The Most Shocking Revelations From Netflix’s ‘Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model’

Star breaks down the five most shocking revelations from the new Netflix documentary Reality Check: America’s Next Top Model about the hit 2000s series and its host Tyra Banks.

1. Shandi Sullivan: Filmed While “Blackout Drunk”

The third-place model from cycle 2 was living her dream wearing high-fashion clothes and doing glamorous photo shoots. But her experience on ANTM turned into a nightmare when the cast traveled to Milan. There, she says, producers invited a group of guys over and served alcohol and continued to film as she got “hammered” on two bottles of wine. (Shandi was just 21 at the time.) “I remember getting in the hot tub. I was pretty drunk at that point,” she says, noting that everything after is “a blur.” She was stunned that cameras rolled as a man sexually assaulted her. “No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed, all of it,” she says. “I didn’t even feel sex happening. I just knew it was happening. And then I passed out.”

When the footage aired, the focus was that a drunk Shandi had cheated on her boyfriend (she was shown calling him in hysterics the following morning saying, “I want to die”). Presented with the horrific incident, Tyra, 52, deflects, saying “It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory.”

2. Keenyah Hill: Harassed on Set

The cycle 4’s model wannabe famously stopped a photo shoot when an aggressive male model — wearing just a loincloth — began sexually harassing her and moaning in her ear. She says she thought she was doing the right thing, but the bosses had a different take. “The looks on their faces were just like, ‘How dare you stop our production?’ To be on a TV set in front of so many people and still not be protected is some pretty dark stuff.” At the judges’ panel later, Tyra told Keenyah she should’ve used her “feminine wiles” to defuse the situation.

3. Tiffany Richardson: The Meltdown

“I was rooting for you,” screamed an incensed Tyra at the cycle 4 contestant after she appeared unfazed at being eliminated. “We were all rooting for you! How dare you!” The viral “Ty-rade” shook up the show’s photographer Nigel Barker and creative director Jay Manuel. “Tyra really scared all of us,” says Nigel. “We literally jumped out of our seats.” Jay says it was his “most difficult moment” on set. Lawyers were eventually called in. In a 2023 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Tiffany revealed Tyra had further denigrated her. “She told me how I could go back and sleep on a dirty mattress with my baby… Of course, they didn’t show that.”

4. Icing Out Jay Manuel

Jay says he let Tyra know via email that he was leaving the modeling competition after he began to feel uncomfortable with the way it was evolving during cycle 8 — photo shoots around that time included one centered on eating disorders (models posed over toilets with fake vomit) and another on drug addicts. Tyra responded three days later saying simply, “I am disappointed.” He was forced to work alongside her for an awkward final season. “On camera, we learned to play, laugh, but it was clear I was not allowed to speak with her after that,” he says, noting that a shoot in China was “psychological torture.”

5. Tyra’s Regrets

Tyra does some reflecting on her past behavior in the doc, including the inclusion of ethnicity-swapping photo shoots (there was one in cycle 4 and another in cycle 13), where contestants were made up and styled to look like people from other races. “This was my way of showing the world that brown and black is beautiful,” Tyra explains of the controversial shoots that critics called blackface, “but then we put it out there and the world was like, are you crazy? Have you lost your mind?” She’s more apologetic about her “Ty-rade,” saying, “I went too far, I lost it” and says she could’ve protected Keenyah more. “I say to Keenyah, ‘Boo-boo, I am so sorry.’ I did the best I could at that time. But she deserved more.”