Tyra Banks filed a defamation lawsuit against Netflix on Saturday, claiming that her portrayal in the America’s Next Top Model docuseries, Reality Check, which the streamer released in February, was edited to support a false narrative.
In the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, Banks’ attorneys say she participated in a three-and-a-half-hour interview about the show’s legacy and decisions she would approach differently today. But, the suit claims, just 16 minutes of her comments were used in the three-part docuseries and they were”stripped of context and reassembled to support a false and defamatory narrative unrelated to what she actually expressed.” Her lawyers argue that the accountability she took for some of Top Model‘s most controversial moments was edited out.
“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,” the lawsuit states. “That narrative about Ms. Banks is a complete fabrication — one that Netflix streamed to a global audience of millions.”
