The Ableism of America's Next Top Model
What the Netflix documentary doesn't address.
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I did not need Netflix’s number-one documentary Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model (or E!’s upcoming documentary) to tell me that Tyra Banks (who did not graduate from Harvard University like she boasts) and America’s Next Top Model (ANTM) were toxic. I only learned about the depth of their toxicity and damage through the YouTube channels Mojo, Ms. Mojo and fashion photographer Jessica Kobeissi.
For years on her YouTube channel, Kobeissi, an incredible photographer, has used her knowledge and practice of fashion photography to offer educated and honest critiques and criticism of ANTM. She has even conducted in-depth and revealing interviews with some former contestants. She continues to critique ANTM on her channel.
Along with ANTM’s racism, misogyny, body shaming, preying on young women from abusive and neglectful families, weaponization of trauma and insecurities, promotion of eating disorders, enablement of sexual assault and sexual harassment, lack of respect for bodily autonomy and verbal and physical cruelty, ANTM remains guilty of another social malevolence: ableism.
I hardly watched ANTM. When I did view it, it was only the episodes on VH1’s weekend reruns of two contestants who captured my heart and eye.
One contestant was Danielle Evans. The beautiful young woman from Little Rock, Arkansas, now a milliner who founded Monrowe NYC, had a wonderful amiable personality and such a striking look. I was so happy when she won.
Yet I was more infuriated that Banks bullied Danielle into closing her tooth gap to remain in ANTM. Ahem. Lauren Hutton anyone?
Another young woman I followed was Mercedes Scelba-Shorte, now known professionally as Mercedes Yvette. Early in the series’ second cycle, she worked to hide her autoimmune disorder of lupus. Out of ignorance and cruelty, contestants and ANTM judges harassed her because of how often she looked tired and took naps.
I know firsthand from living with multiple sclerosis that fatigue is a major symptom of autoimmune disorders. For me, it is also the most disabling. I also get why Mercedes tried to hide the fact she has lupus.
A few months after learning I had MS, a composition coordinator at a Chicago university who had hired me for my first part-time teaching job told me to keep the fact I live with MS “close to the vest.” Close to 20 years later in 2026, society is still not supportive of disabilities and illnesses. One person several years ago described me as “slow” at a work event because of how MS has impaired my mobility, balance, cognition and speech. I cried about it all the way home to one of my dear friends.
In episode five, Mercedes revealed the fact she lives with lupus to ANTM judge Janice Dickinson, one of the most vile people on the show and in real life. To my surprise, Dickinson reacted with compassion and recognized Mercedes for her courage in revealing her chronic illness.
Mercedes became first runner-up at that cycle’s conclusion. Since then, she has become a model, an actor, a mother, an advocate for lupus education and research and the CEO of Luxe Design Living.
While Mercedes did not tell her story in Netflix’s documentary, Danielle did.
Though Danielle does not live with a disability or chronic illness as far as I know, I mention her because Banks viewed the gap between Danielle’s two front teeth—that Danielle had embraced and celebrated—as an unacceptable imperfection that needed fixing. Disability theorist, activist and poet Eli Claire wrote about society’s need to fix imperfections and disabilities in his book Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure.
Since Banks does not hold herself accountable, she blamed her bullying of Danielle on what she claimed industry professionals had told her—that a model with a tooth gap was unacceptable in beauty and fashion. Only a homogenized “perfect” smile would generate bookings and revenue for products and designers.
So much for Banks’s initial desire and mission to challenge and revolutionize the modeling and fashion industries. The now “hot ice cream” (huh?) creator makes it known at the documentary’s start that ANTM’s initial purpose was to change the modeling and fashion industry.
In the documentary, Banks asserts her goal was to educate modeling contestants about these industries. Her biggest mission, however, was promoting and supporting models who went against the tall, rail-thin, blonde-and-blue-eyed, cis-hetero and able-bodied archetype of visual perfection and whiteness.
She failed. Miserably.
ANTM’s and Banks’ treatment of contestants with viewed “imperfections” and disabilities like Mercedes, Amanda Swafford, Nyle DiMarco, Brittany Hatch and Jeana Turner extends beyond ignorant and abhorrent. It’s evil and shameful.
Kobeissi was gobsmacked about the show’s treatment of Swafford who is legally blind. One episode featured ANTM forcing Swafford to walk a crooked runway in the dark.
Several seasons later, DiMarco, who is deaf, uses ASL, and can read lips, was forced to participate in a night photoshoot without lights that could have accommodated him. ANTM producers knew he needed adequate light to see his ASL interpreter and read lips. Instead ANTM chose to make the photoshoot more difficult for him.
Of course, the narcissistic Banks found DiMarco’s concentrated gaze to read lips “uncomfortable” because she thought he was hitting on her. She also views and treats DiMarco as an object for her inspiration porn.
Deaf culture is important to learn about, understand and recognize. Oscar-winning actor and activist Marlee Matlin addressed this at the World Science Festival six years ago. As an executive producer on ANTM, Banks like her fellow producer Ken Mok was obligated to learn about disability and accommodations. All employers must follow ADA guidelines and laws.
For Hatch, she had developed short-term memory loss after a car hit her when she was 17. ANTM dismissed her disability that resulted from it.
Whitney Young wrote in the preface to her Medium article about Hatch:
During Cycle 8 of America’s Next Top Model, judges were mostly unsympathetic towards contestant Brittany Hatch when she confessed that she suffered from short-term memory loss due to being hit by a car at 17. Her difficulty made it difficult for her to complete a commercial challenge. We’re [sic] the judges right in telling her that she would need to learn to “work through” her shortcomings?
The answer to Young’s question is easy. No.
The judges and the producers were (and most likely still are) ignorant and ableist. ANTM was federally and legally obligated to provide Hatch, now a published writer under the pen name C.B. Hatch, and its other disabled and chronically ill contestants with accommodations,
More than 30 years since George H.W. Bush signed the Americans with Disability Act into law, not all businesses and organizations comply with the ADA even after a person reveals their disability and asks for accommodations. Another Chicago university I taught for part-time did not file my ADA paperwork though I had dropped it off to its HR office. Not until 20 years later did I learn my paperwork had never been filed.
Finally, we have the most distressing and merciless example of Turner. She lives with alopecia universalis, an autoimmune disorder. ANTM tricked her into having her head completely shaved.
She told The Blast that the producers made it sound like her make-over would provide her with a new wig. Two years before Netflix’s documentary, she told Vice’s Dark Side of Reality TV that she was not yet ready to shave her head.
It’s tragic irony that ANTM judge and runway coach Miss Jay Alexander who did not support Hatch suffered a stroke in 2022. Before he embarked on physical therapy, Alexander had lost the ability to speak and walk.
The main reason hostility and silence remain toward disability and chronic illness is because both remind us of our mortality, vulnerability and fragility.
The uncomfortable truth is that we can be healthy and able-bodied one minute then become ill or disabled the next. The disability community makes up the largest marginalized community worldwide. Denying that does not make this reality disappear.
I am not surprised that Netflix’s documentary did not acknowledge ANTM’s ableism. Disability and chronic illnesses often remain afterthoughts or completely ignored. Tyra Banks and ANTM’s failures cannot be dismissed with “that was the time.” Ableism and evil are timeless. What has changed are education and awareness.
What I want to express for myself is to reiterate what Banks infamously screamed at contestant Tiffany Richardson.
Learn something from this! When you go to bed at night you lay there and you take responsibility for yourself because nobody’s gonna take responsibility for you! You rolling your eyes, and you act like it’s because you’ve heard it all before! You’ve heard it all before? You don’t know where the hell I’ve come from. You have no idea what I’ve been through. But I’m not a victim. I grow from it. And I learn. Take responsibility for yourself.