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America’s Next Top Model was the Hunger Games of 2000s reality television — sometimes literally. Contestants endured tongue-lashings and survived makeovers that left them looking like fever dreams. They had unwanted orthodontic procedures and nightmare trips to the Italian countryside and were body shamed, encouraged to starve and humiliated on a regular basis. The girls were paid just $40 US a day on a series that was described as a “traumatic sleepaway camp” by former contestant Sarah Hartshorne. The new Netflix series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model maps all of this out and has left us wondering where the America’s Next Top Model contestants are now.
The series lays bare the tragedy of this particular drama. The show’s controversial host, Tyra Banks, considered herself an outsider in the fashion world as one of the first black supermodels, but the show She created ruthlessly punished individuality.
Related: Where To Watch ‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model’ In Australia
As former host Miss Jay admits on the show, many of the contestants who walked through the door came from poverty and unstable homes, looking for validation on the series. They were exactly the kind of women unscrupulous reality TV producers might be tempted to exploit, and over 24 cycles the series churned through them.
There is a podcast called The Curse of America’s Next Top Model and the title is not entirely metaphorical. Since the show’s debut in 2003, its alumni have experienced eating disorders, have alleged sexual assault, career sabotage and lost loved ones.
Related: 8 Moments That Will Remind You Just How Wild ANTM Was
It’s notable that the series directors, Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy, have previously directed documentaries about war crimes and geopolitical catastrophes (see The Osla Diaries and American Manhunt: The Search For Osama Bin Laden). The legacy of America’s Top Model merits scrutiny, and the documentary provides an unsparing lens on a show that was ostensibly about pretty girls smizing and sitting in makeover chairs.
Related: What Were Contestants On America’s Next Top Model Paid?
Watching Reality Check, the question on everyone’s lips is a simple one: Did all the pain get these girls anywhere? Where did it get them? In some cases — Leila Goldkuhl, Winnie Harlow — the answer is the Paris runways, Italian Vogue editorials and Givenchy exclusives. Others faced grief, bankruptcy and long-term mental health impacts.
Below, here’s where some of America’s Next Top Model contestants are now.
Shandi Sullivan, Cycle 2
Shandi was 21, a girl from Walgreens — a cashier at the pharmacy chain in her hometown when she applied — with a dream and a gawky Tim Burton-adjacent aesthetic that felt at odds with the more polished contestants around her. After being slammed in early Cycle 2 episodes and surviving a bottom-two elimination, she emerged from the makeover chair with platinum blonde locks and an ethereal star quality that made the judges sit up straight. But Shandi’s story became one of the bigger scandals in the show’s history and in the documentary, she alleges she was the victim of a crime.
While filming in Milan, Shandi was captured on camera in what the show broadcast as a cheating scandal — she had a boyfriend back home, and the footage appeared to show her in bed with a male model who’d been partying at the contestants’ apartment. The tearful phone call in which she confessed to her boyfriend, Eric, became essential ANTM television.
In the Netflix documentary, Shandi reveals that the encounter was, in her words, an assault. She says producers invited men over to the models’ apartment and made alcohol available. She describes being extremely intoxicated — “blacked out,” in her words. She says she was aware something was happening but could only remember “him on top of me. Then I passed out.” The cameras, she says, rolled the entire time, broadcasting the alleged assault to the show’s viewers. “No one did anything to stop it and it got filmed. All of it. Every moment of it,” she said in the documentary.
Creative consultant Jay Manuel has noted that there was a rule on ANTM prohibiting cameras from following contestants into a bathroom alone — but because Shandi was technically not alone, no such protection applied. Executive producer Ken Mok explained in the documentary that the production “treated Top Model as a documentary.” Shandi has also said that the call to her boyfriend was withheld until she agreed to film it, and that a soundman and a cameraman separately apologised to her after the shoot.
Shandi eventually left the modelling world behind. She and Eric broke up roughly a year after the show aired. She now hosts her own horror movie podcast, Urn Fulla Popcorn.
Shannon Stewart, Cycle 1
Shannon Stewart was 18 years old, from Franklin, Ohio, and runner-up to Adrianne Curry in the very first cycle of America’s Next Top Model in 2003. She was, by her own later admission, defined by exactly three sentences: she was a virgin, she didn’t drink, and she didn’t smoke. On a show engineered for drama, her quiet Christian faith and general equanimity made her something of a cipher — but she also refused, alongside Robin Manning, to participate in the nude photo shoot in episode seven, a moment that the show’s inaugural season is now praised for respecting rather than ridiculing.
After placing second, Shannon moved to New York and signed with a modelling agency. She did print work for Bakers Shoes, Dillard’s, and Speedo, and appeared in ELLE Girl, among other publications. She returned for the All-Stars cycle, finishing sixth
Shannon found the modelling world left her cold once the cameras stopped. As she’s said of her years in the industry, she grew tired of “being seen only on the surface.” She now hosts a podcast called Out of Focus, which she describes as a space for “real, raw stories about identity, pressure, faith, and what happens when life doesn’t turn out the way you thought it would,” and is writing a memoir of the same name. She and her husband lead a church community in North Carolina called Be Renewed. She appears briefly in Reality Check.
Robin Manning, Cycle 1
Robin Manning was 26 years old — the oldest contestant in Cycle 1 — when she appeared on ANTM‘s inaugural season, and she was edited as its villain: a devoutly Christian woman from Memphis, Tennessee whose faith collided loudly with the more secular worldview of her housemates, particularly Elyse Sewell. She was the first plus-size model on the series and was eventually eliminated after refusing a nude photo shoot. Former model and judge Janice Dickinson spent most of the cycle telling Robin she was too old and too big to be a model. She placed fourth.
After America’s Next Top Model, Robin Manning pursued some acting work — she appears in Holla (2006) and Without You (2005) — and did some print work, including church-related modelling, appearing in magazines like O, The Oprah Magazine and Grace magazine. She also appeared in hat campaigns for the plus-size fashion brand Especially Yours.
Tiffany Richardson, Cycle 4
The moment Tyra Banks rose from the judging table and screamed, “WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU,” at Tiffany Richardson has become one of the most viral moments in television history. But, according to Reality Check, for those who were on set on the day it was harrowing. I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this. When my mother yells like this it’s because she loves me. I was rooting for you, we were all rooting for you! How dare you!”
Tiffany had tried to get on ANTM once before, during Cycle 3 casting, but was excluded after getting into a physical altercation during a night out in West Hollywood. She returned for Cycle 4 and told the judges she’d completed anger management. During a challenge involving reading complicated names from a teleprompter, she struggled, eventually gave up, and refused to continue — an act that, in Banks’ reading, became a referendum on her character and her willingness to seize an opportunity. When Tiffany was eliminated, she responded to the dramatic atmosphere with wry stoicism. “Cheer up, waterheads,” she told her tearful fellow contestants. Banks, in turn, lost it entirely.
Former judge Nigel Barker has since said the tirade was not funny in the room. Not everything Banks said made it to air, he added, and lawyers were brought to the set the following week. Jay Manuel has confirmed as much, saying he’d “probably never repeat the lines that were said in that room that day.” Banks herself has acknowledged she went too far: “It was probably bigger than her — it was family, friends, society. Black girls, all the challenges that we have, so many people saying that we’re not good enough. I think all of that was in that moment.”
Tiffany has since called Banks a “bully” on Instagram. As per Page Six, in a post that has since been deleted, she reportedly wrote that Banks had treated her “like shit” — on and off camera — and had “said the nastiest things about me and my son.” She also claimed the viral scene was “edited” to suggest Banks yelled because she cared, when the reality of what was said was different.
Tiffany stepped away from modelling after the show, later expressing that she was “young and crazy” at the time and disappointed she hadn’t taken more advantage of the opportunity. In 2017, she found a different work, caring for people with mental disabilities at a group home, a role she says has changed who she is as a person.
In October 2023, tragedy struck. As reported by The Sun, Tiffany’s son, Chadrick, who she had spoken about during her time on Cycle 4, was shot and killed at a GameStop store in Florida. According to reports, Chadrick allegedly grabbed $600 worth of Pokémon cards from behind a counter; a manager, who was an ex-Marine, fired what they described as a “warning shot”. It struck and killed Chadrick, the Miami college student was 21 years old.
Leila Goldkuhl, Cycle 19
Here is one ANTM story that has a genuinely happy ending — at least by fashion industry standards. Leila Goldkuhl, a Massachusetts native who had studied marine biology and textile design, arrived at Cycle 19 (the ill-conceived “College Edition”) in 2012 and immediately became the season’s standout. The judges agreed: she received a perfect score of 30 for her taxidermy photoshoot in episode two. And then, in week five, she was eliminated.
The show’s new social media twist meant eliminated contestants continued having their photos scored by the public — and Goldkuhl, with the highest average fan score, was voted back into the competition in episode nine. Her fellow contestants were furious. The judges were vindicated. Leila finished third — and then began a career that would render the whole drama beside the point.
In 2013, Leila signed with Next Model Management in Los Angeles. She spent time working in Australia and South Korea before landing her worldwide career-defining moment: a runway debut as a worldwide exclusive for Givenchy during the house’s Spring/Summer 2016 show in September 2015. She has since walked for Alexander McQueen, Balmain, Chanel, Fendi, Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs, Prada, Valentino, and Versace, among others. She’s been featured in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue (multiple editions), V, W, and Marie Claire. In 2015, Cosmopolitan named her one of the most successful contestants in the history of the Top Model franchise. By 2018, Models.com ranked her among the top 50 working models in the world. She married photographer Robbie Masterson in 2017 and they have two children.
Whitney Thompson, Cycle 10
Whitney Thompson was the first plus-size winner of America’s Next Top Model — and the show had a complicated relationship with that fact from the start. Thompson, a Florida native who modelled throughout Cycle 10, found herself in a familiar ANTM bind: celebrated for representing “real women” in one breath, then undermined in the next. When she showed up to photo shoots, she said there was nothing on the rack that fit her. The production would cut open garments and clamp them at the back. “It was demeaning,” she has said plainly. She told Netflix Tudum that “failure wasn’t an option” — not just for her but for “every single curvy woman (and man) watching.”
After winning in 2008, Thompson modelled for CoverGirl, Saks Fifth Avenue, and an Italian Vogue cover before pivoting to entrepreneurship. In 2009 she founded Supermodel, a jewellery and candle brand. She married artist Ian Forrester in 2014 and has two children. She now runs an ice cream and fudge parlour called Pink Pelican in Panama City, Florida. She appears in Reality Check.
Danielle ‘Dani’ Evans, Cycle 6
Dani Evans grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a house with, as she’s described it, “black mould and roaches.” Her brother encouraged her to apply for ANTM as a way out. When she arrived on Cycle 6, she had a gap between her front teeth that she loved — it connected her to her grandmothers, both of whom had one. The show had other ideas. “Do you really think you can have a CoverGirl contract with the gap in your mouth?” Tyra Banks asked her on camera. “It’s not marketable.” Dani refused. Banks pressed. The show nearly eliminated her. Dani eventually relented, as she put it: “It was my one-way ticket out on one side, or keeping my gap and going back to Little Rock, Arkansas. What you think I’m gonna choose, fam?”
She won the cycle anyway. A few seasons later, the show sent another model to the dentist to have her gap widened. When asked in the documentary how she feels about that Evans responded: “Girl, that is absolutely ridiculous.”Banks has since apologised, citing pressure from industry agents who told her Evans “will not get work with those teeth.” Evans, in Reality Check, rejected the apology: “Bull f—ing s—. Me getting my gap closed is not opening any doors for me.” She also revealed that Banks later admitted to her directly: “I knew there were certain doors you couldn’t get into because you did ANTM and I did nothing about it.” Evans has described spending “twenty years in the real modelling industry” getting her “ass handed to her” because of the stigma attached to the show. “It’s my life and it was toyed with constantly,” she said in the documentary.
Dani Evans did build a modelling career after the show — Ford Models, CoverGirl, Sephora, Victoria’s Secret, campaigns for Saks Fifth Avenue and Nordstrom. In 2017, she founded Monrowe, a unisex line of ready-to-wear hats named after her jazz-musician grandfather. She is now working on a memoir and describes being on “a journey of awakening, both spiritually and emotionally.”
Isis King, Cycle 11 & All-Stars (Cycle 17)
When Isis King turned up at an ANTM Cycle 10 photo shoot — not as a contestant — Jay Manuel spotted her and asked if she’d ever considered auditioning. Tyra Banks, watching from behind the cameras, sent a producer to track her down afterwards to encourage the same. This is how America’s Next Top Model cast the first openly transgender woman in its history: by accident. What was not accidental was what King brought to Cycle 11 in 2008.
She arrived having spent seven years competing in New York’s underground ball culture scene — the same world that gave the world Paris Is Burning — and she could walk. She was also living at the Ali Forney Centre, a shelter for LGBTQ homeless youth in New York, a detail the show did not dwell on at the time but which speaks to the precariousness of the life she was trying to escape. GLAAD’s president called her casting an “unprecedented opportunity.” New York magazine named her the season’s cause célèbre. She placed tenth — eliminated before the overseas trip, one of the show’s more pointed cruelties given the context — but returned for the All-Stars cycle in 2011, placing twelfth.
King is, by some distance, the most successful actress to emerge from any cycle of ANTM. According to IMDB 2019 she appeared in Ava DuVernay’s Emmy-winning Netflix series When They See Us, playing Marci Wise, the deceased older sister of Korey Wise in the Central Park Five story — a role with obvious personal resonance. She followed it with appearances on The L Word: Generation Q, Shameless, Good Trouble, and The Bold and the Beautiful, and starred as Sol Perez in the Amazon Prime romantic comedy series With Love from 2021 to 2023.
On the runway, she has walked for Fenty by Rihanna, Christian Cowan, Betsey Johnson, and Gabrielle Union’s line for New York & Company, and fronted campaigns for Savage X Fenty, Verizon, IKEA, and Abercrombie & Fitch, among others. She is a GLAAD ambassador and has served on the board of the Ali Forney Center — the same shelter where she once lived. She has 170,000 Instagram followers.
Winnie Harlow, Cycle 21
With credits from some of the biggest brands and fashion houses in the world to her name, Winnie Harlow is by far the most successful America’s Next Top Model contestant of all time. But, she says the series “didn’t do anything” for her career. In 2018, Harlow appeared on Watch What Happens Live and shared that success came after the series. “[My success] started after the show, ’cause that really didn’t do anything for my career. Which, it doesn’t do anything for any model’s career, realistically,” the 23-year-old model said. “I thought, ‘That’s going to be a career starter.’ But it was really a reality TV show. That’s not what I signed up for.”
In the end, British photographer Nick Knight contacted her after seeing her photos online. The subsequent shoot went viral. “I got campaigns from there, and it hasn’t stopped since,” said Harlow. Winnie Harlow has now walked Marc Jacobs, Schiaparelli, Versace, Coach and Moschino. She was the first model with vitiligo to walk the Victoria’s Secret runway and in 2018 attended the Met Gala on the arm of esteemed American designer Tommy Hilfiger, minting her as fashion royalty. She has been a guest at the event many times since. Harlow has 10 million followers on Instagram, which is more than Tyra Banks herself. On Instagram, she clapped back at suggestions she “suffered vitiligo. “I’m sick of every headline ending in ‘Vitiligo Sufferer’ or ‘Suffers from Vitiligo.’ Do you see me suffering? The only thing I’m Suffering from are your headlines and the closed minds of humans who have one beauty standard locked into their minds when there are multiple standards of beauty!”
Winnie Harlow is currently engaged to NBA player Kyle Kuzma.
Winnie Harlow is by far and away the most successful America’s Next Top Model contestant of all time. While she placed sixth in the series, she has walked runways for top designers, made history on the Victoria’s Secret runway and has a net worth of $5 million US.
Reality Check:Inside America’s Next Top Model can be streamed on Netflix.
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