Former top model sues ex-agency chief over sexual assault
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Former model Carre Otis, who now goes by her married name Sutton, says she endured serial rape during her professional career when she was a teenager.
PHOTO: NYTIMES
NEW YORK • In the early 1980s, long before she would become one of the most recognisable models in the world, Carre Otis was living miserably in Northern California.
Her parents had split up and her family was deeply unhappy; she was dyslexic and struggling in school. At 16, she ran away and lived on the streets.
In San Francisco, she was discovered by a modelling scout and eventually landed in New York, which she found cold and disorienting. In the boundary-less world of the late 20th Century fashion industry, where go-sees often took place in photographers' apartments, humiliations mounted one on top of the other.
She lived in what was more or less a warehouse - vulnerable, unprotected - with other young, aspiring models, some of whom had mothers with them who kept them safe. Ms Otis was alone, "in a unique situation, a wayward child primed for what I endured".
What she endured, she has said since the publication of her memoir, Beauty Disrupted, a decade ago, was serial rape.
She reiterated that claim in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Manhattan last Thursday. In the suit, Ms Otis, who now goes by her married name, Carre Sutton, states that in 1986, when she was 17, she was regularly sexually assaulted by Mr Gerald Marie, Elite Model Management's former European chief.
Also named in the suit is her booking agent at the time, Ms Trudi Tapscott, who would later work at Vogue before founding her own agency, The Model Coaches, in New York in 2018.
In the wake of the #MeToo movement, Mr Marie has come under criminal investigation in France over allegations of sexual assault dating back to the 1980s and 1990s - allegations he has denied "categorically".
In the meantime, the former model has availed herself of another mode of recourse, New York state's Child Victims Act, which allows survivors of childhood sexual abuse to pursue civil claims against those who they say harmed them, no matter how long ago.
It is Ms Tapscott, the complaint maintains, whose negligence enabled the abuse, by sending Ms Sutton from New York to Paris under the tutelage of Mr Marie.
By the mid-1980s, Mr Marie's treatment of young models was allegedly already known.
Ms Sutton's lawyers will first have to prove - in the absence of text chains and e-mails, which did not exist 35 years ago - that Ms Tapscott knew about Mr Marie's proclivities and endangered her anyway.
Ms Tapscott declined to comment on the suit.
NYTIMES
