Miss J’s Stroke, Shandi Sexual Assault

Season 1 of “America’s Next Top Model” had such a low budget that the whole season was shot in a hotel in New York City, where the cast also lived. Before they got there, though, executive producer Ken Mok recounts the difficulties the show had with the network, which he says pushed back against the diversity of the show’s cast. Both Mok and Banks tell the story of wanting to cast a particular woman who was Latina, but Leslie Moonves, the head of CBS (who in 2018 would be ousted because of allegations of sexual misconduct), vetoed her casting. “I lost it,” Banks says. Mok says Moonves and Banks argued to the point where “it almost got physical.” Mok remembers begging Banks: “It’s Les Moonves. Let’s not torpedo the show before we even get it on the air.”

The cast’s inclusiveness also extended to sexuality. Season 1 contestant Ebony Haith was queer, which was rare on television at the time. In an interview for the docuseries, Haith claims Banks outed her on camera, as a clip plays in which Banks says: “We know you’re a lesbian. How do you feel about expressing that on national television?” Haith ended up being fine with being out on the show, and says she’s glad they showed her with her partner. But what she wasn’t fine with was her flop makeover that left her with three bald spots. After Haith protested, Banks called her, and instead of offering support, Haith says she said, “You’ve been showing up ashy every day.”

It got worse from there. The judges called Haith “old,” “aggressive and angry” and “harsh.” She breaks down during the interview. “My heart was breaking, as I’m on this national show, thinking the world would be proud of me,” she says. When Haith was eliminated, Banks told her that she’d had a “chip on her shoulder” which made her “difficult to work with.” (When Haith posted about “Reality Check” on Instagram, the comments were supportive, such as: “Sorry for the racism you dealt with on that show!!” and “I watched your season recently and you are a favorite now. They were so mean to you. I’m so sorry that happened. I’m so glad you did come out on top! Go Ebony!”)

As we all know, “America’s Next Top Model” became a hit, and Jay Manuel tells the story of one early fan: Iman called Manuel after the series premiere, and handed the phone to her husband, David Bowie. “You found the place where you need to be,” Manuel remembers him saying.

The final moments of Episode 1 of “Reality Check” preview the docuseries’ darkest story: the on-camera blackout sex Shandi Sullivan had in Milan during the show’s second season.

After Season 1 was a hit, “ANTM” got a bigger budget for the next cycle, leading to the first international trip for the remaining cast. Once in Milan, Sullivan — an awkward, gawky young woman who’d been a clerk at Walgreens — seemed to blossom, and all the judges were gushing about her transformation (and her photoshoot). During a competition when they went on go-sees, the contestants were driven around on Vespas by young men, whom they then invited back to where they were staying. Does Banks remember what happened to Shandi, an off-camera voice asks her. Banks hesitates: “Um…” So ends Episode 1.

The second episode picks up from there, with Sullivan sharing her story. “I think I had two bottles of wine by myself,” she says, and had not eaten all day. She was in a hot tub with one of the guys, and they began kissing. “I was blacked out for a lot of it,” she says. “I didn’t even feel sex happening, I just knew it was happening. And then I just passed out.” She woke up the next morning and cried hysterically, she says.

The event became a storyline in a way that’s shocking in 2026. The show framed it as if she had cheated on her longtime boyfriend, Eric, and Banks even had a sisterly talk with Sullivan on camera about the perils of infidelity in relationships. (When asked about the ethics of what happened to Sullivan, Banks says she didn’t have anything to do with production.) Sullivan wanted to go home, and she wanted to talk to Eric on the phone. Production filmed her calling him — recording his side of the conversation, too — and confessing, “I did the worst possible thing I could do.” What unfolded is an indelible memory to anyone who saw this scene. “You had sex?” Eric screeched at her. “You stupid bitch!”

Sullivan says there were only two members of the crew with her during the scene, a camera operator and a sound guy. “We’re really, really sorry that we had to film that,” she remembers them saying to her afterward. “They just knew this isn’t right — why are we filming this?”

Mok says the cast knew the show was filmed like a documentary, without interference. But Sullivan says she would have wanted someone to intervene when she was wasted, describing what she wishes the show’s crew had thought that night: “This has gone too far — we gotta pull her out of this.” The show also filmed her later asking the man she’d been with whether they’d used protection, and whether he had any STDs. As for the final product, Mok says, “We scaled back that scene in a significant way.”

Sullivan appeared on Banks’ self-named talk show before Cycle 5 of “ANTM,” and had told them that she’d never watched what happened to her. But Banks played it anyway during Sullivan’s appearance, and she turned her eyes away so she didn’t have to see it. Speaking in the docuseries, Sullivan says: “I literally told you behind the scenes, I’ve never seen it, I don’t want to see it — don’t show it. You didn’t respect that. At all.” 

“Her behavior doesn’t change,” Sullivan says.

As “ANTM” created more and more drama out of its photoshoots, the show really had some doozies. There was the one when they had to wear meat; there was another in which they had to pose as homeless women, with actual unhoused people. In another setup, they showed the negative impacts of smoking in which they were posed in front of a mirror with a beauty shot — then the reflected image showed them prematurely aged, or with tumors, or rotted teeth or baldness as a result of chemotherapy. Barker says that, for the most part, no one noticed that these were strange ideas for a show that was meant to project glamour: “For some reason, no one really seemed to see it.”

In Cycle 8, the contestants posed as crime-scene victims, dead bodies in various poses. One of them was Dionne Walters, pictured above, whose mother had actually been shot and was paralyzed and in a wheelchair. Producers knew what happened because it was in her application. “I thought it was a coincidence at the time,” Walters says. “But I don’t think it was.” During the shoot, Manuel tells her, “I love it because your ankle looks broken.”

Today, Mok regrets this concept and says it was a mistake. He tells himself, “You were an idiot.”

And then there were the show’s infamous race-swapping photoshoots — yes, two of them. In Cycle 4, Manuel was directed to switch up the models’ races and then have them pose with a child of that race. A white woman poses as a Black woman wearing Blackface and a wig — and so on. Manuel says he was uncomfortable about it from the beginning, and knew the implications (his parents are both South African). “You can see it on my face,” he says. Banks assured him she’d take the lead, because she “didn’t think it was controversial.”

In Cycle 13, there was a similarly themed challenge, and Banks yells encouragement to a contestant: “Think about Egypt, the people, what they’ve been through!”

“Looking at the show now, through the 2020 lens — it’s an issue, and I understand 100% why,” Banks says about the race-swapping concepts.

Episode 3 of “Reality Check” is titled “Rooting for You,” named after the most famous, most GIF’d, most quoted scene in the history of “America’s Next Top Model.” It’s a reference to the ending of the Season 4 episode “The Girl Who Pushes Tyra Over the Edge” when Banks fully lost her shit on eliminated contestant Tiffany Richardson.

When asked at the top of Episode 3 what her toughest moment on the show had been, Banks thinks about it. “Tiffany, maybe?” she’s prompted. The blowup occurred after Richardson had flunked a challenge in which they were supposed to be presenters — “None of you girls can read,” judge Janice Dickinson tells them. Richardson had been a semi-finalist the previous season, but got into a fight with a stranger at Barney’s Beanery, who poured beer on her head. You can see this melée in the premiere of Cycle 3, in which Richardson says, “Bitch poured beer on my weave!” — but she had to be eliminated after the public fight. (For a full recounting of Richardson’s “ANTM” experience from her perspective, read Michael Blackmon’s BuzzFeed profile of her from December 2017.)

When Banks brought Richardson back the next season, she wanted the contestant to rise to the challenge. But after eliminating Richardson, Banks, according to Manuel, was “feeling like Tiffany’s mocking this.” Banks then laid into Richardson, shouting (in part), “When my mother yells like this, it’s because she loves me. I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!” It was shocking.

“Tyra really scared all of us,” Barker says, remembering how it felt. “We literally jumped out of our seats: ‘What is happening right now?’” Mok agrees: “It was ugly,” and Manuel says that production came and “took Tyra off the set.”

Banks reflects on what happened in “Reality Check,” saying: “I went too far. You know, I lost it. It was probably bigger than her.” 

She continues: “I think all that was in that moment. That’s some Black girl stuff that goes real deep inside of me. But I knew I went too far.” Manuel recalls that the dressing-down was even worse than what was shown on television, saying there were things the audience didn’t see that “were not well-intentioned” — and he’ll “probably never repeat” what was said that day. Nolé Marin, a judge that season, says, “All I know is, next week, we had all the lawyers on set.” 

“People have tried to make it something funny,” Manuel says, bringing the segment to an end. “But it really wasn’t.” 

The modeling business is rife with eating disorders and body-shaming, and “America’s Next Top Model” was no different — despite Banks’ stated intentions. Season 1 contestant Giselle Samson tells the “Reality Check” team that the judges’ assessment of her — that she had a “wide ass” and “needed to tighten up” — haunts her still. Those comments have “stayed with me forever,” she says. “‘Why does my ass need to be so wide?’ That’s how I talk to myself — to this day.”

For Keenyah Hill, the Season 4 contestant pictured above, her weight was a theme of the season. During a Seven Deadly Sins challenge, she represented gluttony. When they traveled to South Africa and did an animal challenge, she was cast as an elephant. Janice Dickinson is shown saying, “Keenyah needs to lose weight. Keenyah needs to lose weight. Keenyah needs to lose weight,” and Manuel asks her on camera whether she’s gained weight. Banks says to her, “If you don’t fit the clothes, you don’t work.”

In Season 10, Whitney Thompson entered at a size 6. In “Reality Check,” she says she learned from the mistake Season 3 contestant Toccara Jones had made, when she complained that none of the clothes fit her, and then was eliminated that week. “If they see weakness, you’re gone,” Thompson says. She went on to win that season, and weighing 115 pounds at 5’10, is the first “plus-sized” contestant to win “ANTM.”

How ill-equipped “America’s Next Top Model” was to discover America’s actual next top model is illustrated throughout “Reality Check.” But it’s winner Danielle Evans who describes exactly what happened to her after she won the sixth season.

Evans had come from an impoverished background in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the show represented her big chance. So when Banks told her she needed to get the gap in her teeth closed, or she’d be sent home — Evans agreed, even though she felt like it detracted from her signature look. (Evans was one of two contestants that season forced to fix her teeth: Joannie Dodds, the runner-up, spent 18 hours in a dentist’s chair, and reports in “Reality Check” that she still has dental problems to this day.)

After Evans won, and received her cash prize and contract with Ford Models, she moved to New York City, straight into a model apartment. “They just threw me to the wolves,” Evans says. Living with other models, she watched them come and go all day, going on castings and booking jobs. The then-up-and-coming model Chanel Iman was one of Evans’ roommates, and Iman asked their mutual agent why Evans was never sent on castings: “We have to treat Dani differently because she came from ‘Top Model,’” the agent said, according to Evans’ recollection. “That was a hard, hard pill to swallow.”

In the pre-influencer world, as it turned out, designers didn’t want Evans (or any “Top Model” graduates) to overshadow their collections. “I knew from very early on, ‘Oh, “Top Model” has a stigma.’”

Banks, according to Evans, told her years later that she knew she’d been struggling — and she did nothing about it. “’Don’t see me in my suffering and just walk past me,’” Evans says through tears. “That’s so fucked up! They built a whole empire, a multi-million dollar brand known as ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ off the backs of every girl’s dream that did that show. And it never became realized.”

After 18 seasons, all shows’ audiences erode — and “ANTM” was no different. It was 2012, and Banks tells the story of the new head of The CW, Mark Pedowitz, calling her repeatedly, and her avoiding his calls. When they finally spoke, he told her that the show’s ratings were dipping, they needed to make a change — “and there are no sacred cows,” she says. He told her to fire Mr. J, Miss J and Barker. 

Once they learned the news, they all agreed that there would be a joint press release announcing their departures, but before that happened, Manuel says, there was a “leak” to Page Six that Tyra had fired them. Manuel had wanted to quit after Cycle 8, even putting in his notice to Banks, who wrote back, “I am disappointed.” He returned to the series under the threat of being blackballed, he says, and his power ebbed with each season. “When I wanted to leave, I wasn’t afforded that,” Manuel says. “I work on the show from Cycles 10 through 18 — I made so many concessions. That’s the part that’s the most hurtful.”

Miss J and Barker also felt betrayed. “I was the spine of the show,” Miss J says. Barker adds, “That was really tough. It was somewhat mercenary.”

“I cried myself to sleep that night,” Banks says. “Bosses have bosses. And the big boss was very clear — there were no sacred cows.”

The ratings continued to decrease, even as the show amped up its gimmicks: a college edition, Americans v. Brits, adding male models. Eventually, Banks herself was replaced by Rita Ora (who?!).

“They replaced Tyra,” Mok says mournfully. 

Earlier in the episode, Manuel describes how having given notice changed his relationship with Banks — they had been so close, but she froze him out after that. “It was like psychological torture,” he says. During her sit-down interview, when Banks is asked whether she wants to offer her side of that story, she says, “Nah,” and scrunches her face. “I’d prefer — I should just call Jay. I don’t want to do this here. He’s a special man.” 

According to a recent interview with Manuel in Interview Magazine, Banks has not called him.

After Miss J was fired, he continued working in the extended “ANTM” world —even returning to the “America’s Next Top Model” mothership as a judge for Cycle 22 in 2015, and appearing on the China and Russia editions of the show. He also worked at the Savannah College of Art and Design, having started coaching students there through Vogue’s André Leon Talley beginning in 2003.

But on Dec. 27, 2022, as revealed in “Reality Check,” Miss J had a stroke. “I spent five weeks in a coma,” he says. “I couldn’t walk. I couldn’t talk.” Miss J is an interview subject throughout the docuseries, with no visible evidence of his condition, and this reveal — which has never been public until today (in fact, Netflix embargoed it until the premiere date) — packs an emotional wallop.

Barker and Manuel tell the story of when they first visited Miss J in the hospital. “That was just such a terrible shock,” Barker says. “And really upsetting and horrifying and scary,” adding, “I held him.” Miss J says, “I cried, because I just miss them so much.”

“Reality Check” then gathers the three of them together on a set — and Miss J is in a wheelchair. Manuel says to him, “You’re speaking so much better now.” Barker addresses him, too, saying: “When we first saw you in the hospital, you could hardly move, hardly talk. And now you’re sitting up doing an interview — chatting, talking, rolling your eyes, making us laugh.” Miss J’s face crumples in tears, and Barker puts his arm around him.

“I taught models how to walk. And now I can’t walk,” Miss J says, and then pauses. “Not yet. Not yet!” They all take a selfie, their first one since 2019.

And no, though he’s heard from Banks, she hasn’t visited him. “No, not yet,” Miss J says, “Not yet,” and then lowers his head, and looks over his glasses, in one of his signature shady moves.  

As for Banks, she lives in Australia now — she doesn’t say why or what brought her there. “I feel like my work is not done,” she says.

And in a manner that almost sounds like a threat, Banks says: “You have no idea what we have planned for Cycle 25.”