Former America’s Next Top Model contestant Shandi Sullivan has criticized the show’s producers for not “pulling her out” of the now-viral cheating scandal involving her and a male model.
Sullivan caused controversy during the second season of ANTM in 2004, when she and other contestants were filmed drinking wine in a hot tub with a few male models they invited over during a trip to Milan, Italy. She was later filmed kissing one of the men in the hot tub and her bedroom in what became one of the show’s most infamous cheating scandals, as she had a boyfriend, Eric, back home.
In Netflix’s new docuseries, out Monday, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, Sullivan reflects on the incident, recalling how “hammered” she was at the time.
“I just remember like little bits and pieces,” she says during the second episode of the new series. She claims that she had “blacked out” during the incident and that she “didn’t even feel sex happening” even though she knew it was.
She’s then asked: “Do you think that the production should have stopped it?”
Sullivan responds: “I think after getting out of the hot tub, whatever happened after that, they should have been like, ‘All right, this has gone too far. We’ve got to pull her out of this.’”
ANTM executive producer Ken Mok weighed in on whether the cameras should have been turned off during the cheating incident.
“We treated Top Model as a documentary, and we told the girls that,” he explains on Reality Check. “There’s going to be cameras with you 24/7, and they’re going to cover everything, the good, the bad, and everything in between.”
Sullivan claims production only allowed her to call Eric and confess after she threatened to quit the series — and even then, she says, they told her the emotional conversation would be filmed.
“It was just the sound guy and the guy filming,” she recalls of the phone call, where Eric called her a “b****.”
“Afterwards, I’m just laying on the floor, in a fetal position, just crying. I get up to leave, and they both came up to me and said, ‘We’re really, really sorry that we had to film that.’ They just knew that this isn’t right. Like, why are we filming this?”
However, Mok claims the editors “scaled back that scene” of Sullivan and the model in Milan significantly. “That was, for good or bad, one of the most memorable moments of Top Model,” he concludes.
Following the cheating incident, Sullivan stayed on America’s Next Top Model and finished the season in third place, losing to runner-up Mercedes Scelba-Shorte and winner Yoanna House.
During the third episode of Reality Check, Sullivan says she and Eric tried to continue their relationship after she finished ANTM, but it didn’t work out.
“He moved with me to New York after the show. But it would suck when I’d be walking with Eric down the street, and somebody’d recognize me and call me a slut to my face,” she said. “With Eric standing right next to me.”
Sullivan is no longer modeling. She says she’s “taking care of animals for a living” and hopes one day to live on a farm with her own animal sanctuary.
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