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Tyra Banks, current host of Dancing With the Stars and former host of America’s Next Top Model, has faced backlash following resurfaced video clips from the show previously, and the TV star now has fans calling her out for “bullying” models on ANTM.
Banks is facing backlash from fans based on a resurfaced video clip in which Banks tells one Black model that she had bad skin and is rude to others about their final images.
“You have to put on more makeup as a woman of color,” Banks told one contestant in the clip. “Our skin reflects the light.”
Other judges on the show, which aired across many networks for years, told one model that her photos looked “like a Hitchcock film” and went back and forth between retouched and unretouched images to prove her point.
Banks also told the models that she was wrong when suggesting that the photographer did not choose her best shots to present.
Twitter Users Say They Think Banks is ‘Vile’
Fans took to Twitter to talk about the video clip and Banks’s treatment of models on America’s Next Top Model.
“Tyra Banks is lucky that her show didn’t exist during the peak of social media bc it would’ve made the way she got cooked last year seem like a walk in the park,” one user wrote.
Another person wrote, “With every video from ANTM that resurfaces, I realize more and more that Tyra Banks absolutely bullied the women on there, especially the Black women.”
They added, “She’s vile, and saying that sucks bc I looked up to her so much when I was younger. I thought she was genuinely rooting for these women, that she wanted them to be amazing. All she did was perpetuate the very same bullying that she was supposedly against in that industry.”
The user said that one particular heartbreaking memory they had of the show was from when Banks told one model she needed to close the gap between her teeth or she would be eliminated from the show.
Some Fans Came to Banks’s Defense, Say She Was Processing Trauma
Though a lot of the people talking about Banks on Twitter were negative, some people also said that it was possible Banks had been through a lot in the modeling industry and was pushing that off onto the models she was training.
“She must’ve been through it because she’s clearly passing on the trauma,” one user wrote.
Another wrote, “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Tyra Banks needed therapy, not a show in which she normalized the trauma of the modeling industry.”
Some people agreed that Banks had dealt with trauma in her modeling career and was pushing that onto the contestants.
“I wonder if Tyra Banks treated the black women on ANTM so horribly as a way to get them ‘ready’ for what it was going to be like in the ‘real’ modeling world? I truly think that’s what Tyra thought she was doing, but it seemed rooted in her own trauma inflicted by the industry,” one person tweeted.
Banks was previously under fire for having the models on the show walk on a runway through an obstacle course that included swinging medallions, and ANTM winner Lisa D’Amato spoke up about Banks allegedly exploiting models.
Tyra Banks is the current host of ABC’s Dancing With the Stars, which is set to return in the fall of 2021.
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