California’s own Tyra Banks is going to war with Netflix. The Tyra Banks Netflix lawsuit, filed Saturday, accuses the streamer of twisting her words, and she’s bringing receipts.
The California-based supermodel and longtime America’s Next Top Model host says the streaming giant butchered her interview for its docuseries Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model to paint her in a damaging, false light, according to the filing. And the 52-year-old star isn’t mincing words about how she feels.
According to the lawsuit, Banks sat for an interview that ran roughly three and a half hours only for producers to use about 16 minutes of it. The filing claims her words were “stripped of context and reassembled to support a false and defamatory narrative unrelated to what she actually expressed.“
Banks says she agreed to take part because she believed viewers deserved an honest conversation about the show’s legacy, the good and the bad, including the parts she takes accountability for. Instead, her lawsuit alleges, that accountability “ended up on the cutting room floor,” and what survived the edit was engineered through “selective editing, deliberate omission, and surgical manipulation of continuous footage.“
The supermodel’s filing flatly calls the resulting portrayal “a complete fabrication.” Banks is suing Netflix along with the production companies behind the series and its two co-directors, and she’s asking for a jury trial.
Fans Aren’t Buying It And They’re Pointing Out The Irony
But online, sympathy has been in short supply, and the internet wasted no time pointing out the irony of reality TV’s most famous editor crying foul over an edit. “Miss Ma’am, you invented the villain edit. Welcome to the house you built,” one user wrote. “Editing is not your friend when receipts exist,” posted another. A third summed up the mood: “An executive producer of a reality show is upset that a documentary used footage of her out of context? Make it make sense.“
Not everyone piled on. “I hope she wins; context matters,” one supporter countered. “You can cut exact moments into a disturbing clip to make someone look like a villain.” But that view was firmly in the minority as the clip and the lawsuit news spread.
It’s a stunning turn for a series that drew major attention for digging into the messy underbelly of early-2000s reality TV. Banks participated willingly and now says she was set up. As of Saturday, Netflix had not publicly responded to the suit.
Whether a jury ever hears the case or not, the court of public opinion has already weighed in, and for now, it’s not ruling in Tyra’s favor.
