‘They tortured us psychologically… it was inhumane’: America’s Next Top Model winners reveal abuse, bullying and every little thing lacking from new Netflix doc – as they inform CLARA GASPAR what it was REALLY like on present and surprising fact about Tyra Bank

The snaggle tooth is no longer!’ announces 24-year-old Joanie, weary after a 12-hour ordeal in a luxury Hollywood dentist’s chair.

Moments earlier, viewers had watched in gruesome detail as four long teeth, slick with bright red blood, were levered from her mouth and held up for inspection.

This wasn’t Joanie’s choice, but Tyra Banks’ – former supermodel and the imperious host of reality TV series America’s Next Top Model. She had ordered Joanie and another gap-toothed contestant, Danielle, to fix their smiles if they wanted to stay in the competition.

Even though Joanie later admitted that the surgery did her lifelong damage, there was only ever one answer to Tyra’s request. After all, this was America’s Next Top Model –at its peak, one of the most watched shows on television and a stalwart of mid-2000s pop culture.

The premise was simple. After a rigorous casting drive, around a dozen aspiring models were selected to appear on the show and moved into a shared New York apartment.

There, they had weekly photoshoots, ‘catwalk challenges’ and makeovers, all under the watchful eye of Tyra and her rotating panel of judges, which included photographer Nigel Barker, then Vogue editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley, runway coach Miss J. Alexander, as well as veteran supermodels Janice Dickinson and Twiggy.

One by one, contestants were eliminated until a winner was crowned and handed a contract, a magazine cover appearance and the promise of a high-fashion modelling career.

It drew audiences of up to 100 million worldwide, spawned more than 30 international spin-offs from Africa to Brazil and ran for 24 seasons between 2003 and 2018.

The show produced countless online memes and even developed its own lexicon: fans learnt what it meant to ‘smize’ (smiling with your eyes) to ‘booty tooch’ (pushing out your posterior to enhance angles in photos) and to feel ‘flawsome’ (confident in your flaws). 

Viewers watched 324 contestants pass through the Top Model machine – not including the tens of thousands more who auditioned to get on the show.

In hindsight, perhaps they were the lucky ones. The reputation of Top Model has shifted dramatically from camp, fabulous fun to something far more troubling.

Clips of Banks and her fellow judges berating contestants (‘You look deranged… and you look like you have a penis’) and criticising their weight (‘She’s fat. She’s huge! She looks like she should be working for a car-toppling company!’) now circulate widely on social media, prompting a collective sense of disbelief that this ever passed for entertainment.

And now, a three-part Netflix documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model – released on Monday – has lifted the lid on the show’s scandalous legacy. It’s the first time that Tyra has spoken at length on the controversy. She claims she created Top Model as a vehicle ‘to fight against the fashion industry’.

As a former supermodel who ‘was constantly being told’, she says, ‘you can’t do this because you’re black’, this was her form of ‘payback’ to the agencies and fashion houses who had overlooked her.

However, the Daily Mail this week spoke exclusively to two Top Model winners who claim that their experiences were far worse than is revealed in the new documentary – which, they say, is merely a glossy and desperate attempt at damage control.

Both refused to take be interviewed for the sanitised Netflix series, claiming that the involvement of both Banks and Top Model executive producer Ken Mok suggests they had a ‘heavy hand’ in the production process.

Today, they sensationally reveal how they were lied to, manipulated and ‘psychologically tortured’ during and after the production process, comparing Banks to the ‘great white shark’ of the fashion industry. One even claims she was forced to confront her childhood sexual abuse on air. But more on that later.

What the series does offer is a quickfire run-through of the show’s worst controversies.

Perhaps the most sobering incident it recounts is that of Shandi Sullivan – a 21-year-old supermarket checkout girl from Missouri who featured in series two in 2004.

Midway through the series, producers told the contestants that they were allowed to spend a rare evening socialising with a group of male models. Shandi, who had a boyfriend, Eric, at home, got talking to one of them. ‘We were just like talking and drinking,’ Shandi recalls in the documentary. ‘I don’t think I’d eaten anything at all . . . I remember getting in the hot tub… I was pretty drunk at that point.

‘Everything after that is a blur. I just remember, like, him on top of me.’ The pair had sex in a shower.

Despite Shandi’s obvious inebriation, camera crews filmed the entire sordid ordeal instead of intervening. Footage from the following morning shows Shandi sobbing into a pillow wailing: ‘I wanna die.’

Producers then refused to allow Shandi to call her boyfriend to tell him what had happened, until she threatened to quit the series.

When they did give her permission, it was on the condition that the cameras had to capture their conversation. The result was a deeply disturbing exchange in which Eric, wailing down the phone, calls Shandi – whose skeletal frame is curled up on the floor, sobbing – a ‘stupid b***h’.

When asked about the incident on the documentary, Banks coldly replies: ‘It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because it’s not my territory.’

Ken Mok is similarly unrepentant. ‘We treated Top Model as a documentary’, he says, ‘and we told the girls that.’

After series two aired, the show went stratospheric. But it soon became clear that this was primarily a reality TV series. It wasn’t going to be regularly parachuting winners to runways in Paris or the covers of Vogue.

The main thing was to keep viewers hooked. By the time it reached its middle seasons, America’s Next Top Model had developed a taste for what it called ‘high-concept’ shoots – which were less like fashion editorials and more like dares designed to psychologically rattle contestants.

The concepts became ever more absurd: a photoshoot posing with live tarantulas on contestants’ faces; another in which the girls were asked to pose in couture gowns with real homeless people surrounding them; one featured a model posing on a loo in a ‘bulimic- themed’ look; and another, having just heard that a friend had died, was forced to pose in a coffin.

Then there was a race-swapping editorial in which one black model was smothered in white make-up to look Korean. A white woman was painted to appear as an African woman.

It’s unthinkable that any such segment would be broadcast today. Even at the time, the show’s creative director, Jay Manuel – who grew up in apartheid-era South Africa – was uneasy – and reveals that he asked to be excused from the shoot.

Banks refused, claiming she didn’t think it was controversial: ‘This was my way of showing that brown and black was beautiful!’

In hindsight, however, Banks claims: ‘Looking back now, it’s an issue. And I 100 per cent understand why.’

But even the race-swapping shoot pales in comparison to the murder-themed editorial of series eight.

Contestants were styled as murder victims – with fake wounds and dripping in mock blood – then arranged on various sets featuring police tape and chalk outlines. As well as being deeply tasteless, it was an impossibly cruel move from producers.

Contestant Dionne Walters had spoken on the show about her mother having been shot in real life, leaving her paralysed from the waist down. Despite that, her assigned scenario involved a fake gunshot wound to the head.

In the documentary Dionne says: ‘I thought it was coincidence at the time, but I don’t think it was. I think they wanted to see some kind of mental breakdown.’

In another targeted move by producers, series four contestant Keenyah Hill – who judges considered to have gained weight – was cast as an elephant during an animal-themed photoshoot in South Africa. When the photos were analysed, Tyra’s fellow judge Janice Dickinson told Keenyah: ‘If you’re sporting a gut, then you turn to the side and disguise it.’

Banks added: ‘It’s all about choices, Keenyah. You can get a burger and take the bread off… If you don’t fit the clothes, you don’t work.’

Keenyah was informed later by viewers that those clips had led them to develop eating disorders.

So who was to blame? According to Banks, it was the audience: ‘We kept pushing and creating more and more and more. You guys were demanding it. The viewers wanted more and more and more.’ That’s not how former contestants remember it. Ahead of the Netflix documentary’s release, the Daily Mail spoke to two former contestants, Adrianne Curry and Lisa D’Amato – both of whom refused to be interviewed for the series.

Now 45, Lisa first appeared on America’s Next Top Model in 2005 before returning to win the show’s All-Stars season in 2011. She now says the experience left her ‘traumatised’. ‘This was supposed to be a modelling competition,’ she says. ‘But it was psychological warfare.’

Lisa, unlike the other models in their first series, had a successful modelling career under her belt. She claims producers used this against her, painting her as a ‘villain’ – and viewers believed she was one. ‘It was terrifying,’ she says. ‘Social media was just coming into play, and no matter what I did, I was constantly harassed.’

One of her most serious claims concerns the psychological testing contestants undergo before filming. ‘You tell them everything [about your life]. I thought: “Oh my God, I get therapy through this whole thing.” Turns out they use it as intel. Whatever they find out, they take notes and use it against you to break you down emotionally on the show.’

During those pre-show interviews, Lisa revealed to producers that she had been molested as a child. She alleges they deliberately triggered her childhood trauma to provoke emotional reactions on camera. ‘They were manipulating me – constantly bringing it up in my interviews.’ She claims that this culture came from Banks herself.

‘Tyra was directing them to do that. Whenever we saw her when cameras weren’t rolling yet, she was cold as ice to all of us. She never spoke to anyone unless cameras were on. There was no sense she cared about us.’

Daily conditions, she says, were equally punishing. ‘We weren’t fed properly. We’d work ten to 14-hour days and they’d finally feed us – but it’d be foods like Doritos or huge cheap pizzas.’ That, she says, was yet another tactic to manipulate the weight-conscious models.

‘They tortured us if we didn’t obey or if we complained. They wouldn’t let you go to the bathroom when you needed. They’d have you wait in cars for six or seven hours, sometimes ten. It’s enough to send you crazy. It’s inhumane.’

Lisa, with the other series five contestants, were asked to appear on Banks’s chat show after the season ended. Lisa claims producers pressured her to discuss her childhood sexual abuse on air – but she refused.

After receiving assurances that the topic would be dropped, she says it was raised live in front of a studio audience. Lisa is tearful as she recalls that day: ‘Tyra says to the audience: “You all know Lisa is America’s Next Top Model wild child, but what you don’t know is she was sexually abused as was a kid.” The audience gasped, and they pushed me out in front of a live studio audience.’

After Lisa exploded in fury in front of the crowd, the footage never aired. As for her views on Netflix’s ‘exposé’ of the series, Lisa says: ‘Tyra can apologise all day long, but that same strategy, that same formula, is still being licensed, going to Tyra’s bank account in other countries.’

Adrianne Curry, the first ever winner of America’s Next Top Model, was a small-town girl who believed the show – and its claims that the winner would get a contract with Revlon – would be her ticket to financial security. But it didn’t turn out like that.

According to Adrianne, now 43, what the girls were told during filming was not what viewers later saw on television.

After production wrapped, she says Tyra re-recorded the prize announcement, and the language was softened in the edit – the guarantee of a contract with Revlon was replaced with merely ‘the opportunity to maybe work with’ the cosmetics giant.

After she won, months passed and she heard nothing from Revlon. ‘Nine months later they finally used me to put make-up on my face in a closed room with four executives,’ she says. ‘That was what I won.’

The only tangible reward, she claims, was $10,000 prize money.

Living in New York, waiting for her promised modelling career to materialise, she says she ended up borrowing from her struggling family. So, does she place all the blame with Tyra?

‘Tyra came from an industry that ate people alive, and she survived,’ Adrianne says. ‘You don’t survive shark-infested waters unless you’re the biggest great white. She’s a product of what she was around.’

But Adrianne certainly wouldn’t be part of any documentary that included her.

‘It’s definitely damage control. It’s like asking Lucifer himself to tell you that he’s sorry for being the devil. But that’s what you get from Hollywood.’