America’s Next Top Model alum Sarah Hartshorne is opening up about what wasn’t shown on the series when it came to production issues, financial discrepancies and more.
While promoting E!’s Dirty Rotten Scandals, which airs new episodes on Wednesday, March 11, Hartshorne, 38, shared what viewers might be surprised to learn, exclusively telling Us Weekly, “It is highlighting the financial discrepancies between how much money the show made and how much certain people walked away with vs. how little the contestants walked away with.”
Hartshorne had her own experience with financial restraints while filming cycle 9.
“My biggest memory from the time is just this feeling of the need and desire to constantly grab at whatever I could grasp on. I was saving the money that they gave us to pay for food and really trying to eat as cheaply as possible,” she recalled about joining the show in 2007. “I was grabbing free snacks at craft services. If you look at the hierarchy of needs, the base level of that pyramid is needing to find any kind of security and just feeling financially insecure.”
Hartshorne continued: “I was insecure in terms of where and when I was going to eat next, where I was going to sleep next and when I was going to be able to sleep. I don’t think that that was unintentional. They worked very hard to keep us on edge. I was so focused on all of that that I really wasn’t able to see where that insecurity and instability was coming from. I really didn’t put the pieces together until years later that it was intentional and there was someone there that was responsible for that — and it could have been different.”
America’s Next Top Model, which ran from 2003 to 2018, followed aspiring models as they competed to receive a modeling contract, a fashion spread in a major magazine and a cosmetics campaign.
After Hulu made episodes available in 2020, America’s Next Top Model received backlash for its insensitive modeling challenges that featured concepts such as race-swapping, violence against women and eating disorders.
“I’ve seen those videos online [of people reacting to the show]. They are not really an exaggeration. As contestants, we knew we would get a hint of what was to come based on who the cameras were focusing on,” Hartshorne recalled about how the show leaned into trauma each contestant may have faced off screen. “The application process [for the show] was so intense. They really knew every detail of our lives.”
Hartshorne noted how “a huge part of the application” mentioned “stressors” from their lives, adding, “It broke it down into categories. They would have a section like, ‘Do you have anything about housing? Do you have anything about health? Do you have anything about your body or your family’s body or insurance or finances or your finances or your family’s finances?’ It became very clear early on that this is the section of the application that mattered and this is what would get you on TV.”
The former contestant knew that the personal information would be brought up on screen.
“In conversations with casting directors, I knew, ‘Oh, OK, this is what they are looking for. This is what they will reward,'” she continued. “So there wasn’t just pressure to divulge secrets, there were concrete rewards behind it. There was this idea that if you didn’t then you wouldn’t succeed and you wouldn’t be brought onto the show.”
Hartshorne admitted she was grateful that her journey as the show’s plus-size model was the focus of her onscreen arc, saying, “It gave me an advantage because — it feels sad to say — but that was what they focused on instead of any personal trauma or personal history that I was bringing. I had this sort of sacrificial lamb to give them to be like, ‘Talk about that.'”
The controversy surrounding how America’s Next Top Model exploited its contestants has been reexamined in two recent docuseries: Netflix’s Reality Check and Dirty Rotten Scandals.
“My hope for people’s takeaway when they watch the documentary is I hope people understand that reality contestants deserve to be paid for their time. Everybody does,” Hartshorne told Us. “Everybody deserves to be paid for their time and labor. I don’t think that that’s a controversial thing to say. I have been surprised when people have disagreed with me. I think that’s a really basic thing.”
While weighing in on the recent conversations about the show, Hartshorne was “pleasantly surprised” how much the topic of accountability has been brought up.
“There’s a lot of conversations that have allowed for a lot of seemingly conflicting truths to exist at once in ways that are so encouraging and so rare to see. I’ve just seen conversations about accountability that have really warmed my heart — even when people maybe disagree with me or even when I see people saying things that I don’t necessarily agree with,” Hartshorne shared about the backlash creator and executive producer Tyra Banks has gotten for her involvement. “It doesn’t really matter because for me, we weren’t paid for our labor. We weren’t compensated for many hours of grueling work. That — to me — is what accountability looks like. It is financial payments to people who deserve it.”
After her time on the show, Hartshorne found success modeling internationally for brands such as Vogue and Glamour. She was also the first ANTM contestant to write a memoir, titled You Wanna Be On Top?: A Memoir of Makeovers, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Model.
“I’ve been incredibly lucky. I just had my first book come out and I worked as a model in the plus-size industry for many years. I was able to have a pretty successful career in modeling and then also was lucky enough to be able to walk away from a pretty successful career in modeling,” she noted. “It’s just been a great journey of discovering my own voice and discovering myself. I have a 3-year-old and she’s awesome. I feel really lucky. The show was very much my introduction to modeling at all as a possibility as a career. I got to travel the world, I got to meet a lot of amazing people and I got to make a lot of friends — which I know is not why you’re supposed to go on a reality show, but it’s what I did.”
Dirty Rotten Scandals: America’s Next Top Model airs Wednesday, March 11, at 9 p.m. ET, with Dirty Rotten Scandals: The Price Is Right premiering on Wednesday, March 18.
