‘He wanted to control me completely’: the models who
accuse Gérald Marie of sexual assault
Elite Models boss Gérald Marie was one of the most
powerful men in fashion. Was he also a sexual predator? As French prosecutors
investigate, four women tell their stories for the first time
A special
investigation
by Lucy
Osborne
Sat 17 Oct
2020 07.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/oct/17/he-wanted-to-control-me-completely-the-models-who-accuse-gerald-marie-of-sexual-assault
In the
spring of 1980, Wendy Walsh and her mother flew to Paris from their home in a
suburb of Toronto, Canada. Walsh was 17, a straight-A student who excelled at
maths. She was also an aspiring model whose blond, blue-eyed, girl-next-door
look had already got her noticed; at a local hairdressing event, a couple of stylists
from a Paris salon had offered to send her headshots to a leading model agency,
Paris Planning. Letters and phone calls had been exchanged, and Walsh was
invited to Paris.
At the
agency’s offices, Walsh and her mother, Ellen, were introduced to the charismatic
30-year-old boss, Gérald Marie. Marie offered to take them to lunch. “So we
went to a little outdoor bistro in the Place de la Madeleine, around the corner
from the agency,” says Walsh, speaking on the phone from her home in Los
Angeles. “It was the first time I ever had a croque monsieur, and he was
explaining what it was. I realise now it’s a fancy grilled cheese sandwich. And
I remember distinctly him fawning over my mother, and this was surprising to
me. She had been an extremely beautiful woman in her youth, but lupus had left
scars on her face.
“He reached
over and was stroking her hand, and something in my 17-year-old stomach was
like, this is weird.” Later, in their hotel room, Walsh remembers her mother
saying: “‘Oh, that man is lovely, he’s going to take care of you.’ I look back
on it with adult eyes, and I believe this is the way that he groomed families.
He lured girls in by convincing them that somehow he would be this very safe
guardian of their teenage daughter.”
Two months
later, in June 1980, Walsh moved to Paris. “I was young, I was naive, and I had
stars in my eyes,” she says now. “I was not scared one little bit, because I
trusted all the adults who were going to take care of me and make me a famous
model.”
Walsh, who
is now 58 and a respected US radio host, was one of dozens of hopefuls from
across North America and Europe who made the journey to Paris in the summer of
1980. Over the following decades, thousands of young women went to work for
Marie and other agencies there, desperate to make it as a model. But few became
stars, and many were not taken care of in the way Walsh’s mother would have
expected.
Within
weeks of arriving in Paris, Walsh says, she was raped by Gérald Marie. A
Guardian special investigation has found that she is one of eight women who
allege they were sexually assaulted by Marie between 1980 and 1998. Four are
speaking for the first time.
Last month,
French prosecutors announced that they had opened an investigation into Marie,
after a criminal complaint from four women: three former models, who have taken
part in this investigation, and Lisa Brinkworth, a journalist who says she was
sexually assaulted while working undercover for the BBC. Marie, who at 70 still
works in the modelling industry, denies the allegations. In a statement to the
Sunday Times about the French investigation, he said: “It would not be
appropriate for me to comment at this time on the allegations of historic
wrongdoing being made against me, other than to make it clear that I
categorically deny them.”
By the time
Wendy Walsh came to Paris in 1980, Marie had been at Paris Planning for five
years, reportedly after a brief stint working as a dancer on local television.
The son of a hospital administrator, he quickly earned a reputation as one of
the most powerful and well-connected agents in Europe, a man who could make a
model’s career with the click of a finger or a call to Vogue. In 1986, Paris
Planning merged with Elite Model Management, the agency later credited with
inventing the supermodel, and Marie became its European president. He ran the
agency alongside Elite founder John Casablancas, who was based in New York;
together, they helped launch the careers of Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford,
Helena Christensen and others.
But behind
the gloss and glamour of the 90s fashion world, Marie had established a
reputation as a predator. A number of former models and industry insiders have
told the Guardian his abusive behaviour was “an open secret”, and part of an
ingrained culture of exploitation at the heart of the modelling world.
In Paris,
Walsh was assigned to Paris Planning’s new-faces division, and sent to
“go-sees” with potential clients. In the evenings, the now 18-year-old was told
to go to parties that might help her career. “It would be rich old playboys in
very glamorous apartments with big bowls of cocaine. Everybody drunk. There was
no business being done, no photographers there,” she says.
Around six
weeks in, Walsh was told by a female booker that Marie wanted her to dye her
hair brown, and she was sent to a hairdresser. That evening, she was invited to
a party at which Marie would be present. “The only times I’d seen him had been
in the agency, holding court,” Walsh says. At the party, in a tiny apartment,
she found Marie sitting on a bed. “He said, ‘Come here’, and he put his hand
through my hair, and he said, ‘This is good, this is what I like.’ And I
thought he was my boss, telling me I was going to get a lot of work now.”
Based on my own experiences, I believe these
women are telling the truth. It breaks my heart and I admire their courage
Linda Evangelista
The next
day, at the agency’s offices, Walsh was told that Marie wanted to meet her
again, this time at his apartment. “With the wise eyes of a grownup, business
meetings don’t take place at apartments at nine o’clock at night,” she says.
“But when you’re 18 and believing all the adults around you, you just do what
you’re told. So I went.
“In Paris,
you hit the light switch at the bottom of the dark stairway, then you work your
way up. I stood outside his door, and I knocked and knocked until the lights
went out after three minutes, and I was scrambling around looking for a switch.
I waited another three minutes, and then walked all the way home.”
Back at her
apartment, the phone rang. It was her booker, telling her that Marie had been
busy and that she should go back: he was waiting. By then it was 10pm, and
Walsh had no money for a cab. “And so again, I walk and walk for 20 minutes
through Paris at night.”
Walsh
knocked on Marie’s door. This time a young model came out, smiling and
giggling. “She kissed him on both cheeks, said goodbye. So then I went in, and
he said, ‘Oh, that girl, she’s one of our models, and she’s having so many
problems with her boyfriend. They always come to me about their boyfriend
problems.’”
Marie
poured her a glass of champagne and offered her hors d’oeuvres. He told Walsh
that he had heard she was Catholic, and that he was, too. “It was like, what
was going to happen was OK, because he was a trusted person in my club or
tribe.” Then, within minutes, “his hand was down my shirt, and he was saying to
me, ‘You are the only model in the agency with large breasts – I love it.’ All
I was thinking was, ‘If I make this man angry, I’ll never get work again.’”
Walsh tried
to make excuses, telling Marie she wasn’t on the pill, and bargaining with him,
like “a sweet, young, naive girl who’s afraid of people of power, who tries to say
no, but doesn’t know how”. She alleges that he took off her clothes and anally
raped her. “It hurt and I remember one thing distinctly: I buried my face in
the pillow and said, ‘No’. It smelled of somebody else’s perfume.”
Afterwards,
Walsh says, Marie grabbed a bunch of bananas from his kitchen, handed her one
and asked if her roommate was “the other Canadian” (Walsh was sharing with
another young model from Toronto). When she said yes, he laughed and asked her
to give the girl a banana from him, she recalls. She arrived at her apartment,
and asked her roommate if she had also had sex with Marie. “That was the only
language I had for it then,” she says. Her roommate said yes. The next time
Walsh saw Marie, he was at the agency with a male friend. “He was pointing to
me and laughing,” she says. “It was the most humiliating moment.”
Walsh
believes that part of the reason Marie was able to abuse new models like her
was the language barrier. “I didn’t meet one French model while I was there. We
were chosen specifically because we didn’t understand the language, would be
away from home, and didn’t know what the hell was going on. He had complete
control.”
Soon after
the alleged rape, Walsh was invited to accompany her booker on a
glamorous-sounding trip to Monte Carlo. But she had already been advised
against travelling to the south of France by a more successful model, over tea
in the twentysomething’s courtyard garden. The older model warned that this was
a world of wealthy men and their boats, and that unsuspecting models could end
up being exploited. “Bad things happen there,” she was told.
Jill Dodd
never got the warning about the “bad things” that could happen in the south of
France. Marie had invited the 19-year-old swim instructor to move to Paris
after meeting her in her hometown of Los Angeles on a talent-spotting trip. Her
Californian agent told her it was a great opportunity.
Like Walsh,
Dodd spent the spring of 1980 navigating the Paris Métro, and attending
“go-sees” set up by Paris Planning. But after several weeks, she started to
rack up debts to the agency, who were not only charging her fees, but also
billing her for a dingy hotel and her flight from California. After one long
day of rejections, Dodd recalls crying on a street corner as it got dark,
feeling exhausted.
On 23 April
1980, Marie asked Dodd, then 20, and her roommate out dancing. She felt
hopeful: time spent with her boss could be good for her career. She had seen
Marie send the girls he liked “straight to Vogue without even an interview”. At
the club, she recalls dancing awkwardly, watching her boss in his black leather
jacket. He was a confident dancer and she thought he looked sexy – a different
person from the “moody” manager she’d encountered at the office. In the early
hours, Dodd and her roommate went back to Marie’s apartment. When her friend
left, she stayed on. Dodd says Marie kissed her and she remembers relishing the
attention. “I’d only had one serious boyfriend at that time.” When Marie
offered to run her a bubble bath in his marble tub, she agreed, and afterwards
joined him in his bedroom to watch a John Wayne film. But “all of a sudden”,
she says, Marie raped her. “It happened so fast,” she says. She shouted,
“Stop”, but he did not.
This man
had control of your life. So you make him think you’re enjoying it – then you
get the hell out
In the days
that followed, Marie told Dodd he wanted to be her boyfriend, and scribbled her
a note (seen by the Guardian) saying: “I want you to behave when I’m away…
don’t forget! Love, Gérald”. “I was so immature, and even though it was rape, I
was confused,” she says now. “I was like, ‘Oh, he does like me! He’s so
powerful.’”
Soon
afterwards, Dodd says, she discovered that Marie had tried to have sex with her
roommate; the former roommate, who spoke to the Guardian on condition of
anonymity, confirms this. She added that, months later, Marie tried again. This
time, she alleges, he tricked her into being alone in a room with him; she felt
the only way out was to perform oral sex. “This man had control of your life.
So you make him think you’re enjoying it – then you get the hell out.”
When Dodd
was invited to Monte Carlo that summer, she jumped at the opportunity to take a
break from go-sees. On her first night, she went to a party where she was
introduced by her Paris Planning booker to Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi
billionaire arms dealer, then said to be the richest man in the world. The
following day, Dodd says, she and the booker were invited to stay the night on
his yacht, and offered their pick from a closet full of couture gowns for the
evening. That was the start of a “relationship” between Dodd and Khashoggi: “I
was basically one of his harem wives for almost two years,” she says now.
But it was
a more transactional relationship than she knew. “It wasn’t until the end of
our relationship that I found out that he had paid to meet me,” Dodd says. “I
was chosen out of a bunch of pictures by Adnan.” She says she realised this
when one of Khashoggi’s assistants came into their hotel room one evening with
a portfolio of pictures of women. She says the assistant openly went through
the photographs, asking whom he would like to meet, and discussing fees between
$35,000 and $50,000. She says Khashoggi, who died in 2017, later admitted that
he had paid Paris Planning to be introduced to her. “It was all a front. I had
been manipulated and used.”
Ann Maguire
was on her first modelling shoot, in Rome, when she was scouted by Marie.
Maguire, from Virginia, was 5ft 11in, with striking blue-green eyes, high
cheekbones and thick eyebrows; she was often likened to Brooke Shields. She had
just turned 18, and was new to the world of fashion. “I was the jock, always
sporty. I’d never even worn mascara before,” she tells me now. She says Marie
showered her with compliments and made her feel “a million dollars”. He invited
her to Paris and promised to get her work straight away. Maguire signed up to
Paris Planning, and on 31 January 1980 moved into Marie’s spare room: she is
one of several former models the Guardian has spoken to who were put up in his
apartment. (While Maguire, Walsh and Dodd all worked for Paris Planning in
1980, they have never met or heard each other’s stories.)
Maguire,
now 60, has decided to speak for the first time about what happened next.
Initially, she says, Marie was charming. “He would play great music and fix
great meals, all this kind of stuff… Then, as it grew into a friendship, he
proceeded to abuse that.” She alleges she was raped several times by Marie
while living in his apartment, and that at night he would ignore her pleas for
him to stop and “crawl into bed with me”. She remembers him “flaunting” other
models he was romantically involved with, kissing them in front of her, or
joking that their toothbrush was in his bathroom. In her notebook at the time,
which she still has, she scribbled: “Fight with Gérald” and “Too fat!”
Eventually,
Maguire snapped. “I said, ‘Screw you, I’m going to get my own apartment.’” But
after moving into an apartment with other models, she says her work stopped.
She began busking with her guitar, and one day returned home to find a note
from Paris Planning telling her she could no longer live there. She says all
her shoes and her passport were missing, which she believes Marie took: “He
wanted to control me completely.” She began sleeping on a bench in front of the
Louvre.
A booker at
the agency arranged for her to stay with another man, who she says also sexually
abused her. Maguire wishes now that she had reported the assaults to the
police, but didn’t consider it at the time “because I was afraid of not working
again”. She explains: “I thought they would laugh at me. ‘You’re living in his
house, what do you expect?’ I also didn’t speak French well enough to explain.”
On one of
several phone calls with me, Maguire breaks down in tears; she tells me it is a
time of her life she would rather forget. She returned home to Virginia and
didn’t model again for at least another year.
Another
former model, EJ Moran, says that when she was in her 20s, she was raped so
violently by Marie that she feared for her life. Now 61 and an author, she is
still scared of him, 40 years on. One evening in the summer of 1981, when she
was turning 22, she was phoned by a booker at Paris Planning to say she had to
attend a dinner with Marie right away. “I really didn’t want to go,” she
recalls. “But I felt coerced into it [by the booker].” Dodd and Walsh say the
same woman arranged their evening meetings with Marie, and sent them to parties
they didn’t want to go to.
The booker
“disappeared abruptly right after dinner”, Moran recalls, and Marie persuaded
her to go up to his apartment, which was across the street, so he could show
her promotional videos for the agency’s most famous models. “VCRs were a new
thing in the 80s,” she explains. Moran remembers she was wearing
“lavender-coloured pumps, a white blouse and a forest-green sweater”, as well
as “mom jeans”. Suddenly, she says, Marie raped her. “Before I know it, I was
thrown on the bed. He took his open palm and smashed my face into the bed.” He
verbally abused her, in what she describes as “a terrible low voice”.
Afterwards,
Moran says, the “debonair and charming” Marie returned, asking her to stay the
night. She made an excuse about needing to change her contact lenses; she was
scared that if she wasn’t polite, he would hurt her again. In the following
days, she received a call from the booker telling her she had a well-paid
catalogue job in Belgium and needed to get on a train. Moran says now that she
believes this was “a message”: that if you “play this game and stay quiet,
you’ll get all this work”. Other women who told the Guardian they were sexually
assaulted by Marie remember being offered lucrative jobs in the days that
followed.
Ten years
later, by 1991, the modelling industry had hit its golden years, and Marie was
firmly at its helm. The original supermodels, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista
and Cindy Crawford, had signed with Elite Model Management, then run by Marie
alongside Elite US president John Casablancas. Elite had offices around the
world, from Tokyo to London; Marie now reportedly owned homes in Manhattan,
Saint-Tropez, Ibiza and Paris. He had also been married to Evangelista for more
than four years, telling an interviewer that he had left his previous
girlfriend, American model Christine Bolster, “within the hour” of meeting Evangelista.
In 1991,
the couple were among the celebrity guests at the final of Look of the Year,
Elite’s annual international modelling contest, in New York. Evangelista wore
her hair in a striking red bob with a heavy fringe, and towered over Marie, who
wore a black suit and tie, his hair slicked back. Evangelista joined Naomi
Campbell to present a prize, while Marie sat with fellow judges Casablancas and
Donald Trump in the audience.
Canadian
schoolgirl Shawna Lee was a 15-year-old Look of the Year finalist the following
year. In the weeks leading up to the 1992 contest, she was sent by Elite to
Paris from her hometown outside Toronto to build up her portfolio. She had
already visited in the spring, staying in Marie and Evangelista’s flat while
they were on holiday. “She was my idol,” Lee says now. “I was walking around
her apartment and seeing these shoots she’d done with [Vogue photographer]
Peter Lindbergh, so it was obviously pretty exciting.” This time, she was put
up in an apartment with other models; but after an evening out at the nightclub
Les Bains Douches, Lee ended up back at Marie’s apartment where, she says, he
raped her – an allegation published as part of a Guardian investigation into
Look of the Year in March. Speaking more recently from her home in Toronto,
where she works as a makeup artist, Lee adds: “What is grossest is him asking
me to put Linda’s T-shirt on to sleep in, then pouncing on me.”
Evangelista
divorced Marie in 1993, after separating from him the year before. Speaking
exclusively to the Guardian, she said: “During my relationship with Gérald
Marie, I knew nothing of these sexual allegations against him, so I was unable
to help these women. Hearing them now, and based on my own experiences, I
believe that they are telling the truth. It breaks my heart, because these are
wounds that may never heal, and I admire their courage and strength for
speaking up today.”
At the
time, Lee confided in a fellow model, and this got back to Marie. She says he
took her into his office and berated her for “going around saying I raped you”,
suggesting her career would be on the line. She says he told her: “What else
are you going to do? Go back home and flip burgers?” Other staff at the agency
found out: “It was just understood that it was in my best interests to brush it
under the rug.”
At least five
women the Guardian spoke to say they experienced sexual misconduct from other
men who worked with or for Marie. Lee says that after Marie raped her, a Paris
Elite scout and friend of Marie told her that the two men had been competing
over “who was going to get your virginity”. She says the scout was “kind of mad
that he [Marie] got it first.”
Lee, then
15, went on to have a sexual relationship with the scout, which at the time she
thought was consensual. As an adult, she’s not so sure: “It was definitely an
abuse of power.” The Guardian has spoken to two other former Elite models, then
15 and 17, who allege they were sexually assaulted by the same scout, and one,
then 19, who says he raped her.
Swedish
model Ebba Karlsson, who was 20 in 1990, alleges she was raped that year by a
different Elite scout, and that, days later, she was introduced to Marie.
Karlsson says that when she arrived at his office, the first thing he did was
lower the blinds. “There was a window between his office and other people in
the agency,” she explains. She says Marie then took her through the portfolios
of famous models he represented and asked her if she knew what they did to
become successful. Then, she says, “Suddenly, his hand was inside my vagina. It
was so quick and abrupt, I totally froze.” After the meeting, she sat down on
the “first available bench” and cried, feeling “ashamed and in shock”.
On another
occasion, Karlsson agreed to go to a “casting” at Marie’s apartment. He had
told her she had a lot of film potential because she spoke several languages.
The other models there looked younger than her, she says, perhaps 16 or 17, and
some were living in his apartment. “Some were sick, they had colds or
something, and did not look great.” She and the others were told to take off
their clothes, don high heels, then walk and pose for Marie and two other men.
“They wanted to see our boobs. And I don’t know if that was the common
practice, but it was like a meat market. It was horrible.”
A movie
never materialised, and Karlsson went back to Sweden as soon as she was able,
returning to her job at the Body Shop. “Marie took my power away,” Karlsson
says now. “I was powerful before, I could protect myself. But after that, I was
just a shaking leaf.”
In 2011,
the supermodel Carré Otis published a memoir, Beauty, Disrupted, which included
claims that she was repeatedly raped by Marie when she was 17. In an interview
with the Guardian, Otis says it started around 1986, the year Paris Planning
merged with Elite. She was staying in Marie and Evangelista’s apartment; it was
the early days of his relationship with the supermodel. “Linda was maybe a
little bit older than me,” Otis recalls. “She was soaring, she was already a
star in the sky.” But when Evangelista was out of town, “he attacked me in the
middle of the night”, she says. “I was sick and I had a fever. That was the
beginning of many such attacks.”
Otis went
on to become an enormously successful model, and was married to the actor
Mickey Rourke, her co-star in the 1989 film Wild Orchid. But in the mid-1980s,
like the other women interviewed for this investigation, she was still pounding
the pavements looking for work. In her book, Otis writes that Marie told her
she needed to drop more weight, giving her “a small brown glass vial of cocaine
every day… this was the key to model weight management”. She says now: “It was
made very clear that, if I wanted to make it, I would have to deal with his
advances. That continued until I actually did say no, and then my work
stopped.” Otis is one of the four women whose complaints triggered the French
investigation, along with Karlsson, Dodd and journalist Lisa Brinkworth.
Otis says
she was also abused by others connected to Marie or his agency. She alleges she
was raped in her hotel room by a hairdresser on a shoot arranged by Elite. She
believes that Marie and other Elite agents were making money by sending models
on trips where there was “no actual work”, or to parties with wealthy men who
had no connection to the industry. “I was definitely pimped out,” she says. For
Dodd – who says she was sexually assaulted at a party she was sent to by Paris
Planning, and by another man on a shoot arranged by the agency – this was “out
in the open” in 1980. “There were all these offers of, ‘If you go on this trip,
you have to sleep with the photographer,’” she says. “It was talked about out
loud.”
It was just
such a trip – to Monte Carlo – that Wendy Walsh had refused to make, back in
the summer of 1980. Instead, the 18-year-old Canadian wrote to her parents from
Paris, a letter they kept and which she now has. Reading it now, her
disillusionment is clear: “I refuse to hang around in their social circles, and
act like a prostitute to get work,” she wrote in what Walsh describes as her
“swirly, little-girl handwriting”. “Unfortunately, as much as I wish it weren’t
so, I have discovered that this business operates on a totally social level. If
you don’t cooperate, you get stepped on.”
Marie
Anderson, who worked for Elite between 1983 and 1990, says that to understand
how Marie was able to get away with his alleged behaviour, one has to grasp the
“complete control” model agencies had during this era. “It was like a cult
mentality,” she says. Anderson, who worked for Elite Chicago, first as a booker
and later as vice-president, says she remembers at least six different models
telling her that Marie had been sexually inappropriate with them, but they
swore her to secrecy, “terrified” that they would stop getting work if they
complained. She recalls overhearing Trudi Tapscott, an executive at Elite in
New York from 1984 to 1991, and another agent, tearfully pleading with Marie
and Casablancas to stop sleeping with underage models, some time in the late
80s. Anderson says she could only warn others against working in Paris: “I wish
I could have done more.”
Tapscott,
who is still a model scout, began working for Elite at the age of 23. She says:
“I was only a little bit older than the models, and also taken in by the
glamour. We didn’t have the language then to know that this was wrong, and even
if we did, who would we report it to? We were like a family and there was no HR
department; this was the culture that protected these men. I have tremendous
regret about not doing more at the time.”
Most of the
models who spoke to the Guardian did not tell their agents about their alleged
abuse, for fear it would get back to Marie. Walsh talks in terms of
“psychological shackles”. “I was trapped by the fact that they’d gotten me into
debt right away,” she says. “And then you had your parents at home with stars
in their eyes going, ‘Send us pictures, honey, tell us how it’s going, we want
to tell everybody about our famous little girl!’ And you just didn’t want to
let down your parents. You didn’t want to be a failure. What a horrible
catch-22 to put a teenager in.”
In 1999, it
looked as if Marie’s alleged behaviour had caught up with him when a BBC
investigation reportedly filmed him saying he hoped to seduce the contestants
at Elite Model Look (the new name for Look of the Year), as well as offering an
undercover journalist money for sex. In the wake of the allegations, he was
suspended from Elite; in an interview at the time, he said: “I’m destroyed… I’m
finished.”
But Elite
launched a libel action against the BBC, arguing that the report was
“dishonestly edited”; the agency successfully made the case that Marie had been
set up by the crew. The case was settled, the BBC apologised and conceded that
its portrayal was unfair. The film disappeared and Marie was reinstated,
continuing to run Elite Model Look for many more years.
People ask
how I got brave. I say: I’m a woman of a certain age. What I mean is, I learned
the hard way. Gérald Marie prepared me
After years
of financial mismanagement, Elite was forced into bankruptcy in 2004, splitting
into two separate agencies, owned by different corporate entities, which still
operate today. Marie is believed to have continued working with the New York
division of Elite, Creative World Management, until as recently as 2011. The
company declined to comment, but a spokesperson told the Guardian in March that
it condemns the kinds of “deplorable behaviour” alleged to have taken place at
Elite in the past.
Meanwhile,
a spokesperson for Elite World Group said: “We find these alleged criminal acts
egregious and abhorrent. Gérald Marie’s contract with Elite Model Management
ended in December 2010, and the company was sold in 2011 to its current owners
Elite World Group, for whom Marie has never worked. Elite World Group is
committed to providing a safe environment for our models, and does not tolerate
any form of abuse, harassment, discrimination and/or gender bias.”
In 2012,
Marie joined Oui Management, a prestigious Paris agency whose models front
Louis Vuitton campaigns and Vogue magazine covers. He remains an investor in
Oui, which is registered in the UK: company documents filed in August this year
state that Marie continues to be a “person with significant control” over Oui
Management Ltd.
Although
Marie has claimed he is retired, industry insiders who work with Oui Management
say that until recently he had a “hands-on” role. One source has shown the
Guardian emails that indicate Marie was accompanying models on castings with
photographers as recently as last year. Marie’s LinkedIn page, which he
recently deleted, had listed his responsibilities at the “thriving newcomer”
agency as scouting for and managing talent. Oui Management has told the
Guardian that Marie is not currently an employee.
Now married
to a Russian model, Marie splits his time between Paris and his home in Ibiza,
which according to a local paper has “the best French wine cellar on the
island”. Responding to the new allegations put to him by the Guardian, his
lawyers said that he was “extremely affected by the accusations made against
him, which he contests with the utmost firmness… He intends to actively
participate in the manifestation of the truth within the scope of the opened
criminal investigation.”
Is the
predatory culture of the modelling industry in the 1980s and 1990s a thing of
the past? Both Anderson and Tapscott say that there is still a pressure to
“stay silent” – one that applies to agents, too. Anderson says: “I can’t get a
job in the modelling business any more, because I’ve been ostracised for
talking out about this stuff.” She adds that it “speaks volumes” that Marie is
still involved with an agency today. “It is living proof that the cult-like
mentality still exists, and the code of silence remains.”
Meanwhile,
the eight women who spoke to the Guardian say that, even 30 to 40 years after
their alleged abuse, the impact on their lives has been lasting. Walsh, Dodd,
Lee and Otis all battled eating disorders as a result, and several accusers
went on to experience problems with alcohol or drugs.
Otis left
Paris in 1987, moving to a farm in northern California for several months to
get as “far away from [modelling] as possible”. But when her money started to
run out, she approached a small agency in San Francisco and got a few jobs. “It
felt safe and stable and normal,” she says. “You knew you were going to get off
at five.” From there, her career took off. In 1988, she did an American Vogue
cover shoot with Evangelista, the first ever to feature two models, in which
they posed together on a Greek beach in matching jumpers and black caps,
smiling and laughing. (There is no suggestion that Evangelista was aware of the
allegations against her husband at the time.) In 1991, Otis became the face of Calvin
Klein and joined Evangelista as one of the world’s most recognisable models;
unlike many other women the Guardian has spoken to for this investigation, she
found success without Gérald Marie.
Dodd, who
is now 60, became a successful businesswoman (she is the founder of the surf
brand Roxy) and lives with her husband and three children in the north
Californian countryside. “I made it out,” she says, although she stresses that
the years that followed weren’t easy.
Walsh
remembers crying down the phone to her parents in 1980, asking them to get her
home for the summer, and then back to school. “I was sitting in my mother’s
basement, suffering from depression, not knowing what that was at the time,”
she says. “I was just eating and crying.” She says she is coming forward now,
“because I believe this is still a problem for girls in the industry today, and
it needs to stop.”
After
gaining a degree in journalism and later a PhD in clinical psychology, Walsh
became a successful broadcaster. In 2017, she was the first woman to go public
with sexual harassment allegations against Fox News host Bill O’Reilly. Walsh
told a New York Times investigation that, when she was a regular guest on The
O’Reilly Factor in 2013, he reneged on a verbal offer to secure her a lucrative
position after she declined an invitation to his hotel suite. He was later
sacked by Fox after it emerged he had paid five women tens of millions of
dollars to settle various sexual harassment lawsuits. At the time, O’Reilly
said there was no merit to the allegations. “I never mistreated anyone,” he
said, adding that he had resolved matters privately to protect his children
from publicity.
Walsh is
now a qualified psychotherapist and hosts the Dr Wendy Walsh radio show.
“People say, ‘How were you so brave to just go, “No”, to this powerful man who
offered you a major job on television in America?’” she says. “And what I said
in all the press conferences is that I’m a woman of a certain age, I’ve had
some life experience. But what I really meant is, I learned the hard way. What
happened with Gérald Marie prepared me for what happened with Bill O’Reilly, 30
years later. What I learned when I was 18 was to never go to the private
quarters of any powerful man, whether he held your paycheck or not.”
BIG CITY
Why an Ex-Supermodel Who Says She Was Raped at 17
Is Suing Now
Carré Sutton accuses a former executive at a modeling
agency of sexual assault, and a second employee of enabling the attacks.
Ginia
Bellafante
By Ginia
Bellafante
Ms.
Bellafante writes the Big City column, a weekly commentary on the politics,
culture and life of New York City.
Published
Aug. 13, 2021
Updated
Sept. 7, 2021
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/nyregion/carre-otis-sutton-sexual-assault-lawsuit.html
In the
early 1980s, long before she would become one of the most recognizable models
in the world, Carré Otis was living miserably in Northern California. Her
parents had split up and her family was deeply unhappy; she was dyslexic and
struggling in school. At 16, she ran away and lived on the streets. “It was my
only hope,” she told me recently, from her home in Colorado, where she has
settled into a quiet life with her husband and children, “that I could make it
in modeling.’’
In San
Francisco, she was discovered by a modeling scout and eventually landed in New
York, which she found cold and disorienting. In the boundary-less world of the
late-20th-century fashion industry, where go-sees often took place in
photographers’ apartments, humiliations mounted one on top of the other. She
lived in what was more or less a warehouse — vulnerable, unprotected — with
other young, aspiring models. Some girls had mothers with them who kept them
safe. Ms. Otis was alone, “in a unique situation, a wayward child primed for
what I endured.’’
What she
endured, she has said since the publication of her memoir, “Beauty Disrupted,”
a decade ago, was serial rape. She reiterated that claim in a lawsuit filed in
federal court in Manhattan on Thursday. In the suit, Ms. Otis, who now goes by
her married name, Carré Sutton, states that in 1986, when she was 17, she was
sexually assaulted regularly by Gérald Marie, Elite Model Management’s former
European chief. Also named in the suit is her booking agent at the time, Trudi
Tapscott, who would later work at Vogue before founding her own agency, the
Model Coaches, in New York in 2018.
In the wake
of the #MeToo movement, Mr. Marie has come under criminal investigation in
France for allegations of sexual assault dating back to the ’80s and ’90s —
allegations he has denied “categorically.” As of February, 11 women who have
accused him of sexual misconduct and rape had been asked to meet with
investigators in Paris. Ms. Sutton is scheduled to talk to them next month. In
the meantime, she has availed herself of another mode of recourse, New York
State’s Child Victims Act, which allows survivors of childhood sexual abuse to
pursue civil claims against those who they say harmed them, no matter how long
ago.
Since the
law was enacted in 2019, thousands of such claims have been filed, many of them
against the Archdiocese of New York, and a substantial number, like Ms.
Sutton’s and Virginia Giuffre’s against Prince Andrew, were brought this week,
just before the window provided by the statute was set to close. It is Ms.
Tapscott, the complaint maintains, whose negligence enabled the abuse, by
sending Ms. Sutton from New York to Paris under the tutelage of Mr. Marie.
According to the suit, the two Elite executives arranged for the teenager to
live in his apartment, with Ms. Tapscott failing to let Ms. Sutton know that
“the modeling agency was sending her to live in the home of a sex offender.”
By the
mid-1980s, Mr. Marie’s treatment of young models was allegedly known. Before
Mr. Marie joined the agency in 1985, Elite’s founder, John Casablancas, was
wary of an association with him, the suit claims, quoting a former business
partner of his who said Mr. Casablancas had called Mr. Marie “a sleaze” who
“beats up girls” and “rapes them.”
The pattern
of assault began, the complaint states, when Mr. Marie’s girlfriend, the model
Linda Evangelista (whom he would later marry and then divorce), was out of
town. In the apartment, on Rue du Bac, Ms. Sutton was put in his daughter’s
vacant room. “It became clearer and clearer to me that if I did push back, I
would not work” Ms. Sutton told me. When she did push back, she said, she did
lose work.
Not long
after this period of emotional and professional descent, she returned to California
and moved to a farm, where she lived with midwives and herbalists. She
eventually found fame on her own terms, working with superstar photographers
like Herb Ritts and Richard Avedon and modeling for Calvin Klein. But intimacy
with men was impossible for years, she told me; abusive romantic relationships
followed, and she had also grown to roundly mistrust women.
If Ms.
Sutton was betrayed by Ms. Tapscott in the way the suit lays out, by being
directed toward a predator, how should the law respond? “Any time you are
working with children, there is a heightened responsibility to keep them safe,”
said Carrie Goldberg, a Brooklyn lawyer who has represented many adult victims
of child sex abuse. The problem for young models, particularly during the ’80s
and ’90s, was that “they weren’t seen as children, but legally they are, and
they were.”
Ms.
Sutton’s lawyers will first have to prove — in the absence of text chains and
emails, which did not exist 35 years ago — that Ms. Tapscott knew about Mr.
Marie’s proclivities and endangered her anyway. In response to an investigation
into Mr. Marie’s conduct and the various accusations against him, published
last fall by The Guardian, Ms. Tapscott did not claim obliviousness but said
instead: “We didn’t have the language then to know that this was wrong, and
even if we did, who would we report it to? We were like a family and there was
no HR department.” She went on to say that she had “tremendous regret about not
doing more at the time.” In regard to Ms. Sutton’s suit, Ms. Tapscott declined
to comment.
In the
summer of 1986, according to the suit, Ms. Sutton told Ms. Tapscott what had
happened to her, and Ms. Tapscott reported the news to Mr. Casablancas, the man
in charge, via written memo. Mr. Casablancas, who died in 2013, was said to
advise Mr. Marie simply to be more cautious in the future. Mr. Casablancas was
in no position to offer a moral counter example. What he described as his
affair with the model Stephanie Seymour took place when she was 15 and he was
41. He was married at the time but that relationship ended. At 51, he married
again, this time to a 17-year-old.
It takes
only a quick saunter through the annals of recent history to realize how little
cultural condemnation was directed at this sort of behavior. Even as recently
as 2017, just eight months before the #MeToo movement exploded, Netflix
released the documentary “Casablancas: The Man Who Loved Women,” directed by a
former Elite booker, Hubert Woroniecki, who told The Wall Street Journal that
it was not his job to “make an investigation.” (The article in which that quote
appeared ran under the headline: “A New Netflix Documentary Tells the Story of
Elite Model Management’s Colorful Founder.”)
I asked Ms.
Sutton what she hoped to gain by bringing her case at this moment, just as the
deadline was closing. She said she was motivated in large part by her anger
over Bill Cosby’s release from prison, and by watching her two daughters enter
adolescence only to see clearly how young and unformed girls of that age really
are. “They are children,’’ she told me. A lawsuit like this also comes with the
potential to encourage other victims to come forward.
Exactly a
year ago, Ms. Sutton, along with 12 other people, addressed a letter to Gov.
Andrew M. Cuomo urging him to support the Adult Survivors Act, which would
extend the statute of limitations on civil claims to those who suffered sexual
abuse when they were 18 or older. Given the frequency with which women and men
in their late teens and early 20s are preyed upon, the law is a logical
corollary to the Child Victims Act. Although the State Senate passed the bill
earlier this year, the Assembly did not bring it to the floor for a vote before
adjourning. Now, perhaps it will go forward. As State Senator Brad Hoylman, the
bill’s sponsor in that chamber, put it, “Wouldn’t that be a fitting coda to the
end of the Cuomo administration?”
Ginia
Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City
columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also
been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine.
@GiniaNYT
