Supermodel and ice-cream mogul Tyra Banks has filed a defamation lawsuit against Netflix over her representation in the streamer’s docuseries, Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model.
Aired in February, the three-part series revealed shocking allegations about the 2000s reality-TV show, including a culture of body-shaming, the controversial firing of judges J. Alexander, Jay Manuel and Nigel Barker, and sexual assault.
Banks’ lawsuit, filed on Saturday night in the United States, claims Netflix whittled over three hours of interviews with her into 16 minutes, which they manipulated “to support a false and defamatory narrative”.
In the lawsuit, first obtained by TMZ, Banks claims Netflix used “selective editing, deliberate omission, and surgical manipulation of continuous footage – including 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”.
Former contestant Shandi Sullivan, from season two of America’s Next Top Model, alleged in the documentary she was sexually assaulted by a guest at Model House during filming in Italy. Sullivan said the incident had been ignored by the show’s producers and then framed as a humorous storyline about infidelity.
In the documentary, Banks said she remembered Sullivan but was not involved in the handling of the incident, saying, “it’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory”.
However, the lawsuit says Banks did not know Sullivan was participating in the documentary and that she had labelled her experience as sexual assault.
“The implication is devastating and deliberate: that Tyra Banks cannot even remember the story of the woman who was assaulted on her show,” it writes.
Banks also says she only viewed the final product the day before it aired on Netflix, and that the documentary distorted her attempts to contact fellow judge Miss Jay Alexander after their 2022 stroke.
“Had the producers informed Ms Banks that part of the Netflix series narrative would include Miss J saying that Ms Banks never visited him in the hospital, Ms Banks would have explained that she had been living in Australia for 2½ years,” the lawsuit says.
“She would have shown how hard she tried to get in touch with Miss J personally when she had initially heard the news of his stroke. And she would have shown the text message that arrived from Miss J’s family member who eventually texted back months later and apologised for not responding to Ms Banks’ texts and multiple calls sooner due to her being focused on getting him better.”
The 52-year-old, who has called Sydney home for the past three years, runs an ice-cream shop, SMiZE & DREAM, in Darling Harbour.
