‘She isn’t sorry’: is anyone rooting for Tyra Banks now? Eight things you need to know

Ever since Netflix dropped its documentary series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, the supermodel has been under fire. But is there another motive behind all the controversy?

“I was rooting for you,” Tyra Banks famously berated a contestant on America’s Next Top Model some 20 years ago. But who, now, is rooting for Tyra Banks?

The supermodel and reality-TV mogul has been under fire from all sides ever since Netflix dropped its documentary series, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model. Long-circling scrutiny of the show’s tasteless extremes, frequent body-shaming and blatant failures of duty of care have come to rest on Banks herself, with viewers, Top Model contestants and even her former friends all expressing outrage at her apparent lack of repentance.

Does Banks really want to move on in her new life as an ice-cream impresario in Australia – or is all this controversy over Top Model a Trojan horse for a reboot?

Reality Check has been a hit for Netflix – but a blow for Banks

Deadline reports that Reality Check has drawn more than 14m views in its first week on Netflix, topping the platform’s English-language charts. (By comparison, Being Gordon Ramsay debuted at number 10 with just under 3m views.) Banks received no questions in advance of her four-hour interview, had no powers of approval over how she was presented, and was only able to watch the series at the same time as the rest of the world. “She had no say, no influence, no anything,” co-director Mor Loushy told Vanity Fair. Banks may well have received Reality Check as just that, with critics and viewers focusing on her failure to take adequate accountability for her part in the toxic reality-TV juggernaut.

The criticism keeps on coming

According to Reality Check’s directors, Banks was told that the docuseries would happen with or without her involvement; she agreed to an interview to give her side of the story, and express her good intentions to make modelling more inclusive. But rather than being the final word, or refining her public image, Banks’s interview on Reality Check seems to have inflamed feelings further, inspiring yet more former contestants to weigh in. One, Brittany Brower, said on TikTok that the series was “triggering” and “hard to watch”, not least for Banks’s failure to “take any accountability for … how we got completely used”. Another, Brittany Corinne Hatch, said in a statement that Top Model was “a systemic labor violation and a psychological experiment”, and that Banks “DESERVES. EVERY. OUNCE. OF. HATE”. Some former contestants said Reality Check didn’t go far enough to expose Top Model. Lisa D’Amato said on Instagram that the series’ view was “tame and sugarcoated”, and that the experience for many contestants was “wayyyyyyyy worse”. And in a blog post, Victoria Henley wrote that the contract securing her appearance on Top Model was more “deeply troubling” than The Handmaid’s Tale.

Banks did admit to going too far...

You wouldn’t quite call it an apology, but in Reality Check Banks did admit to going “too far” with her infamous “rooting for you” tirade at contestant Tiffany Richardson in cycle four. “You know, I lost it,” she said. According to Top Model judges interviewed in the documentary, Banks’s outburst went far beyond what was broadcast, and led to her being removed from the set. Her rage was supposedly prompted by Richardson’s failure to correctly pronounce the names of various fashion designers. Richardson certainly seems to have rejected Banks’s version of events. In a since-deleted post to Instagram, she reportedly addressed Banks directly, calling her a “lying ass bitch”: “You know how you treated me the whole time off and on camera, YOU WAS A BULLY!!!”

But the verdict from former judges is damning

Criticism isn’t just confined to former contestants: Banks’s trio of former judges – catwalk coach J Alexander, creative director Jay Manuel and photographer Nigel Barker – have little good to say about her either. On Reality Check, Manuel said that, after he expressed concern about Top Model’s creative direction, Banks froze him out and diminished his role. When this is put to her in the documentary, Banks says only: “I should call Jay.” Manuel told Entertainment Tonight he would not be waiting by the phone, and did not miss the friendship. He also told the New York Times that it was “a shame that she wasn’t willing to be a little more vulnerable … What I saw was Television Tyra”. Meanwhile, Alexander suffered a stroke in December 2022, spent five weeks in a coma and had to relearn how to talk and walk. Banks has not visited – though she did send a text. A GoFundMe has been set up to support Alexander’s recovery since Reality Check and has already raised nearly $30,000.

TikTok is making light of the Top Model trauma

On TikTok, people have been skewering Banks’s apparent lack of compassion and Top Model’s ludicrous photoshoots by imagining uniquely traumatising challenges. One representative video set out one such hypothetical scenario: “You tell Tyra you are afraid of being underwater and your sister drowned”, only to be then submerged in a tank in haute-couture. Others imagined an aspiring model being dressed as an aubergine, having just disclosed an allergy, or having to pose in a shower stall and be “fierce for grandma” after a relative’s fatal fall. It is undeniably dark humour.

There is a pro-Banks brigade

Not everyone is anti-Banks. Isis King, Top Model’s first trans contestant, said she “can’t downplay” the positive impact of the show on her life, leading to a career as an actor as well as gender-affirming surgery. Another model, Jaslene Gonzalez, credited Banks and producers with encouraging her to seek help with an abusive relationship; at the time, she did not know what domestic violence was. Top Model’s first-ever winner, Adrianne Curry, said that, though she had been “deeply hurt” by Banks, the reaction was disproportionate. “People act like what Tyra did is worse than Bill Gates and Epstein. It isn’t… Being a dickhead isn’t illegal, people.” Curry also said, on Instagram, that she did have to hand it to Banks for refusing to kowtow to public pressure when “she isn’t sorry”: “We want her to lie, and say how bad she feels … and she’s just like: ‘Fuck you, I’ll do what I want.’ And I gotta respect that.”

Banks has found a new, creamier calling

For all the talk about Banks, she has not publicly addressed Reality Check or the response to her interview. Even in the documentary, she is keen to emphasise that she has moved on, being now based in Australia and pursuing her new passion: ice-cream. Banks opened a parlour for her Smize and Dream business in Sydney last September and made headlines for apparently pioneering “hot” ice-cream. A reporter for this publication said it was “a lot more watery than expected”, and like “a forgotten cup of tea”. Called on to explain her “hot Smize cream” creation at the SXSW Sydney conference in October, Banks said only that “different is better than better”. The range also includes “ice-cream you can chew”. Last December, she told an Australian podcaster that she was “very proud” of her modelling career, and for breaking “down a lot of doors” within the fashion industry, “but the legacy, the real legacy – I want it to be ice-cream”.

…but is she actually still in the running to host America’s Next Top Model?

If Banks remains committed to innovating frozen desserts, Reality Check and the refocused attention on her Top Model past will surely be an unwelcome distraction. But an oblique remark she makes at the end of the documentary has prompted speculation that she may be sounding out a potential reboot. “I’m obsessed with pivoting … I feel like my work is not done. You have no idea what we have planned for Cycle 25,” Banks said (or threatened). She has previously expressed interest in reviving Top Model, but this recent reckoning seems like a particularly tone deaf moment. Then again, we’re talking about a show that staged a “race-swapping” photoshoot – twice.