Janice Dickinson Admits She “Tortured” Tyra Banks On ‘ANTM’ When She Was “Mean” To Contestants

Janice Dickinson is reflecting on her work dynamic with Tyra Banks, and it sounds like things got a little toxic back in the day.

The supermodel and former America’s Next Top Model judge opened up to Kaitlyn Bristowe on the June 18 episode of her Off The Vine podcast, deeming Banks “not a friendly lady,” per Entertainment Weekly. As for what their working relationship looked like on the famed reality competition series, Dickinson said, “Well, I just tortured her.”

“Because if she was going to be mean to the girls,” she recalled, “I saw her ploy, just so I could remain under the radar. I would tell her things like, ‘I did Vogue, you did Elle.'”

Dickinson also claimed that Banks “was always late, keeping [them] waiting for hours and hours,” citing the instance of when they filmed in Cape Town, South Africa “with no air conditioning.”

Decider reached out to Banks’ manager for comment, but did not hear back by time of publication.

Dickinson has said similar things about Banks in the past, explaining during an August 2021 appearance on the Behind the Velvet Rope podcast that “sitting next to Tyra for hours and hours can be daunting because she didn’t really like me and we didn’t really get along,” per ScreenRant.

“I did Vogue. She did Elle, and I used to constantly remind her of that,” she also said at the time.

In 2014, after calling Banks “soulless” in 2012, Dickinson issued an apology to her former co-worker, telling Us Weekly, “The one regret I’ve had is badmouthing Miss Tyra Banks when I was not speaking with a sober mindset.”

“I just want to take this time to apologize to Tyra, and say I’m terribly sorry for any of the antagonistic things I’ve said about her in the past,” she added. “It was just because I was hurt from being fired from the show.”

Also, as highlighted by EW, Dickinson appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Network in 2015, explaining that Banks ” hired [her] to be like a female Simon Cowell, to be feeding, in negative fashion, things about the girls.”

“I love working with Tyra Banks. It was an amazing experience. Tyra’s a tough businesswoman, and she does great TV, and I respect her as a woman. I’ve said some pretty bad things about her in the past because I had been fired, and I was very hurt that I’d been fired, and so I acted out. But that’s not when I was acting in a sober-like fashion,” she shared at the time, apologizing once again to Banks.

In other ANTM news, in April, ANTM‘s Cycle 23 winner India Gants opened up on TikTok about her experience on the show, claiming that Banks said that “if [she] told anybody that [she’d] won America’s Next Top Model before it actually aired on TV, that they would fly [her] back, reshoot the finale, and have the other girl win.”