Shandi Describes Cheating Scandal in ‘ANTM’ Documentary

Shandi Sullivan is one of the greatest contestants in reality-TV history. In 2004, while on America’s Next Top Model cycle two, she lived a real-life Cinderella story when she went from being a Walgreens clerk to modeling in Milan. But the part most viewers may remember her for is something far more personal. While on the show, she had sex with a man who was not her boyfriend Eric, then called Eric on-camera to tell him. That moment has lived in reality-TV infamy for years, most notably her boyfriend shouting “You had sex?” at her. Now, in Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, a Netflix docuseries, Sullivan finally has a platform to explain herself, and her version of events is difficult to hear.

In her words, the experience sounds more like sexual assault than the cheating scandal everyone saw on TV. “I think I had two bottles of wine by myself,” she says, on top of not eating all day. She can’t even remember having sex. “I was blacked out for a lot of it,” she says in the doc. “I didn’t even feel sex happening, I just knew it was happening and then I passed out.” She woke up the next day and realized what had occurred. She says she believes production should have stopped it.

Executive producer Ken Mok is unapologetic for what they filmed and for not intervening. “We treated Top Model like a documentary,” he says. “And we told the girls that. On day one, when they’d show up, we’d go over the rules with them.” Tyra Banks, the show’s infamous host, claims she had no knowledge of the production “because that’s not my territory.” (She was an executive producer on the show.) But in the same episode, Tyra has a chat with the girls in which she “randomly” brings up how terrible it feels to get cheated on.

From Sullivan’s vantage point, she still feels she was set up by the production. Initially, she wasn’t going to be allowed to have a phone at all to call her boyfriend, but when she threatened to leave the show, production gave her one on the condition that she let them film the talk. During that conversation, Eric berated her, calling her a “stupid bitch.” “It was just the sound guy and the guy filming,” she says. “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 knew that this isn’t right.” The message to girls who might want to go on Tyra Banks’s threatened ANTM reboot is clear: Beware.