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We always knew that a tell-all documentary about America’s Next Top Model wasn’t going to be pretty. But the Shandi Sullivan storyline from cycle two was particularly harrowing.
We’d all seen the memes, the makeovers, the questionable photoshoots and the Gladiator-level runway challenges. And given that the show hit its peak in the mid-to-late noughties, we weren’t under any illusions that Tyra Banks’ attempt to democratise the modelling industry via reality TV would be particularly inclusive, either. At best, ANTM could be written off as simply a product of its time. At worst, it could be blamed for perpetuating the worst elements of a 2000s celebrity culture that preyed on vulnerable women.
Watch Netflix’s new docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model and you’ll probably lean towards the latter. But no ANTM contestant’s story has been quite as troubling as Shandi Sullivan’s.
What was initially framed as a cheating scandal when her season first aired has now been explored in a different light – and to make matters worse, the ANTM producers don’t appear to show any remorse. Read on to find out what happened.
Who is Shandi Sullivan?
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Shandi Sullivan was brought on as the dark horse of her season, an unassuming girl from Kansas City who worked in Walgreens and was hopelessly devoted to her boyfriend, Eric. At 21, she was noticeably less confident than many of the other contestants, having been encouraged to attend the open call audition at the Missouri Mall by Eric. A month later, she was on the show and being given her Top Model makeover, swapping her brown hair for glossy, golden locks.
What happened to her on ANTM?
Sullivan defied expectations and made it to the final four contestants, who were flown to Milan for the season’s last few challenges. It was her first time out of the country and, after a photoshoot featuring male models, the show’s producers organised a small party at the girls’ house with some of the Italian men. Sullivan estimates that she had two bottles of wine to herself before they were all encouraged to get in the hot tub. From that point on, she remembers a distressing experience. The cameras were rolling the whole time.
“No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed, all of it. Every moment of it,” she remembers in the documentary. “I didn’t even feel sex happening, I just knew it was happening. And then I passed out.” The incident was framed as a cheating scandal, as though Sullivan had intentionally betrayed her boyfriend back home. And the camera crew captured every stage of her humiliation in detail, from her phone call with Eric to explain what had happened to her visit to a doctor for a sexual health check-up.
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