decision to become a cover girl again at the age of 57 seems unlikely to be an isolated episode.

‘I don’t know if she sees it as a comeback,’ Rutten said. ‘But it is also possible that it gave her a taster, and that she will be back for more.’

Additional reporting by Peter Allen in Paris.