'Reacher' shot him into Hollywood’s top tier, but behind that success — the 41-year-old reveals in an unusually candid interview — was a harrowing struggle with bipolar disorder, sexual assault and a suicide attempt that he survived with a mix of faith, love and brute force.
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He very severely accused Testino!!!
At the runway show and a VIP dinner afterwards, Ritchson was seated next to Mario Testino, one of the industry’s most prolific photographers, who later that year shot
Voguecovers featuring Beyoncé and Amanda Seyfried, a spread featuring Justin Bieber and Kendall Jenner, and a
Vanity Fair cover with Taylor Swift. “He wouldn’t keep his hands off me,” Ritchson says. “The entire time we were sitting at dinner, he was trying to rub my crotch under the table. I was like, ‘Get your hands off me, dude. I lived that life with people like you where you feel like you can just have anybody. I’m not an object to you. I’m way past that now, dude.’ But he was entertained by it. He thought it was the funniest thing. The rejection seemed to make Testino more aggressive, Ritchson claims. “I’m trying to enjoy conversations with the playmakers in the industry and the whole time, he wouldn’t leave me alone. I ended up leaving early, but he called my hotel room later that night and begged me to come over. He said, ‘I’ve never googled someone right after meeting them. What have you done to me? My car is out front.’ Then he said he loved manly men ‘because they kick harder.’ He was disappointed that I wouldn’t come to his place,” Ritchson says, adding that Testino went so far as to offer him a cover of
Vogue if he slept with him that night. “I was like, ‘I don’t give a sh*t about the cover of
Vogue. I don’t give a sh*t about whatever opportunity you want to dangle in front of me.
Four years later, almost to the day,
The New York Times published an explosive investigation that detailed allegations of sexual misconduct by Testino and Bruce Weber. Fifteen male models who worked with Weber and 13 male assistants and models who worked with Testino came forward with claims of sexual misconduct and coercion. “I’ve had problems with both of them,” says Ritchson, who recalls seeing the investigation at the time it was published in early 2018, months into the tidal wave of #MeToo claims that surfaced following exposés about Harvey Weinstein published by the
Times and
The New Yorker in late 2017. “Some of the stories were just like mine. I was just starting to build a platform and get my voice in the business, and I wondered, ‘Should I say something?’ Because all of the stories that those models were telling were my own. It’s all true.”
