Tyra Banks Sues Netflix For Defamation Over America’s Next Top Model Documentary
by Daniel Welsh · BuzzFeedTyra Banks at the Franca Fund Gala, 2025
Tyra Banks is taking legal action against Netflix over the streaming giant’s recent documentary about her time at the helm of America’s Next Top Model.
Earlier this year, fans were surprised to see that Tyra had sat down for an extended chat to discuss her many years as Top Model’s host, head judge and co-executive producer for a documentary titled Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, which charted the show’s rise as well as some of its more thorny and controversial issues.
It later emerged that she’d “never asked to have any creative input or control”, but four months after the three-part series aired, she is now suing Netflix about it.
People magazine reported on Saturday that it had seen court documents in which Tyra alleged the documentary’s creators had “stripped of context and reassembled” the three-hour interview she gave, in order to “support a false and defamatory narrative unrelated to what she actually expressed”.
In these court documents, it’s alleged: “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.
“That narrative about Ms. Banks is a complete fabrication – one that Netflix streamed to a global audience of millions.”
HuffPost UK has contacted representatives for both Netflix and Tyra Banks for comment.
An official Netflix synopsis for the three-part doc teased: “Since ANTM ended, a decade ago, longtime fans and new audiences alike – fueled in part by pandemic-era binge-watching – have revisited the show and taken to social media to reconsider its place in the culture, scrutinising controversial moments and questioning whether contestants were treated fairly.
“In the docuseries, Tyra Banks, [executive producer] Ken Mok, and former judges and contestants speak directly to those questions and reflect on the show’s complicated history.”
Vanessa Golembewski, an executive producer on Reality Check, said earlier this year: “From the beginning, this documentary took an incredible amount of trust. Tyra’s perspective was always important to the series, but it was just as important that her involvement was as an interview subject only. She afforded us the same level of trust as everyone else who participates in the documentary.
“She never asked to have any creative input or control, and she’s seeing the footage for the first time alongside the rest of the world.”