Where is Shandi Sullivan now? ‘ANTM’ alum reflects on painful Milan moment caught on camera: 'No one did..'
For 15 years, across 24 cycles, ‘America’s Next Top Model’ sold the dream that anyone, literally anyone, could step in front of a camera and be remade. The judging panel alone seemed to be engineered for fireworks: Tyra Banks at the helm, with Miss J Alexander, Jay Manuel, Nigel Barker, and Janice Dickinson. Then came Shandi Sullivan. When she entered Cycle 2, she was no seasoned runway model or pageant queen. She was a Walgreens store employee from Kansas City. She was shy and awkward. But with each passing week, she shocked everyone, including herself. She went all the way to the finals despite having no modeling background.
Viewers latched onto her 'ugly duckling to swan' arc. But her makeover was not without costs. In the new Netflix docuseries ‘Reality Check: Inside America's Next Top Model’, Sullivan revisits her time on the show with a clarity that only comes years later. For Sullivan, one night in Milan still lingers. The documentary brings viewers back to a now-infamous evening during the Milan leg of Cycle 2. Sullivan, who had a boyfriend at home, ended up kissing one of the male models in a hot tub and bringing him back to the apartment. Cameras were there. Of course they were. “I was blacked out. No one did anything to stop it. And it all got filmed. Every moment of it,” Sullivan reveals in the doc.
It became one of the most talked-about scenes of that season. Years passed, and the show continued. But for Sullivan, that night didn’t fade into the background. She says the wound reopened when she appeared on Tyra Banks’s daytime talk show for a reunion special and made a specific request about the footage. “I literally told you behind the scenes, I don’t want to see it. Don’t show it,” she says in ‘Reality Check’. “You didn’t respect that at all.” The clip aired anyway.
These days, Sullivan’s world looks very different as she works with animals. Furthermore, she co-hosts a horror movie podcast called ‘Urn Fulla Popcorn’. She works full-time for a cat-sitting company, which she describes as 'a dream job.' She has also launched a jewelry business based in Brooklyn called ‘Dream Meow Corner’. After the documentary premiered on February 16, Sullivan addressed the experience again in an Instagram post.
She wrote, “At the age of 43, I continue to struggle with it; always smiling. That's why I took this opportunity. Knowing that Tyra didn't have control over my narrative, that the director and producers here had my back... that's why I did it. I did it for me. Because I mattered and I still do! The love I have felt today has been immense.” Her relationship with her then-boyfriend Eric did not survive long-term, though they tried. She speaks about that period with a kind of blunt honesty that doesn’t ask for pity. “We tried. We really tried,” she says in the documentary. She also spoke about Eric, “He moved with me to New York after the show. But it would suck when I'd be walking with Eric down the street, and somebody would recognize me and call me a sl*t to my face. Or a cheating wh*re, with Eric standing right next to me. That was fun. It made me hate myself.”
