If You See Something, Please Say Something
First off, I just want to say that I have never met Emily Ratajkowski. And Jonathan Leder’s name is vaguely familiar. But to be totally honest, I had to look him up, and I didn’t really recognize any of his work. Although, of course, I recognized plenty of the models that he has worked with. In other words, I don’t know them, and I don’t have a dog in this fight.
This article that I am writing here isn’t really about the incident that Ms. Ratajkowski wrote about in last week’s The Cut. To give you an edited version, the article details a sexual encounter between her and fashion photographer, Jonathan Leder. It occurred during a “test” her agency set up for her in the early days of her career. They asked her to go out to his home, by herself, in the Catskills. I’ll be frank: it’s a brutal read. Especially for a woman reader.
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Conversely, I had a model come to shoot at my place upstate, and it would never have crossed my mind to ask her to stay in my house. It’s unprofessional and inappropriate. Is it her responsibility to know that? Or is it mine, as an older, seasoned, experienced, professional photographer? I put her up in a hotel, and told her to bring a friend so she wouldn’t be at a total stranger’s on her own. Why aren’t men offering young women these same courtesies!? Because they don’t have to think about these things. It doesn’t cross their minds because it doesn’t have to. Either that, or they actually want the model to be alone and at their mercy.
Not only does Emily go into graphic detail about the encounter, she also talks about a lawsuit a paparazzi photographer brought against her. She had found an image on the internet that he had taken of her, and posted it on her Instagram. He sued her for $150K. Then there was the time an artist used one of her Instagram photos of herself, repurposed it as “art” without her consent, and sold it to her for a mere $80K. Actually she goes into detail about a lot of hypocritical, scandalous shit about the fashion industry. But what I really want to talk about, in addition to the rampant sexual abuse, is people’s reaction to it.
I first found out about Emily’s article via an Instagram post. It was from a female singer/model living in Los Angeles, who said she too had suffered from abuse by the same photographer. I immediately found myself down a long, windy road of reading how more and more women have spoken out about Leder. The question isn’t if I believe them or not, because of course I fucking believe them. Not only have I myself been a victim of sexual misconduct at the hands of some sleazy male photographer, but I have heard countless stories from models over the last 35 years. Shocking accounts of horrible abuse by men in the industry. So yeah, believing these stories is not a question. But I do have quite a few other questions.
Why the fuck is this still going on? Why do fashion photographers like Terry Richardson still have Instagram followers, when there have been loads of disgusting, creepy, predatory sexual accusations made against him? What kind of world do we live in, where people want to give a sexual predator positive attention? How long are we going to continue letting young girls, who don’t yet have the experience to know a sexual predator from a legit professional, to be exploited by pervy nerds?
And why the fuck did I see comments like this about Emily’s essay?
“What does she think will happen? She poses half-naked all the time on Instagram”
“Poor little rich girl, she deserved what she got”
“She’s just attention-seeking….everyone know she’s a slut!”
What’s even more puzzling, is that all of the above comments came from women. So my next question is: really???
In my opinion, there is nothing more dangerous than a misogynistic woman. It’s bad enough that we’ve been forced to accept the fact that some men just “can’t control” their urges. Like they have some shortcoming, and we should just pity them. But for women to turn on women, especially women victims, is just grotesque to me.
Okay, so let’s look at this. Sure, it’s easy to hate Emily Ratajkowski. She’s incredibly beautiful. Her body is a perfect ten, not a flaw to it. She appears to be happily married, mom to an awesome dog she clearly loves, successful career, her own business Inamorata, and from what we can detect from her social media, it looks like she’s living her #bestlife. So yeah, sure, we can find handfuls of reasons to be jealous of her. So does this mean that she deserved to have a photographer stick his hands up her pussy and violate her? After plying her with wine for hours? While she’s trapped and isolated in his Catskills home? With no transportation, no female friend, no support? ( BTW: where did the female makeup artist run off to??)
Even the accused photographer’s response is fucking mind numbing. He told New York Mag:
“You do know who we are talking about right? This is the girl that was naked in (“a nudie”) magazine, and bounced around naked in the Robin Thicke video at that time. You really want someone to believe she was a victim?”
So, if you’re hired to pose nude and dance in a music video semi-nude, you are basically announcing to the world that you are fair game? That it’s open season, boys, come and get me!? Sometimes for models, posing nude is their job. But it stops there. A naked woman is not fair game. Okay, boys?
I’ve known what the modeling industry was about for awhile now. When I was 16, I tried it out myself. I lived in Los Angeles, and I had the standard requirements: tall, thin, high cheekbones, blah, blah, blah. On my second test shoot, I answered an ad in the LA Times from a fashion photographer. He was looking for models to use in "ad campaigns”. We all know that’s NOT how it works, but I was so inexperienced and so naive at the time. No one had ever warned me that it wasn’t safe to go see these photographers alone (and it seems not much has changed). I needed pictures, so I called and we met at his San Fernando Valley studio. He reluctantly agreed to test with me, telling me that he wasn’t sure I had potential, but he would take a chance on me. (Oh gee, thanks so much!) I agreed to meet him in Malibu Canyon the following Sunday, and when I showed up, the vibe was pretty unpleasant. I was late getting there because I had gotten lost, and he was annoyed. When we finally started taking pictures, he kept getting angrier and angrier because I wasn’t emoting what he wanted. He wanted sexy. But I was so terrified, and also so angry that I had gotten myself into a situation with a guy who was treating me like shit. I’m sure you can guess what came next. He asked me to slowly start unbuttoning my blouse and take off my clothes. When I refused, he shouted at me that I would never make it, and that I don’t have what it takes. I still have those pictures, actually. I look so fucking miserable. For what seemed like a terribly long hour but could’ve been just a few minutes, I was sure he was going to rape me. We were alone, in the middle of nowhere. Luckily, I wasn’t raped, but I tell you, it scared me off modeling. And then a year later, almost forgetting the incident, I picked up a camera and made the decision that I would become a fashion photographer. It’s like I shoved the incident into some dark recess of my mind, never wanting to talk about it because I felt like I was the one at fault.
My next run-in with fashion industry fucked up-ness, came in 1987. I had just graduated from the prestigious Art Center College of Design. I was 24, and still building my book, while hitting the pavement with my portfolio looking for work. I was at the Nina Blanchard Agency (which was later bought by Ford Models), and I came across a model’s zed card who was wanting to test. I was pretty astonished she was on the testing board, because I had met her while I was still in school, and she was unapproachable. She was already known as “The Face.” She was dating a huge LA-based fashion photographer who lived in Venice Beach at the time, and well on her way to becoming a super model. I was too afraid to even speak to her when she came up for a shoot at Art Center in Paul Jasmin’s fashion class. I just sat in the back and stared.
I leaped at the opportunity to test with her, and we became instant friends the minute we worked together. She became my muse, my best friend, and my roommate. I’ll never forget the day she told me what happened to her, shortly after I had seen her at Art Center. Her agency sent her to Milan as a “next step” to build her career, which is pretty common. Her agent in Milan talked her into having dinner with a very important potential client, at his villa outside of Milan. After being delivered via his limo, she was drugged and the Very Important Client, along with twenty of his closest friends, took turns raping her. She left Milan soon after, returning to Los Angeles broken. It’s a long story, but her path back to herself and recovery was long and strained.
For the next twenty odd years, I had to hear stories like this from models. As a female photographer, I cannot even count how many calls I have gotten in the middle of the night from a new face or even a girl on her way up, asking me to pick her up from some hotel or mansion or bus bench, and help her get out of some fucked up situation she was in with a male fashion photographer.
So why am I finally talking about it now? Because it’s taken me this long to undo the misogyny that’s been ingrained in me. And I’ve just begun. For my entire life, I have been indoctrinated to believe that if women are sexually assaulted, there’s a chance they might be at fault. And it doesn’t just stop there. I have been indoctrinated to believe that a man’s opinion is the final say. I have been indoctrinated to believe that if I challenge this, I will never have an opportunity to succeed. I have been brainwashed to think that women’s lives are somehow secondary to men’s. I have been conditioned to feel inferior to men. I have been brought up to think my fear of men is because they deserve my blind respect. That they somehow earned the right to their authority, simply by being men. I’m finally starting to reeducate myself, to un-know, to rebuild my belief systems about the injustices women face at the hands of un-evolved men. As much as I hate seeing women turn on other women, I have to admit to the misogyny within myself as well.
So. Is the fashion industry perpetuating these man-made myths? Does our industry have a “call to action?” This is a question I actually have the answer to: YES.
Similarly to how black parents are sadly still forced to give their children “The Talk:” Don’t go out at night with a hoodie on. Always put your hands up immediately if you get pulled over. Don’t argue with a cop, even if you’re right. Women get a talk of their own. Only ours is a bit confusing. Don’t dress like a slut. Show more skin. Don’t give him what he wants. Give him what he wants, or you’ll never make it. Don’t be too fat. Don’t be too skinny. It’s okay to be sexually assertive. You’re a whore. What “The Talk” for women, specifically in the fashion industry, should be is: Never go to a photographer’s alone. Never do anything you’re not comfortable doing. Never be too scared to say no, because you deserve to say no if you want to. And most importantly, if a photographer ever sexually assaults you or makes you uncomfortable in any way, EXPOSE HIM. We have a right, a responsibility, and an obligation to expose sexual predators. Not just for ourselves, but for other potential victims. And a note to the many male photographers who I know are not sexual predators, we need your help too. We need you to confront your colleagues if they even hint at behavior like this. You can’t stand idly by, turning a blind eye to this. It’s unfortunate, but those bad apples give the whole bunch a bad rap. You need to speak out too.