Tyra Banks has filed a lawsuit against Netflix in the wake of the controversial series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.
The former ANTM host alleges the service cherry-picked her interview to portray her in a negative light.
People magazine reports that Banks viewed the series as “defamatory” after she sat for an interview for more than three hours, with just 16 minutes used in the final edit.
“Tyra Banks participated in the Netflix documentary series because she believed viewers deserved a candid conversation about the show’s legacy – its successes and its shortcomings,” the lawsuit states.
But Banks asserts that the 16 minutes of her participation were “stripped of context and reassembled” in a “false and defamatory way”.
The lawsuit continues, “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. That narrative about Ms Banks is a complete fabrication – one that Netflix streamed to a global audience of millions.”
Banks is also upset that the series aired comments by ANTM judge Miss J Alexander, who stated that she hadn’t visited since his 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 two and a half years,” the suit reads.
ANTM was a TV competition in which women from all over the US competed for the honour of being America’s next ‘it girl’ in the modelling world. Banks co-created and hosted the show for 22 cycles.
The show, which ran from 2003 to 2018, launched the careers of Winnie Harlow, Leila Goldkuhl and Yaya DaCosta among others.
