Tyra Banks really didn’t like that Netflix docuseries about American’s Next Top Model. On Saturday, she filed a defamation lawsuit alleging the team behind Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model — the tell-all docuseries that came out in Netflix earlier this year — edited her interview to present a false narrative about the show she created and hosted.
In the suit — which names Netflix, directors Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy, and production company EverWonder Studio as defendants — Banks claims the docuseries’ team left out the parts of the interview where she took responsibility for some of the show’s most controversial moments. According to Banks, she spoke with producers for three and a half hours only for them to edit her sound bites deceptively in the final cut.
“Of the hours of answers Ms. Banks provided, the producers used only about 16 minutes,” the lawsuit reads. “The producers used what could be stripped of context and reassembled to support a false and defamatory narrative unrelated to what she actually expressed.”
Banks’s main claims center around the allegations made by contestant Shandi Sullivan, who appeared in the show’s Cycle 2 in 2004. During an episode titled “The Girl Who Cheated,” ANTM infamously broadcast footage of Sullivan — a then-21-year-old aspiring model from Missouri — getting blackout drunk during a cast trip to Milan, having sex with a male model, and tearfully confessing the incident to her boyfriend back home. Later, Banks has an on-camera chat with the contestants about the issue of cheating on your romantic partners. In Reality Check, Sullivan said that, while she viewed the encounter as her being unfaithful at the time, she has since come to understand she was too drunk to consent to any sexual activity. She added that she wishes someone in the production had intervened to help her that night.
Banks was asked about the incident in the docuseries, which showed her responding, “I do remember her story. It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because I’m … that’s not my territory.” In her lawsuit, however, she claims she said way more and that producers used “selective editing, deliberate omission, and surgical manipulation of continuous footage” to present a false narrative in which she supposedly allowed Sullivan to be sexually assaulted on the show and then exploited her trauma for the sake of ratings.
Banks also took issue with the editors’ choice to cut to black at the end of the first episode after asking her about Sullivan, allegating that the cliffhanger implied “Tyra Banks cannot even remember the story of the woman who was assaulted on her show.” The supermodel also claims that she wasn’t informed that Sullivan now described the incident as an assault and therefore she approached questions about it as if it was a cheating scandal.
According to Banks’s suit, she has issues with “other misrepresentations” in the series — “some petty, some more serious” — that she’s choosing not to challenge. But, the complaint says, the suggestion that she seemingly allowed the assault to happen is “a fabrication so grave, constructed so deliberately, that it overwhelms everything else … Every other conversation about ANTM’s legacy — including the candid reflection Ms. Banks came prepared to have — is now drowned out by an accusation she was never given the chance to answer.”
Banks alleges that she didn’t have access to the docuseries until a day before its premiere and that producers denied her requests to review the unedited interview footage. In addition to her defamation claims, she is also suing breach of contract and false endorsement. Banks is seeking unspecified damages to be determined by a jury trial.
The Cut has reached out to Banks, Netflix, and EverWonder Studio for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
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