'I take the darkest and most unfunny parts of my life and find all the humour in them'

Michelle de Swarte went from living in a women's shelter to becoming an international model. She chats to Ellie Harrison about moving to the States, running out of cash and turning to stand-up, as well as her new semi-autobiographic TV show

- Ellie Harrison

At the age of 20, Michelle de Swarte was strutting the catwalks of New York fashion week. Then 9/11 happened. She and a group of fellow models were suddenly stranded in a city that had become a war zone. The next thing she knew, an unknown man had offered to fly them out to join the runways in Milan. But he wanted to meet them all first. His name? Jeffrey Epstein.

De Swarte met the late financier and convicted sex offender briefly at his Upper East Side mansion and, getting a bad feeling, declined his offer of a free ride. “I’ve fared better than most, I’ll say that,” she says now. “I’m lucky that my experience was very much on the periphery, and I wasn’t affected by it too much.” She admits that “life in itself was quite surreal at that time”. Just a few months before, she’d been pulling pints at the Prince of Wales in Clapham, scrimping and saving her wages.

De Swarte’s life has taken a lot of surreal turns. So many, in fact, that she’s made a TV show based on her experiences called Spent– and the Epstein encounter doesn’t even make it in. The BBC Two comedy drama, which she wrote and stars in, follows Mia, a model forced to return to London from New York after she ages out of the industry, runs out of money and files for bankruptcy. The show, De Swarte is at pains to emphasise, is only semiautobiographical. She reckons “20 per cent” of it is true.