In one of the most talked-about scenes from “America’s Next Top Model,” Banks raised her voice at an eliminated contestant, Tiffany Richardson, whom she accused of being too flippant and seeing the competition as a joke.
“I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you! How dare you?” Banks yelled in the clip. “Learn something from this! When you go to bed at night, you lay there, and you take responsibility for yourself. Because nobody’s going to take responsibility for you. You rolling your eyes … It’s because you’ve heard it all before.”
Richardson had previously spoken about how much her family had sacrificed to help her enter the competition.
“You don’t know where the hell I come from,” Banks added. “You have no idea what I’ve been through, but I’m not a victim. I grow from it, and I learn. Take responsibility for yourself!”
The incident has since become a pop-culture meme, although the scene was uncomfortable.
Banks addressed the viral moment in “Reality Check,” saying she “lost it.”
“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 that was in that moment,” she said in the documentary, adding that she went too far.
Richardson also released a statement calling Banks a “liar” and a “bully.”
“You know how you treated me the whole time off and on camera,” Richardson said in a since-deleted Instagram post, The Huffington Post reported. “You treated me like s*** and said the nastiest things about me and my son. That is not how the argument went but YALL EDITED TO MAKE IT LOOK LIKE YOU CARED.”
“ANTM” judge Jay Manuel later described the incident as the “most difficult moment on set I had ever experienced,” saying “production staff literally just took Tyra off set” once filming was underway.
“Some of the things that were said were not well-intentioned. I will probably never repeat the lines that were actually said in the room that day,” he added.
