Tyra Banks is asking Netflix for the receipts, including the footage Netflix viewers never saw.
The America’s Next Top Model creator is seeking complete, unedited interviews from former colleagues J. Alexander, better known as Miss J, Jay Manuel and Nigel Barker as part of her defamation lawsuit over Netflix’s Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model.
Banks argues in a new filing that the unseen material could shed light on how producers shaped the documentary and whether the final version resulted from “ordinary editorial decisions,” as they have maintained.
Her lawsuit claims producers used only about 16 minutes of her approximately three-hour interview and accuses them of presenting her misleadingly.
Banks has taken particular issue with a portion involving former contestant Shandi Sullivan and an incident Sullivan described as sexual assault.
Banks said she did not know Sullivan viewed the incident that way or that Sullivan would appear in the documentary.
“It’s a little difficult for me to talk about production because that’s not my territory,” Banks said in the film. Now, she wants to see what her former ANTM crew said before editors made their final selections, including Miss J, who said in the documentary that they had been dealing with health issues and had not heard from Banks.
Banks is seeking unspecified damages for alleged harm to her reputation. Netflix and the documentary’s producers have denied her allegations.
