Joe Budden is walking back his support for an America's Next Top Model alum.
In the latest episode of the Joe Budden Podcast, the 45-year-old rapper turned podcaster revisited his support for Shandi Sullivan, who appeared in the reality competition’s second cycle in 2004 and recently looked back at her journey with the show on the Netflix docuseries Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model.
Sullivan, now 43, recalled in the docuseries how the production’s trip to Milan, Italy in 2003 spiraled into a traumatic event, with her being involved in sexual activity while drunk — activity set up and filmed by the show — that she claims to have only fragmentary memories of.
At the time, the show’s cameras captured her drunkenly kissing and getting into bed with a male model she met from an earlier photoshoot, before later calling her boyfriend back home to confess infidelity — a framing that she says now was created by the producers of the show.
“There's a few things that I do have to walk back from the last part. One, the sexual assault and sexual abuse victim from the Tyra Banks America's Next Top Model doc? We got to walk it all back," Budden said near the one-hour and 14-minute mark in the video linked here.
He continued, “I've been watching America's Next Top Model all week. I've been watching the interviews from that time. This girl wanted it.
“That's why women are tricky. That's why she never used those words. Because she was very clear on camera saying, ‘Oh, we got these dudes coming over. I'm fucking one of them … I got a boyfriend, but I don’t care.’”
Budden then played an audio clip from a 2020 interview Sullivan gave to media personality Oliver Twixt about the night of the incident, noting her “very different tone” when describing the events that unfolded.
“So one of her homegirls left because she had a boyfriend. There's more to this, but I don't need to play it,” he said, before later adding, “We gotta believe all victims, but l've also had a hot tub before.”
Although Budden questioned Sullivan's intentions, experts note that people who are drunk, high, or passed out cannot legally consent to sex. Planned Parenthood defines consent as freely given, reversible, informed, enthusiastic, and specific.
Despite the incident taking place in 2003 in Milan, current Italian law states anyone who engages in sexual acts without the other person's free and current consent faces six to 12 years in prison, per Euro News.
In the Netflix docuseries, Sullivan recalled getting into the hot tub with the male models along with her fellow contestants April Wilkner and Mercedes Scelba-Shorte, but the remainder of the evening “just a blur.”
“I was hammered. I think I had two bottles of wine by myself. I just remember, like, little bits and pieces,” she said in the doc, per People. “He threw me in the shower and then just sitting in the shower. And then we're in the bed. I was blacked out for a lot of it. I didn't even feel sex happening. I just knew it was happening. And then I passed out.”
“The next day, I woke up. I was, like, 'Holy shit, what the fuck happened last night?' It all fucking hit me. It just flooded over me. I just sat there and cried,” she added.
Sullivan spoke with Rolling Stone earlier this month and insists the producers should have stepped in from the situation escalating further.
“My whole feeling for a long, long time was ‘I did this. I let this happen to me.’ But there were people watching the whole time, and someone should have intervened. Someone should have said ‘We need to put the cameras down and just go get her,’” Sullivan told the magazine. “They facilitated that whole situation with the hopes that something would happen. And thankfully for them, it made amazing television, right?”
“I hadn’t spoken about it in depth in a really long time because of the emotion,” she said elsewhere in the interview. “My body still feels that trauma. My skin crawls when I talk about it. But when I talked to the director of the documentary, I could tell that she understood that I just needed to talk about it. I just had to purge it.”
“How do you treat people as cash cow[s] instead of humans?” she added. “It’s messed up, no matter what year it is.”