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Revisiting Harm Is Not the Same as Taking Responsibility
- Jun 11
- 7 min read
America’s Next Top Model and the Cost of Turning Abuse Into Entertainment
ANTM turned young women’s suffering into entertainment, and the recent documentary revisits that harm without truly taking responsibility for it.
I didn’t watch America’s Next Top Model when it first aired. I actually don’t think I have ever watched an entire episode from start to finish.
People asked me all the time if I did — “HELL NO,” I would respond, annoyed. I loathed the show from the few minutes I caught a glimpse of it.
I could not believe Tyra was doing that to us.
When it aired in ‘03, I was modeling full-time, and I didn’t need the episodes to understand what was happening behind the scenes — the body policing and shaming, the humiliation disguised as opportunity. I had already been living in the same industry that the show glamorized for years.
Watching the documentary now, years later, isn’t introducing any new information to my body; it’s just confirming what it rejected then: the exploitation of these young women and the humiliation dressed up as opportunity.
Still angry about it. And honestly, still annoyed.
These girls weren’t just used — they were abused — sexually, physically, and emotionally. And the person who understood the industry best not only allowed it to happen, but turned that abuse into entertainment — exaggerating it, packaging it, and selling it back to us as “reality” for more fame and money.
And while it was presented as the modeling industry to the millions who watched, anyone who actually worked in fashion could see that, season by season, it was becoming pure spectacle — bordering on mockery.
The idea itself wasn’t the problem. In theory, it was actually brilliant — expanding the definition of beauty beyond the narrow mold the industry had long enforced. But somewhere along the way, the mission gave way to ego, spectacle, and ratings.
But there were moments that felt very familiar…
Moments my body recognized immediately — because I had been through them, or knew someone who had.
Listening to contestants talk about surviving on Diet Coke and cigarettes — yes. I lived on coffee, diet pills, and cigarettes for a time, too, because that was what Kate Moss did, and she was a supermodel. It was the cost of staying thin enough to get the booking, and therefore be considered “professional.”
Thinness was currency.
Hearing a size 6 model talk about sample sizes that never fit her. How they would cut the clothes open in the back and clamp them together for the shot brought back all the times I stood there while they did the same thing to me.
I was always the “healthy” one on set.
“You look so healthy,” a stylist or makeup artist would say. They probably meant it as a compliment, but that comment is never a compliment on a fashion shoot. And depending on where my mental health was that day, hearing that could send me straight into a black hole.
One thing I never understood then — and still don’t — is how someone who had been so vocal about being body-shamed could turn around and enforce the same standards on young girls herself. She had spoken publicly about being body-shamed, yet she went on to fat-shame other models.
And I don’t care about “the times” and the industry’s obsession with thinness; that’s just another way of blaming someone else.
I really thought this documentary would be the moment Tyra finally took accountability. Her chance to finally tell us she had been forced into certain things by higher-ups, that she regretted them, that maybe — just maybe — she also felt bad about some of the ways the show treated those girls.
Instead, we got very little accountability and a lot of deflection.
Tyra and Ken suggest this is simply what the audience wanted, as if humiliating these girls was just giving people what they came to watch.It’s one of the ways they avoid taking ownership throughout the documentary.They repeatedly frame the harm done to these girls as necessary — something they claim they had to do to “keep up” with other reality shows.
That framing is insulting. And frankly, gross.
It made me wonder why this documentary was made in the first place — especially when Tyra framed it as her chance to “finally say her part.”
Because replaying pain without deep accountability doesn’t heal anyone. It just asks the people who were hurt to relive it again.
One of the most disturbing moments involved a model who was sexually assaulted in Milan and later appeared on Tyra’s talk show. She asked Tyra not to show the clip — said she had never watched it herself because it was all too painful.
And while she was live on air, the clip played in the background anyway.
Even years later, still anything for ratings, fame, and fortune?
Watching this documentary, I really wasn’t hoping for more shock.
I was hoping for honesty.
That girl went on to be harassed in the streets of New York — called a whore, a slut — punished for years by something she never consented to, not on ANTM and not on Tyra’s talk show.
This isn’t about hindsight.
It didn’t feel okay then.
And it doesn’t feel any different now.
Refusal to take responsibility shows up again and again — not just from Tyra, but across the adults in power.
When one model stopped a shoot because she felt uncomfortable, a male model was groaning in her ear and touching her inappropriately. She wasn’t protected. She was told to be professional. To go with the flow. That this was just the reality of the fashion world.
Tyra did apologize to her in the documentary, and I appreciated that. But the moment shouldn’t have happened in the first place.
Nigel Barker, speaking today, says harassment has always existed in the industry and that you need to be able to handle it.
Nigel — she tried.She stopped the shoot.She said she felt uncomfortable.
How about the person being inappropriate is asked to leave the set? Or the adults in charge do the right thing?
Jay Manuel says the show was originally created to expose the realities of the fashion industry and change it, but that over time, the creative direction shifted. He says it began chipping away at him, and that he never felt he could tell Tyra or the producers when something was too much.
But listening to him, you would almost think he was the victim. He was with the girls the most. If it was wearing on him, he had to see what it was doing to them.
He admits he made concession after concession until he was eventually fired — yet nowhere does he clearly say, I’m sorry.
What the documentary barely touches on is the responsibility not only to the contestants but also to the millions of girls watching at home.
The psychological impact — the way the show quietly taught young girls how to relate to their bodies, their food, and their worth.
Viewers have since admitted the show triggered eating disorders.
When these girls weren’t thin enough or “good enough”, the message was simple: they weren’t enough. Millions of girls watching learned to believe the same thing.
Although having a “plus-size” winner later appeared to open doors, it came at the contestant’s expense. After the season ended, she was signed to an agency that didn’t really have a place for her. Thankfully, she went on to have a successful career, but most agencies didn’t yet have plus-size divisions, and the industry wasn’t built to receive her.
You have to wonder what that did to her psyche.
That’s part of what made the show’s framing so misleading.
It presented moments like this as progress, when in reality it staged “change” without any infrastructure to support it — visibility without protection, opportunity without follow-through.
Moments that allowed the show to say, Look, we’re inclusive, without an industry ready to support these young models or the millions of young girls watching.
The same pattern repeated throughout the seasons. Many of these girls were promised opportunity, a future, a way out. They were young and vulnerable, trying to build a better life for themselves.
Instead, their harm became the entertainment.
There were moments of progress — the inclusion of a plus-size model before most agencies had divisions, the first trans model, and the discovery of Winnie Harlow.
But many of the girls were left with no real careers, no usable photos, and a stigma for having come from ANTM. I remember seeing them at castings and hearing the whispers: “She’s from ANTM.”
I remember feeling that stigma myself.
Tyra even admits to one contestant: “I knew you were suffering and I did nothing about it.”
Most of these girls were right back at square one.And that’s where the gap between what the show promised and what it delivered becomes impossible to ignore.
This isn’t about canceling. It’s about accountability.
When you know better, you do better. You respond better.
— admitting you were more interested in protecting yourself and your fame than in protecting the people who trusted you.
The documentary could have been a moment to center the voices of the women who lived through it — without defending, reframing, or asking them to carry the burden of explanation again.
It could have been about acknowledging that fame was more protected than people.
We were willing to listen. It was a missed opportunity to actually tell the truth.
At the end of the documentary, Tyra says the only way you get better is by someone calling you on your shit — thanking people for calling her on hers, because one day someone will call them on theirs.
Respectfully, I disagree.
The only way you get better is by owning your shit.
