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This week on Legally Us, Rachael Bennett, a certified family law specialist and senior attorney at Sullivan Law & Associates, breaks down Tyra Banks’ lawsuit against Netflix after her participation in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, the platform’s docuseries about the long-running competition series.
Banks, 52, filed the lawsuit against the streaming giant on Saturday, June 13, accusing Netflix of defamation and editing her interviews to support a false narrative.
“It’s actually a really interesting claim, because generally documentary producers enjoy broad creative agency over how to edit and how to put together footage, and that’s all under the First Amendment. Now, part of that creative freedom allows them to cut interviews and cut footage in a way that might portray the person being interviewed as being, like, mean or annoying or some kind of opinion-based cut, and we’ve all seen someone get a bad cut or a bad edit on a reality TV show, and that’s allowed for the most part, as long as it’s not completely false,” Bennett explains to Us. “Where it crosses a line into defamation is where something is so heavily edited that it completely manufactures facts that are just objectively not true.”
Banks alleges that only 16 minutes of her extensive three-and-a-half hour interview ultimately appeared in the docuseries, arguing that her comments were taken out of context and rearranged to advance what she describes as a false and defamatory story line that did not reflect her actual statements.
According to Banks, portions of the interview in which she accepted responsibility for some of the most criticized moments from America’s Next Top Model were excluded from the final edit.
The lawsuit claims, “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. That narrative about Ms. Banks is a complete fabrication — one that Netflix streamed to a global audience of millions.”
Cycle 2 contestant Shandi Sullivan said in the Netflix docuseries that she was sexually assaulted during a trip to Italy and was too intoxicated to consent. She criticized production and Banks for turning the incident into a story line rather than intervening.
Banks, who hosted and executive-produced the show, declined to discuss the incident in detail, saying she remembered Sullivan’s story, but production decisions were not her area.
“Banks claims that the producers selectively edited the documentary to make it look like she did know about the sexual assault when it happened back years ago, and that she was so indifferent about it that she just forgot that it had happened years later,” Bennett tells Us of Banks’ lawsuit. “Based on this, she’s made two primary claims. The first is defamation by implication, and then the second is false light, which is similar to defamation. For the defamation claim, she has to prove that Netflix edited the documentary deliberately to create a false and defamatory factual implication that Tyra Banks knew about the sexual assault and had forgotten about it, and then she’ll also have to prove that this was intentional and that the implication was defamatory in that it implied she was indifferent to this contestants sexual assault.”
She adds, “Now, the false light claim is very similar. There, she’s going to have to prove that through intentional editing, Netflix portrayed Banks before the public in a way that was false and that would be highly offensive to a reasonable person and then, because Tyra Banks is a public figure, both of these claims, she’s going to have to prove that the producers acted with actual malice which is either acting with knowledge with how she was portrayed in the documentary was false or acting with reckless disregard for the truth.”
Netflix has not publicly addressed Banks’ lawsuit. Us Weekly reached out to a spokesperson for the company for comment.
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