America's Next Top Model Star Claims 'a Girl Fainted Every Week' on Show

An America’s Next Top Model alum talks about the tough conditions she allegedly faced on the show.

Sarah Hartshorne, who completed the ninth season of the reality series in 2007, claimed she was harassed on the Tyra Banks-hosted hit show during Vice TV’s docu-series finale on Nov. 19. The Dark Side of Reality TV.

“The girl passed out every week,” she said. “They warned us. They said, ‘Don’t bend your knees’.”

Hartshorne, who joined the show as a plus-size model, at first thought her peers were passing out because of her “skinny” weight until she experienced vertigo herself.

She recalled that elimination days were the “longest, hardest days” on set. The content creator claimed that sometimes they would start filming around 5am or 6am and the day wouldn’t end until “3am”

Sarah Hartshorne.

sarahbhartshorne/Instagram

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Hartshorne was eliminated in tears in the eighth episode of the season after the judges claimed that she had lost too much weight during the competition and no longer appeared as a plus size model.

“The reason I was losing weight was because I was stressed,” she claimed in the documentaries. “But I was also trying to save because we weren’t getting paid, so I was trying to eat very little and very cheap food.”

Looking back, Hartshorne said she felt “super sad” and “cried a lot” after losing the competition, but it was ultimately difficult to decipher her emotions.

A representative for the Bank did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.

Sarah Hartshorne at Darrelle Revis’ birthday party at Greenhouse on July 28, 2009 in New York City.

Jerritt Clark/Getty

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In an interview with in 2021 New York Postthe model also said the alleged bullying she experienced on the show was intentional. “The production kept us in the dark about almost everything because they wanted to keep us on edge. We are confused, tired, stressed, sleep deprived and hungry just made for better TV,” she claimed at the time.

Hartshorne claimed: “We never knew where we were going at any given moment. We would be shuttled from place to place in a windowless van and would have to face every situation completely oblivious and oblivious.”

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The model is now preparing to release a book about her time on the show titled You Want to Be on Top: A Memoir of Makeover, Manipulation, and Not Becoming America’s Next Top Modelwhich should appear on the shelves on July 8, 2025.

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Source: HIS Education