Tyra Banks has filed a lawsuit against Netflix, claiming she was defamed in the recent America’s Next Top Model docuseries Reality Check.
The supermodel and former ANTM host participated in and provided an interview for the streaming service’s explosive docuseries. However, the lawsuit alleges, Banks’ interview was edited to portray her in a negative light.
“Tyra Banks participated in the Netflix documentary series America’s Next Top Model (‘ANTM‘) because she believed viewers deserved a candid conversation about the show’s legacy—its successes and its shortcomings,” the lawsuit first obtained by People states. “There are aspects of the show for which Ms. Banks takes accountability and she wanted ANTM viewers to hear that from her directly.”
Many of the models featured in the docuseries detail an on-set environment that was chaotic, manipulated by producers, and allegedly ignored industry standards for emotional and physical safety, experiences that left them humiliated, traumatized, and unable to work in the industry after their time on the show.
The lawsuit claims that Banks sat down for a four-hour interview with the docuseries’ filmmakers, of which only 16 minutes was used in Reality Check. By editing her interview so extremely, it was “stripped of context and reassembled to support a false and defamatory narrative unrelated to what she actually expressed.”
“Worse, the false narrative the producers constructed—through selective editing, deliberate omission, and surgical manipulation of continuous footage—included that Ms. Banks knowingly allowed a contestant to be sexually assaulted on her show, exploited that contestant’s trauma for ratings, and then could not even remember it when asked,” the lawsuit continued. “That narrative about Ms. Banks is a complete fabrication—one that Netflix streamed to a global audience of millions.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, ANTM Season Two contestant Shandi Sullivan — whose cheating scandal was a central storyline that season, an incident Sullivan now says was sexual assault — said that Banks refuses to take accountability for her actions on the reality series. “How do you treat people as cash cow[s] instead of humans?” Sullivan says. “It’s messed up, no matter what year it is.”
Sullivan’s claims feature prominently in Banks’ lawsuit. “The implication is devastating and deliberate: that Tyra Banks cannot even remember the story of the woman who was assaulted on her show,” the lawsuit said. “But that was false. The full footage of Ms. Banks’ interview reveals two things that the producers cut out and did not show viewers in Episode 1: before the upward glance, Ms. Banks nods—affirmatively, unmistakably—and immediately says, ‘I do remember her story.’ By carving the nod out of the middle of the sequence and cutting off Ms. Banks’ comment at the end, the producers ensured that viewers would see only the lie and not the truth.”
Banks is seeking a jury trial to determine he “appropriate” amount of damages.
