Tyra Banks just can’t seem to catch a break these days.
If she isn’t being dragged online for her outfits on “America’s Got Talent,” and “Dancing With The Stars,” her time as a judge on the 90s reality television show, “America’s Next Top Model,” keeps coming back to haunt her.
The show was harsh. Will ordering models to carry out off-the-wall and sometimes humiliating tasks to build up their portfolio, Banks insisted that the harshness of the tasks and of the judging was a true reflection of what it’s like behind the scenes in the fashion world.
This week, Banks hit the headlines again after a former contestant claims she was paid just $40 a day to appear on the show.
“$40 a day, no residuals, and we had to pay for food,” Sarah Hartshorne tweeted.
The tweet received a lot of traction — but being paid little to nothing to take part in reality television shows is common. For instance, contestants on “The Bachelor” are not paid for their time on the show.
A weekly stipend is usually paid to contestants of such shows but ultimately, there are no huge payouts for them unless they make it all the way to the end or win the show. If they are able to flip their fame into something bigger when the show is over… all the better.
In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Banks revealed she almost walked away from the show more than a decade ago. She ultimately changed her mind.
Whatever people think of Banks, diversity and spotlighting the wide range of Black beauty was always at the forefront of her mind.
“It starts with my personal journey of being a black woman, first of all, in the fashion industry. Even though I was a successful supermodel, I was hearing ‘no’ quite often,” she said at the time.
“Being curvy and not having a body that was a cookie-cutter [shape]… [I had to figure] out how to pivot my career to make my curves work for me. Being Black and being curvy made me empathize with people who didn’t fit the cookie cutter. Whether it’s the girl with alabaster skin and red, frizzy hair with freckles all over her face to a girl with Ebony’s skin and close-cropped hair and features she didn’t feel were considered beautiful in society. In putting these girls on the show and saying, ‘You are beautiful,’ I wasn’t necessarily telling them they were beautiful; I was using them as a vessel to tell millions of girls around the world who looked like them that they were beautiful.”
