Amid the debut of Netflix’s new docu-series Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, you may be wondering where Tyra Banks and Jay Manuel stand today.
If you don’t know, they worked together when America’s Next Top Model launched in 2003. He eventually decided that he wanted to leave after the show’s 8th cycle.
“I didn’t like what the show was becoming,” Jay said in the doc. “It was chipping away at my soul”
He says he sent Tyra an email explaining, to which she took three days to respond. She ultimately wrote him back three words: “I am disappointed.”
He then felt pressured to stay on another season, and he did. “It was clear I was not allowed to speak with her outside [being on camera]. It was like psychological torture, I felt broken.”
Tyra was asked in the doc for a comment, and she wouldn’t give one.
So, since filming, has anything changed?
Keep reading to find out more…
“I never got that phone call,” Jay told People in the latest update after the doc was filmed about a year ago. “I don’t think I’m getting a phone call. She’s got my number.”
He did run into her at an event in 2017 and had a “really nice conversation.”
He added, “Other than that, we’ve had no communication of any sort, text, email, anything. Tyra and I were close, and when we were in New York shooting, or even in L.A. shooting, she’d be at my house or I’d be at her house…But at the same time, and she knows this to be true, the things that are those really, really trusted important things that she has said to me, I will never repeat. I will forever honor my relationship with her in the past.”
“I’m in a healed place,” he added. “I wish her no ill will.”
There’s a really upsetting update about another ANTM judge, Miss J Alexander.
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