Although the photo montage that illustrates this article looks like the poster for the new James Bond film, the story told is entirely true. The arrest on French soil on August 24 of the founder and CEO of the opaque messaging platform Telegram, the Russian Pavel Durov, has given us an unexpected protagonist, the also Russian Juli Vavilova, a professional “er” – “influencer-instagrammer-gamer” – who accompanied the millionaire on his private jet and about whom all kinds of theories have been generated in recent days. The most Martian suggests that she could be an agent of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency and, perhaps, the most effective in the world. But who the hell is Juli Vavilova?
To obtain information about the aforementioned, one must inevitably go to her public biography, Instagram, where she has 35,200 followers and
In this post, she introduces herself as a “streamer” (one who makes live broadcasts) and adds “gaming, cryptocurrencies, languages and mentality”. Among the languages, four stand out: Russian, English, Spanish and Arabic, and the “mentality” can only be perceived in the mosaic of colorful images with which this 24-year-old girl shows us her exhausting intellectual life: gyms, beaches, poses in bikinis and tights, sports (horse riding, skydiving, rallies, jet skis, surfing, skiing), fantasy dishes and, of course, a varied collection of animals: kittens, puppies, tigers, monkeys. In the entire profile, only one man appears: Romeu Felipe, her hairdresser, known as “the most famous Brazilian stylist in the world”. He has 2.3 million followers on that social network and is an attractive and muscular guy, but his appearance, well, is a thousand miles away from that of Clint Eastwood when he was Clint Eastwood. Vavilova opened this profile in 2013 –curiously, the same year Telegram was founded: here’s a topic for conspiracy theorists–, when she was a teenager with a childlike face. In these more than ten years, from her first posts to her most recent ones, the physical change she has experienced can be clearly seen.
As for the Instagram profile of the 39-year-old detainee, it must be said that it is at least surprising: one imagined different content, of greater depth, with more brains and less muscle, but it is not far from that of an exhibitionist firefighter or a policeman very proud of his tattoos: Mr. Pavel Durov, who opened the account in 2011 and has 1.5 million followers, presents himself to the world as an “entrepreneur” and repeatedly shows himself bare-chested, boasting of his Herculean anatomy. And here the comparisons with Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, fall to pieces, as the latter cannot shake off the appearance of the biggest nerd in the class.
The Russian tycoon – who is estimated by Forbes to have a fortune of 14 billion euros – was held for four days, the maximum time allowed given the crimes he is accused of, and was released under judicial supervision after paying a bail of five million euros. The French prosecution has accused him of 12 crimes, including distribution of child pornography and complicity in drug trafficking. Durov, who has said on his own channel that his arrest was “wrongly approached,” must appear before the police twice a week and has been banned from leaving the country.
Juli Vavilova had not posted on her Instagram account for weeks and yesterday, Friday 6th, around three in the afternoon Spanish time, she gave us a photo in a restaurant in which she poses seriously, in black and with the following text, quite revealing: «I am grateful to have you in my life. The level of support I have received is immeasurable. (…) I am happy to let you know that everything is fine. There is a lot of false information circulating, but that is a topic for the future.» Could he have intervened in a movie-like operation whose purpose was to arrest the inconvenient businessman? It is hard to imagine Vavilova as a modern-day Mata Hari, an expert in martial arts and in handling all kinds of weapons, hiding a dose of poison or a lethal syringe in her garter. It is easier to see her as a cross between the silly girl in the middle of an orgy and Maria Barranco in “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” that totally out of place girl who gets involved with a Shiite terrorist. But who knows. The ways of the Mossad are inscrutable.