Weinstein Accuser Ambra Gutierrez Takes on the Modeling Industry

"A lot of working models like me face a lot of retaliation. I was recently dropped by two agencies, maybe because I complained about wanting to know my rates for jobs," Gutierrez told Back Row.

A quick note to readers: A year ago, I met with Model Alliance Founder and Executive Director Sara Ziff to talk about the Fashion Workers Act. The bill, which would protect models from entering into financially exploitative contracts with agencies, was being opposed by a group of modeling agencies calling itself the Coalition for Fairness in Fashion. Ziff and her colleagues are still working to get the bill passed this legislative session, which ends in about a month. I had the opportunity to talk to Ziff and the Model Alliance’s new board member Ambra Gutierrez about where the bill stands and why it remains as important as ever. Don’t miss last year’s story:

A Proposed Law Would Regulate Modeling Agencies. They Are Fighting It.

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Model Ambra Gutierrez arrived in New York City around 2015. She had left her home country of Italy after speaking out against former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. Her agent there had sent her to one of his “Bunga Bunga” parties in 2010, and she became a witness against him when he was tried for abuse of power and having sex with a minor.

Gutierrez tried modeling in other European cities before coming to the U.S. She was 22 when she met Harvey Weinstein at a reception for a show he was producing at Radio City Music Hall. Her agency then set up a meeting with him in his office, where he groped her. She went to the police, and, in a sting operation the next day at the Tribeca Grand Hotel, recorded him confessing to assaulting her. Despite the evidence, then-Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr. never pressed charges. Scared and worried about supporting herself, Gutierrez ended up signing a nondisclosure agreement and agreed to destroy the recording in exchange for a payment from Weinstein.

That part of her story became pretty well known after Ronan Farrow included it in his October 2017 New Yorker investigation into Weinstein’s use of NDAs to cover up serial sexual abuse. His story was preceded by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s investigation into Weinstein’s abuses and cover-ups for the New York Times. Their reporting launched the era-defining #MeToo movement.

The part of Gutierrez’s story that is less well-known is how, when she came to New York, she was $10,000 in debt to her model management company. She had to reimburse them for a slew of expenses, including around $3,000 for an O-1 visa that permitted her to work only for that agency and an expensive plane ticket to New York. She was lucky she found a sublet, otherwise the agency would have charged her $2,000 for a bunkbed in a model apartment. There were other charges, too, for things like being featured on the website. After reimbursing the agency for her debts and paying its 20 percent fee, she was left with $147 for her first month of work in New York.

“They literally make you work until you reach $10,000 so that you can extend your stay,” she said. “It means I made more than $10,000, and I never got anything.”

When models sign with agencies in New York, they typically hand over power of attorney to the management companies. This means they aren’t entitled to see contracts negotiated on their behalf and don’t know what they’re being paid for jobs or what their expenses are. The Model Alliance has been working to pass The Fashion Workers Act, which “would establish baseline transparency and accountability in the industry,” said the organization’s founder and executive director, Sara Ziff. “When we have gone to Albany and spoken with lawmakers about how the industry works, the lawmakers’ jaws drop to the floor. They're shocked about what is normalized.”

This financial exploitation, Ziff argued, leads to sexual exploitation. “There's a long history of models being sent to known predators by their agents. Bill Cosby, for example,” she said, “specifically asked an agency to send him broke, out-of-town models. So I don't think this is a coincidence.”

For nearly ten years, Gutierrez has been speaking out about Weinstein. His New York conviction for rape and 23-year prison sentence was recently overturned, with a retrial set for after Labor Day. She has joined the board of the Model Alliance to further her advocacy work, and is prepared to help with the new Weinstein trial however she can. I talked to Gutierrez and Ziff about why the Fashion Workers Act is so needed and why an industry that once professed to care so much about victims and marginalized groups has done little to support it.

Ambra Gutierrez (center) and Sara Ziff to her left.

What’s changed in the nearly ten years that you’ve been in the U.S.?

Ambra Gutierrez: I'm more exposed, so people are scared to even get in touch with me, if anything. But apart from that, nothing else is changing in the agencies’ world. Maybe they're not going to send models to very bad people, because now they get exposed easily, but otherwise nothing is changing.

It’s crazy to hear you say that, because there has been so much societal upheaval in the last decade, notably the #MeToo movement.

Ambra: I love the art of fashion. But fashion people just want to support what’s cool. Everybody was supporting #MeToo when it was time. But I feel that people are scared. I've seen it on my hand. People would not support me when I went against Harvey, and then the moment, I don't know, my recordings came out, I was a hero. And I'm like, well, it was very obvious he was wrong.

Cyrus Vance, Jr., the Manhattan D.A., decided not to prosecute Weinstein even though you recorded him confessing to groping you, which was a lot more evidence than the previous ten criminal complaints for groping or forcible touching had, according to a law enforcement source who talked to The New Yorker. But who in the fashion industry didn’t support you?

Ambra: My agency at the time was like, “Maybe it's better if you lie low. We're not going to propose different castings for a few months and see what happens.” It was the lowest time of my life, because I was removed from everything that I worked so hard for. And I was not even able to get a normal job because I didn't have a visa that would [allow it]. The industry did not want to help the victim.

What would you lying low accomplish, in their eyes?

Ambra: He knew a lot of people in the fashion industry. He was telling me when I had my [meeting] with him the next day with the police that he could place me at Victoria's Secret very easily because he [knew people]. He had hands everywhere, and that's why they kept me out of the industry for a little bit. Nobody would've gone against him. Maybe it was just because he was famous, he knew famous people, he was rich.

He did have a chummy relationship with Anna Wintour, among others. How did you find out that his conviction in New York was overturned? What was your reaction?

Ambra: A month ago or so, I knew of him trying to overturn and request to appeal, and I knew that a lot of activists were against it. I just never expected it would be that fast — just a month to overturn a sentence of 23 years for rape. It just got my blood cold.

I felt since 2015, the Vance administration was not fair and right. The 2020 case was something that I never digested because he didn't pursue my case five years earlier. The mishandling of that really caused a problem, and we just need to fix everything.

Would you be open to helping another case?

Ambra: Of course. Even in 2015 when I put myself through working with the police and doing as much as I could in releasing and keeping those recordings against the NDA, it was always just to stop [further abuse] from happening. So I am here and ready.

You have done so much with this case and you thought it was done and it’s still not.

Ambra: It became part of me. It's just so annoying when I have to see myself in anything, it's always about Weinstein. I do a cover even for work and it is like, ah, Weinstein. I'm like, I just want to get rid of that and continue working on my future and other things that I want to do.

What do you want to do?

Ambra: I'm always interested in new things. I never limit myself. I’d love to help people.

Sara Ziff: Ambra has joined [the Model Alliance] board so we’ll definitely think about ways that we can deepen our impact for survivors and people who work in the fashion industry.

The Fashion Workers Act would do many things to protect models. What are some of the key provisions?

Sara: It would establish a zero-tolerance policy for abuse. So model management companies shall conduct due diligence to ensure that any employment or engagement booked through the model management company does not pose an unreasonable risk of danger to the model. It would allow models to file complaints with the labor commissioner, and modeling agencies would be forbidden from retaliating against models for filing or attempting to file a complaint or declining to participate in a casting or a booking if they have concerns.

Ambra: A lot of working models like me face a lot of retaliation. I was recently dropped by two agencies, maybe because I complained about wanting to know my rates for jobs or when I will be paid, things that should be normal to ask about. They label you as somebody who is difficult. Guess or other big brands, they’d rather remove one uncomfortable model instead of fixing the whole situation. They just keep going and making money.

You believe you were dropped for asking to know basic information that most employees know about their work? Like your wages and what your out-of-pocket expenses would be?

Ambra: Yeah. I would see a booking for flights on my statements and ask, “What was that about?” Or why my website fee for the month is $100 when I'm not even in town. When they see that you are trying to actually fix what's wrong, that's what happens. They suddenly email you that they no longer want to work with you and they hope the best for you.

I’m sorry that happened.

Ambra: It's fine. I found the better agencies. But the thing is still, even if they're great agencies, they're good people — models have to change how they do things. For me as an immigrant, the agencies have control over everything. When I came first to the United States, I was on an O-1 visa that was tied to the agency that I had to work with and I couldn't work outside the agency. They're not required to find you work. And so you're in this cycle of not understanding how you're going to pay debt and how you're going to keep going if you are not making enough money to live in a city like New York.

Why do you think the agencies are resistant to this legislation?

Ambra: I can bet on the fact that when the legislation passes, a lot of agencies are going to close down. Having people come into another country and controlling them is trafficking. So they make money off of them through rent, through the flights, expenses that I've never seen even being booked. It was also a way for me to escape my country. I went against the Prime Minister of Italy by saying what happened in his mansion when I was brought there by my agent. When I spoke out, I didn't feel safe and I left. I see a lot of models coming from Ukraine or from refugee camps from other countries. They just take advantage of that because they know how to control people going through hardships.

What do you need to push the Fashion Workers Act through? Who do you need on your side? Anna Wintour? Bernard Arnault?

Sara: We're holding a rally this Sunday morning ahead of the Met Gala [on Monday, may 6]. We’re going to be raising awareness and support for the Fashion Workers Act, and Ambra is going to be speaking alongside other models and labor allies. So we want as much solidarity and support as we can get. And we welcome folks to join us and stand with us.

Ambra: I don’t want to set my expectations too high. People who work in lawmaking and ourselves, whoever has opened their eyes — and there's not many people — we want to be the first ones to do it, and people will follow. Like all the other people that said sorry to me when [Weinstein was exposed by the media], that's what's going to happen. A lot of people will support us, but it's going to happen after.

We will see some very famous models at the Met Gala on Monday night. Do these models have the same contracts? Do we know?

Sara: I think there's a 1 percent of models and then there's everyone else. The industry's biggest names may have a bit more bargaining power and have the ability to hire an attorney to represent them. If they're entering into an agreement with an agency, I would hope they have a better deal, because the average working model has a terrible deal with their agent.

Ambra: The Hadid sisters, for example — we saw it on reality TV [The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills] that they got to New York, they had a huge apartment paid for by their family. That's not how it works. Modeling is not an easy industry. Models make so many sacrifices. You’re away from your family, always traveling, you have crazy jet lag all the time, you don't know how to eat, and people just tell you to keep losing weight and keep doing this and keep doing that. I started it because I wanted to get away from Italy. Maybe it's someone’s dream, but a lot of time it's for survival that they start a job like this. Because if I had the possibility, probably I would've just become an architect in Italy. And so all of these nepo babies out there starting from those comfortable positions, shooting with the biggest photographers so that they get, in six months, the best-ever portfolio so that they can book Chanel – that never happens for other models. That's not how it works.

Where are the brands in all this? Remember all those brands who wanted to do the right thing in 2020? Who told us how much they care about inclusivity?

Ambra: I was just going through the closet of my agent [who’s a friend], and she's like, “Found my boots. We're not wearing them, they're out of fashion.” And I'm like, “But they look good. If you like them, just do it.” It is just a very low-self-esteem industry. A lot of people just do what others tell them to do. And that's the problem. It's going to happen at some point. Maybe a big brand is going to come on board. Everybody's going to follow.

People reading this may not know that the Model Alliance worked to pass the Adult Survivors Act, which allowed victims of sexual abuse outside of the statute of limitations to file suits for a one-year period. These included some very high-profile cases like E. Jean Carroll and Cassie. That year just ended – can it continue?

Sara: One thing that we are calling for is to make the ASA look-back window permanent. I think it only serves abusers to put a limit on survivors seeking justice.

Ambra: My case against Weinstein was unfortunately not pursuable because of the NDA I signed. I really wanted to reopen my case. And this NDA was terrible. That's also something that I really want to work to dismiss, because I think that having NDAs for being abused is just ridiculous. It's seriously hurtful, how much trauma stays in your body. And you're not ready [to take action] until maybe years after. Maybe you have a child and you feel like, That's her safety. Now I have the strength to do it. Five years is nothing. If there was no statute of limitations — and hopefully there will not be NDAs — I would pursue right away.