“The Culture Was: You Did What You Were Told”
Ultimately, Anderson Boyd and Kramer agreed that Elite never trained agents to speak with models about sexual misconduct. Both women say they and other agents they knew did not prepare models for how to deal with predatory behavior.
“It was not handled like a traditional corporation where you’re handed a sexual harassment manual,” Anderson Boyd said. “I did not know how to help [the models’] working conditions.”
Their account matches the experiences of women at other agencies at the time. For example, when former model Lesa Amoore was 17, she said her agent at the now-defunct Riccardo Gay Model Management company warned her that a photographer she was about to shoot with in Milan could “be a little weird.” Amoore said that during the subsequent shoot, when she was wearing only a bra and underwear, the photographer unzipped his pants, pulled out his penis and asked whether he could masturbate. According to the former model, now 48, she put on her clothes and ran out of the room.
Amoore said that when she told her agent about the photographer’s behavior, he responded, “I’m so sorry, that happens sometimes with him.”
Sara Ziff, who began modeling at age 14 in the late ’90s and later founded Model Alliance, told The New York Times last year that she too was regularly asked by photographers to get naked or topless without prior warning and, in at least one instance, was told to sit on her male booker’s lap.
“When I first started modeling, I did not feel protected by my agency [Next Management],” she told HuffPost. “In some cases, I felt like they were facilitating meetings [with powerful people] that were not clearly work opportunities ― they felt more like being set up on a date.”
Though the modeling industry is now more regulated than it was in decades past, abuse is reportedly still frequent. A whopping 87 percent of models say they’ve been asked to get naked without prior warning, while 30 percent have experienced “inappropriate touching” on the job and 28 percent have been pressured to have sex at work, according to Model Alliance.
Model Cameron Russell’s Instagram is filled with her own colleagues’ stories of being preyed on at go-sees and shoots. A 22-year-old model wrote about how a male photographer pulled down her bra and started kissing her breasts six months ago. Another woman recalled how, as a 14-year-old model, a photographer made her change in front of him, rubbed oil on her legs, and, after asking if she was a virgin, said, “You make me want to go to jail.”
The collection of horror stories portrays male photographers masturbating in front of young models, asking for sexual favors, and, in one case, penetrating a 15-year-old with his finger to make the photos “look more sensual.”
Ziff said that beyond adhering to the 2013 bill, even the best-intentioned agencies still don’t have firm policies in place to protect their models from sexual misconduct.
“They tell the girls that if they are in a situation that feels uncomfortable: ‘Go to the bathroom and walk out,’ ‘Feel free to call me,’ and ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,’” the 35-year-old explained. “[They should] take a preventative approach that doesn’t allow those situations to happen in the first place. It’s much easier said than done to walk out of a shoot, especially if you’re young, maybe English isn’t your first language, and you’re working with someone who could make or break your career.”
In fact, Model Alliance found that 70 percent of models surveyed didn’t feel they could report sexual misconduct to their agencies. Of those who did, two-thirds said their agents didn’t consider the behavior problematic, and, in a few cases, even encouraged models to sleep with predators to advance their careers.
Model Jason Boyce, who filed a lawsuit against Bruce Weber for sexual misconduct last year, is also suing his agency, Soul Artist Management. According to the court filing, Boyce claimed the agency knew about Weber’s predatory behavior and alleged that his agent told him to “nail” his shoot with the famous photographer.
“The culture was: You did what you were told. That was how they sold it,” he said in an interview with The Business of Fashion. “If you do what I tell you, you’ll make it. ... My agent told me that all the time.”