Transcription
It is not a coincidence to me that a freshly 18-year-old model who went to Jeffrey's Island and flew on his plane back in 2006 went on to allegedly take her own life just 2 years later in 2008 in the midst of Jeffrey's Palm Beach case. So today we're going to talk a little bit about Ruslana Korshunova, and I apologize if I'm pronouncing her name wrong at all.
Ruslana is often forgotten within this case or swept under the rug because she fell out her Manhattan balcony apartment, allegedly right around the time that Jeffrey was being sentenced in his Palm Beach case. So she really never had a chance to tell her story. So let me give you a little bit of background of Ruslana before we explain the mysterious circumstances in which she passed away.
So Ruslana was born in Russia on July 2nd of 1987, and from a very young age, her parents observed that she was incredibly intellectually gifted. Ruslana's father was a Red Army officer who passed away when she was just 5 years old, but Ruslana's mother continued to raise and nurture her and her older brother as a single mother successfully. Ruslana was so incredibly intellectually gifted that her mother had to enroll her in schools for children that were extremely gifted. Ruslana consistently rose to the top of her class in those gifted schools. Before even graduating from high school, Ruslana was fluent in multiple languages, including Russian, English, and German.
In 2003, Ruslana's photo was published in a local newspaper discussing a German club that she was involved in. A talent scout named Debbie Jones of Models 1 saw Ruslana's photo in the newspaper and decided to track her down because she was so beautiful. And Models 1 is a modeling agency that has represented figures like Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford. After Debbie Jones did track down and discover Ruslana, she signed Ruslana to Models 1 at the age of 15 years old. After modeling for Models 1 for a while, Ruslana moved on to IMG Models, and by 2005, Ruslana was being featured in publications like British Vogue. Ruslana found a lot of success before she even turned 18 years old, from Vogue Italia to Pantene commercials. Everyone wanted to work with Ruslana.
Not long after signing with IMG Models, Ruslana would move to New York City to accommodate her ever blooming modeling career. But sadly, on June 28th, 2008, just days before her 21st birthday, Ruslana passed away after falling out of her ninth-floor Manhattan apartment balcony. And what was very alarming about this situation, just right off the bat, is the fact that Ruslana was found in the middle of the street. She didn't just step off her balcony. Logistically, she would have had to have taken a running start from inside of her apartment and thrown herself off of her balcony, or she would have had to physically been thrown off of her balcony for her to land so far away. She was in the middle of the street. If I'm not mistaken, she was like 8 and a half meters from her balcony.
While the New York City Coroner's Office quickly ruled her passing to be self-inflicted, Ruslana's mother, friends, ex-boyfriend, current boyfriend, and doorman all vocally rejected this ruling and made their feelings known to the media. Ruslana's mother told the media that she had just spoken with her daughter on the phone, and she did not appear to be distressed whatsoever, nor did she have any kind of a history of mental health issues or anything of the sort. Ruslana's friends were shocked and shared that Ruslana had just arrived home from a modeling job in Paris that was extremely successful. Her friends who had spoken to her in the hours leading up to her passing shared that Ruslana seemed to be on top of the world. Some of her friends even shared that they had plans to celebrate Ruslana's 21st birthday that following Wednesday from when she passed away.
Ruslana's ex-boyfriend Artem Perchinok, I apologize if I'm pronouncing that name wrong, was with Ruslana just hours before her body was found in the street, and later that same day, Ruslana had also seen a new man who was in her life named Mark Kaminsky, who was the last person that Ruslana spoke to before she was found in the street. In interviews by the media, it appeared that these men were not aware that they were both in Ruslana's life and seemed kind of annoyed with the presence of one another, but they did both express that Ruslana was not giving any indication that she was going to take her own life. She was not distressed, nothing of the sort. Ruslana's doorman also expressed that when he had seen her, she seemed like her normal self. He also shared with the media that he was immediately suspicious of Ruslana's passing. Ruslana's doorman explained the carnage that he saw whenever he saw her body in the street, and he also expressed that he was shocked to see that her long beautiful hair had all been cut off. Ruslana was known as the Russian Rapunzel in the modeling world and was known for her long gorgeous natural hair, but before her passing, it had all been chopped off.
After Ruslana's mother laid her daughter to rest, this case pretty much stopped being talked about until early January of 2024, when the DOJ would release thousands of documents pertaining to Jeffrey's case, and none other than Ruslana's name appeared on Jeffrey's flight logs circa 2006, showing that she was traveling to Jeffrey's Island along with Sarah Kellen, Jeffrey's bodyguard, Jeffrey's chef, and a former UFC fighter. Shortly after Ruslana's trip to Jeffrey's Island, her friends recalled her sparking up a fling of some kind with a Russian oligarch who was never named publicly. And from what her friends have said, it appeared that things did not work out between Ruslana and this Russian oligarch, and she did not take it very well. And there's also the question if that Russian oligarch was a co-conspirator of Jeffrey's and that's how they met.
But a year after Ruslana passed away under arguably mysterious circumstances, a fellow Russian model and close friend of Ruslana's named Anastasia Drozdova, and I apologize if I'm pronouncing her name wrong, passed away after allegedly throwing herself off a building in Kiev circa 2009. And Anastasia left a note for her family stating, "Forgive me for everything, cremate me."
Upon further research, I learned that both Anastasia and Ruslana were a part of an organization for a brief period of time called Rose of the World, which was a Moscow-based cult that used the same structural model as the United States-based cult Lifespring. Lifespring was founded in the United States in the '70s but were forced to shut down operations in the '90s after they were hit with multiple lawsuits accusing them of being a cult, inflicting emotional trauma upon members to the point of psychotic breaks. And Rose of the World adopted Lifespring's ideology of needing to take responsibility for any trauma that happened to you in your life. The leaders didn't believe that you could maximize your full potential unless you accepted that every trauma that happened to you in your life was your own doing and your fault, which is extremely damaging to the psyche. A notable member of Lifespring up until the late '80s is Jenny Thomas, the wife of disgraced and easily bribable Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. If you know anything about the Lifespring cult, Rose of the World was basically the exact same thing but in Moscow, Russia.
Anyways, Anastasia and Ruslana were both briefly involved in Rose of the World as teenagers in hopes to maximize their personal potential in life. They were roped into this organization the way many other young impressionable people are roped into cults and organizations like this. Ruslana was only a part of Rose of the World for about 90 days before leaving, and she would move to New York City for her modeling career, and Anastasia was a part of Rose of the World for about a year before she left. Both of these girls' very strange and similar passings that occurred only about a year apart did happen years after they had both cut ties with this organization, but many still theorize that this organization, this cult Rose of the World, had something to do with these two young models taking their lives. Others have speculated that the things that these girls learned within this organization, then being very vulnerable and thrown into the vicious and tumultuous world of modeling, may have been a perfect storm. Others have speculated that Ruslana was deeply traumatized by whatever happened to her on Jeffrey's Island, and then when she came back, she applied the things that she learned in Rose of the World and blamed herself for whatever occurred. Obviously, no one really knows. There's a lot more information that needs to be dug up around this case. Anyway, I just thought I would share Ruslana's story with you guys. I think it's gone really under the radar, and I think that there are a lot of unanswered questions about her entire case, and if anyone has more information about Rose of the