When producers asked Shandi Sullivan why she wanted to try and become America’s Next Top Model, the then 19-year-old’s answer was off-the-cuff, loud, and straight to the point.
“I yelled, ‘I don’t want to work at Walgreens anymore!’” Sullivan tells Rolling Stone. “I just screamed it at the top of my lungs.”
That was the moment that Sullivan thought would change her life forever. Within a month of that fateful interview in an open call in a Kansas City, Missouri mall, Sullivan was cast on America’s Next Top Model. The reality series, hosted by supermodel Tyra Banks, was only in its second season when episodes premiered in 2004. But it quickly dominated ratings and TV screens across the U.S., becoming a cultural fixture for over a decade. Now, a new Netflix docuseries is taking a detailed look at the show that defined years of reality television, and the harm it left in its wake.
Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model includes sit down interviews from the people directly responsible for creating the show, including Banks as well as judges J. Alexander (Miss J), photographer Nigel Barker, and Jay Manuel. (Winnie Harlow, the most famous model to compete on ANTM, is notably absent from the production.) But the strongest aspect of the project by far is the personal stories of the women who actually competed to become America’s next top model, including Sullivan. Many of the models featured in the series 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. Sullivan saw ANTM as her ticket out of Kansas City. Instead, what she describes as one of the most traumatizing moments of her life was aired for an audience of millions. Now, over 20 years later, Sullivan says she’s letting that guilt and shame go.
“My whole feeling for a long, long time was ‘I did this. I let this happen to me.’ But there were people watching the whole time, and someone should have intervened. Someone should have said ‘We need to put the cameras down and just go get her,’” Sullivan tells Rolling Stone. “They facilitated that whole situation with the hopes that something would happen. And thankfully for them, it made amazing television, right?”
It started with a trip to Milan, Italy. Sullivan, who had never been out of the country before, had pushed through the competition, wild challenges, and difficult judging to make it to the final four. After working with male models earlier in the day, producers invited a group of them back to the models’ house for a small party. “We’re young, we want to socialize, and we’ve just been in this very stressful situation,” Sullivan says. “So it was perceived as a night to just chill and relax and not really worry about anything. Then it became something else.” Combining heavy amounts of alcohol on top of exhaustion and a lack of food, Sullivan blacked out. She only remembers bits and pieces of the night, but she says most of her memory ends after producers encouraged the girls to enter a hot tub with the male models. She thinks she kissed one of them, but only has flashes of someone later pulling her off of a shower floor, and someone having sex with her. When she woke up, she was horrified. (The male model involved was only referred to as the “Italian guy” in the aired episode of the show and was not identified in Reality Check or in our conversations with Sullivan. Sullivan did not report it at the time, and he was never charged with a crime.) “I was still drunk and bits and pieces started flooding in,” she says. “I just started crying. Even thinking about it now makes me want to cry, and I mean, it’s 20 years later.” But producers kept the cameras rolling throughout Shandi’s distress, capturing her sobbing frame and even filming a tearful phone call with her boyfriend back home.
For Sullivan, part of her anger over the situation remains with the production’s decision to keep filming rather than intervene in a dangerous situation. “If you see somebody that’s blackout drunk and you see a guy messing with her, you could have just stepped in and called it a wrap,” Sullivan says. “There’s no reason to keep going. It never had to get to that point.” In Reality Check, executive producer Ken Mok defends many of the choices producers made by framing the show as a truthful exploration into the lives of models. “We treated Top Model as a documentary, and we told the girls that. There’s going to be cameras with you 24/7, and they’re going to cover everything, the good, the bad, and everything in between,” Mok says in the docuseries. “That was, for good or bad, one of the most memorable moments of Top Model.” When asked directly about the scene, Banks says in the docuseries, “I do remember her story. It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory.” (Mok and Banks did not respond to Rolling Stone‘s request for comment.)
But Sullivan’s feelings of anger and betrayal also extend to producers’ decision to frame the storyline as her cheating on her boyfriend. After the incident, the girls were filmed in a sit down conversation with Banks, where she talked solely about cheating. And even when Sullivan was invited to a reunion episode to talk about her time on the show, she claims producers played the clip even after she asked them not to, a situation Sullivan describes as “extremely insensitive” and hurtful. “Telling somebody to their face, ‘These are my boundaries,’ and then seeing clips not even minutes later?” Sullivan says. “It says, ‘I don’t respect you, I don’t care about your boundaries. All I care about is my show.’”
Now 43, Sullivan says her time as an aspiring model feels like a lifetime ago. But even with years of distance, she tells Rolling Stone talking about what happened still feels difficult. “I hadn’t spoken about it in depth in a really long time because of the emotion,” she says. “My body still feels that trauma. My skin crawls when I talk about it. But when I talked to the director of the documentary, I could tell that she understood that I just needed to talk about it. I just had to purge it.” She says she doesn’t regret talking about her experience, but she doesn’t have any plans to watch the documentary. She’s focused on keeping her eyes on the good in her life, which means cats, and being happy her entire job isn’t linked to her ability to “smize.” But she wouldn’t say no to an apology from Banks — especially since she still believes the model refuses to take any real accountability for her actions on America’s Next Top Model.
“How do you treat people as cash cow[s] instead of humans?” Sullivan says. “It’s messed up, no matter what year it is.”
