Former America’s Next Top Model winner Adrienne Curry is revisiting a painful memory from the show’s first season—one she says left her with permanent damage.
In a new Instagram video, the Season 1 champion alleged that the makeover directed by ANTM creator and host Tyra Banks caused lasting harm to her scalp. Curry, now 43, revealed that the weave she received during filming left her “partially bald” and that the area “doesn’t grow anymore.”
“The reason is, when I was on Top Model, Tyra Banks told them to put a weave in my hair,” she said in the clip. “The Black stylists that were putting it in pulled her aside. I heard them tell her, ‘This white chick’s hair is too fragile for this.’”
According to Curry, Banks instructed the stylists to proceed anyway. The model recalled developing “an oozing wound” on the side of her head midway through the process. “Half my hair had been ripped out,” she added.
After the show wrapped, Curry said she returned home to Joliet, Illinois, where she had to visit a local Black salon to have the weave removed. Because she was under a nondisclosure agreement, she couldn’t explain where it had been installed. “It took hours and hours,” she remembered. “They told me whoever did this must’ve hated me.”
Curry claimed the damage was severe enough to leave scarring and bald patches that remain today. “It’s permanently damaged from that weave,” she said. “It was so painful. I remember [fellow contestant] Kesse trying to teach me how to itch it properly. I didn’t know—I was scratching with a fork.”
Reflecting on the experience, Curry said she believes many of the show’s early makeovers were designed more for shock value than for modeling success. “I think most of those makeovers were done just to torture us,” she said.
Curry’s account echoes her on-camera comments from Cycle 1, Episode 3, titled “The Girl Who Gets Rushed to the Emergency Room,” in which she admitted the weave process was “very long and pretty painful.”
Entertainment Weekly reports that representatives for Banks have not responded to Curry’s claims.