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TRANSCRIPT

 

Erin Ryan: Welcome to another episode of This F*cking Guy, the series where we spotlight one fucking guy making America worse and explain why they suck. I’m Erin Ryan, host of Crooked Media’s Hysteria podcast.

 

Kendra James: And I’m Kendra James, Crooked Media’s executive producer of Culture and Entertainment, and 90s and Y2K era, middle brow culture enthusiast.

 

Erin Ryan: Kendra, I am so glad you’re the special guest on this episode because the life of today’s subject provides a great tour through 90s culture that fucked up millions of millennial women. And it takes us all the way to the place where all roads seem to lead, the Epstein files, a story of beauty, of rage, wealth, corruption, privilege, and how the fashion industry serves as a moral window dressing for the international sex trade, which itself is the invisible crazy glue that holds the entire system in place.

 

Kendra James: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this. Today, we are talking about the life, times and crimes of Naomi Campbell.

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi Elaine Campbell was born on May 22, 1970 in London, England. Her mother was an 18-year-old unmarried dancer named Valerie Morris. Naomi has never met her dad, per her mother’s wishes, as her father abandoned her mother when her mother was a few months pregnant with Naomi. Her dad’s name is not on her birth certificate and remains a mystery.

 

Kendra James: Completely justifiable. Naomi has mentioned at reflective moments in her life that her residual anger with her father has contributed to her anger and vices. But plenty of people have shitty dads, or no dads, and manage not to spend their thirties collecting assault charges like they are Pokémon.

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi’s mother was in a European modern dance troupe called Fantastica. Unfortunately, I tried so hard, I looked so hard I could not find footage of the group from the 70s or the 80s. But since this was a modern dance troop in Europe at that time, it probably involved Easter egg colors, feathered hair, sparkly headbands, you know, the Eurovision works.

 

Kendra James: I was gonna say very Eurovision.

 

Erin Ryan: Very Eurovision, at a very young age, Naomi was enrolled in a performing arts school called the Barbara Speak Stage School. While there she trained in ballet but could also tap dance.

 

Kendra James: And I doubt that’ll be the last time ballet acts as a supervillain origin story, especially not for a young girl. [laughter] But really, imagine being in a ballet class next to a seven-year-old Naomi Campbell. At age eight, she appeared in the Bob Marley music video for Is This Love? By age 12, she was in a Culture Club video where she tap danced, and at age 15 she was discovered by a modeling scout while shopping.

 

Erin Ryan: And from there, it was a rocket ship to the top of the fashion world for Naomi. She landed her first fashion magazine cover, British Elle, the month before she turned 16. By the time she was 18, she’d become the first black model featured on the cover of French Vogue. She was still a teenager when she set out on her own to follow her modeling career. Luckily, as she became one of the world’s most recognizable and sought after models, she made some good friends, like other top models like Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington. She also made some helpful allegiances in the industry. Gianni Versace and Yves Saint Laurent, for example, would go to bat for Naomi when designers or magazines hesitated to work with her.

 

Kendra James: Right. Because even as Naomi was becoming one of the most recognizable models in the world, the fashion industry did continue to be pretty damn racist. She was actually kind of a pioneer for her time.

 

Erin Ryan: And Naomi had a couple of things working for her. First of all, look at her. She’s very good at what she does. Clothes look great on her. The girl knows how to move. One of the most beautiful faces humanity has ever created.

 

Kendra James: But. Natural talent and noble friends can’t save you from yourself, especially if anger at your absentee dad prompts you to glom onto the wrong kind of men.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, at the tender age of 17, Campbell had a fateful meeting with boxer Mike Tyson, doesn’t get much wronger than that, at a New York City party thrown by underwear designer Fernando Sanchez. Now, there are some conflicting reports about how those two met. One news story at the time says Tyson was harassing Campbell at the party, and when somebody told Tyson that Naomi, who again was only 17, was quote, “just a baby,” Mike Tyson replied, I’m a baby too.

 

Kendra James: I mean, he kind of had the voice for it. It was, like, the one thing people always made fun of him for at the time. Another version of the story involves an unlikely confrontation between an Oxford philosophy professor named Freddie Ayer who confronted Tyson, who was either harassing or assaulting Campbell.

 

Erin Ryan: But in another version of the story, Professor Ayer interrupts Tyson assaulting Robin Givens, the woman Tyson would go on to marry and divorce the next year.

 

Kendra James: Still, another retelling of the story in another gossip column from the 1990s recalls that the heroic professor interrupted Tyson as he was shoving his tongue down Campbell’s throat, and after Tyson let go, Campbell was back to hanging out with Tyson within minutes.

 

Erin Ryan: Now. Regardless of how contemporaneous gossip columnists recall how the two met, Campbell was definitely part of Tyson’s tumultuous love life between 1988 and 1990. This overlapped pretty much exactly with Tyson’s marriage to the aforementioned Robin Givens, who would go on to publicly accuse Mike Tyson of being an abusive shitheal and take out a restraining order on him during their divorce. Now, Tyson denied what he was accused of and accused Givens of being a gold digger.

 

Kendra James: The Tyson-Campbell pairing was a heavyweight train wreck. The biggest name in modeling paired up with the biggest name and boxing and domestic violence.

 

Erin Ryan: But Campbell never badmouthed Tyson, even decades later when comedian Chris Rock alluded to violent fights between the pair.

 

[clip of Chris Rock]: Mike pushed you out of a moving car one night.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: Did he? Are you sure it wasn’t me that pushed him? [laughter]

 

[clip of Chris Rock]: First?

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: That’s if I even got in the car with him. He wasn’t our best driver, Chris.

 

[clip of Chris Rock]: I think you gave somebody a number. He lost his head. That’s odd, right? [laughter]

 

Erin Ryan: What a pair of strange friends. Campbell kept her lips zipped, even after it was pretty well established that Tyson was violent toward women. In 1992, Tyson was convicted of raping an 18-year-old pageant contestant named Desiree Washington. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison with four years suspended, but served only three.

 

Kendra James: Personally, I would have liked to see him spend more time in prison, but I guess having to be humiliated by fighting Jake Paul on Netflix, that’s a punishment of sorts.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, maybe we can count that as the suspended sentence. It was the early 1990s, the age of the supermodel was in full swing, and Naomi was front and center for better or for worse. This was the era of models who declared they didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day. A quote that has since been widely misattributed to Naomi Campbell, but actually came from Linda Evangelista in a Vogue interview. And the original quote wasn’t, I don’t get outta bed for $10,000 a day, it was, We don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day. In reference to Evangelista and Christy Turlington. Now, I don’t know if that makes it any better or not, but Naomi didn’t say it. The Naomi misattribution was so pervasive that Campbell felt the need to correct the record during an appearance on a British talk show.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: I never discuss money ever and I want to correct this that I never ever said in any of my interviews that I would never get out of bed for $10,000.

 

[clip of interviewer]: No, I never said you did. We were just making it up as we went along.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: It’s a quote that’s been following me for a while, but I just want to correct it, because I think it’s not right, and some people wouldn’t make that in a lifetime, so they’d be kind of mad to hear that we’d make that, or not get out of bed for that, so.

 

Kendra James: Why would that quote get pinned on Naomi? It could be that just about as fast as her star was rising in the 90s, so too was her reputation of being an abusive pain in the ass.

 

Erin Ryan: By the early 1990s, Campbell had ascended to being one of the queen bees of the modeling world and no queen bee’s life is complete without a drone to pick on. For Campbell, that drone was Tyra Banks, then a wide-eyed teenage ingenue from Los Angeles. Now, the feud started, and this is all alleged, as is most of the stuff we’ve had to mine from archived 1990s society columns. This started at a shoot in Antigua where Campbell allegedly overheard Banks on the with her mother talking about Campbell. Campbell flipped out because she thought that Banks was talking smack about her and Banks got sent home early from the shoot.

 

Kendra James: Hedda Hopper would be so proud of this section. Things escalated from there. People Magazine claimed that Campbell got Karl Lagerfeld to ban Banks from his show, and that Campbell also got elite model management to drop Banks. The feud was played up in the media, partially because of the racism. There was only room for one Black girl on top.

 

Erin Ryan: But the feud also survived for as long as it did because Naomi was relentless. Tyra Banks was so scarred by the whole affair that years later when Banks was on top of the world, hosting the wildly successful and wildly problematic America’s Next Top Model and hosting her own daytime talk show on top all of that, Banks invited Campbell onto that talk show in order for the women to squash their beef once and for all. Tyra was quite emotional about their feud and Campbell was like, I’m sorry you feel that way.

 

[clip of Tyra Banks]: I had a conversation with Naomi Campbell, a long, in-depth conversation, and I got a lot of answers, and it has started my healing from all of the devastating rumors and gossip and rivalry and pain that I have experienced. I’ve started to heal, and I think Naomi has too. Who would have ever thought Tyra and Naomi would be on the stage sitting here together? [applause]

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: I have something I have to say.

 

[clip of Tyra Banks]: What’s that?

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: I have some thing I have say. Before we start, however I’ve affected you, however you felt that I’ve affected you, I take my responsibility. I just want to say I’m very proud of you for being a powerful Black woman sitting here and doing what you’re doing. And please continue. [applause]

 

[clip of Tyra Banks]: Thank you so much.

 

Kendra James: So, I would be happy to put my life savings down and say that at the beginning when Tyra says I think I’m starting to heal and Naomi is healing as well, Naomi had nothing to heal from. There was no healing happening. There was no wound.

 

Erin Ryan: She probably was like, okay, what do I need to say to just like end this shit? In the 1990s, Naomi’s fame inoculated her from the consequences of her actions. In 1992, when Campbell was rumored to have been dating Robert De Niro, she allegedly got in a punching and scratching match with actress Troy Beyer outside of De Niro’s Tribeca restaurant. One gossip column from the New York Daily News claims that Campbell slammed Beyer into a limo. What was the fight about? The truth has been lost to time.

 

Kendra James: Do you know the aura that you have to have to have two Black women fighting over you as a white man in public? Also, lost to time is the real story behind why, in 1993, at the very height of her career, Campbell and Elite Model Management parted ways.

 

Erin Ryan: The agency’s founder, John Casablancas, claimed that the agency had dumped her, calling Campbell quote “crazy, irrational, and uncontrollable.” In a faxed announcement to the agency’s brand partners, Casablancas added, no amount of money or prestige could further justify the abuse that has been imposed on our staff and our clients. According to a People magazine write-up of the split. He added that Naomi, quote, “has been having people around here in tears. Our staff had killed themselves for her in terms of the number of lies told in order to protect her.”

 

Kendra James: Campbell’s people were like, uh-uh. You didn’t break up with me, I broke up with you. Her mother claimed that no white woman would be treated the way Naomi was treated by Elite and that her treatment was racist.

 

Erin Ryan: So what really happened? Who can say? Naomi Campbell is not a great person, but John Casablancas was also a fucking creep. Earlier that year, he’d married a 17-year-old Brazilian model, his third wife. He was 50. And yeah, the 1990s were a different time, but they weren’t import a teenage bride from South America, and everyone will be fine with it different. When he was asked about how he’d react if he’d ran into Campbell at a Fashion Week event, Casablanca said, I’m going to completely ignore her. I’m really disgusted with her, so she better not even address me.

 

Kendra James: Man that would have been a great season of 90 Day Fiancé.

 

Erin Ryan: Oh yeah.

 

Kendra James: But Naomi didn’t need John Casablanca. This was the mid 1990s. Supermodels were more powerful than many heads of state. And don’t worry, we’re going to come back to one of those two. But models, they were everywhere.

 

Erin Ryan: In 1994, Campbell wrote a novel called Swan, which is widely viewed as one of the worst celebrity books of all time in a crowded field. Naomi did very little press for the book, appearing at an event celebrating Swan’s release at Harrods, and then basically never talked about it again, according to an article on the Mirror about the worst books of time.

 

Kendra James: Who has time to read when you’ve got all that modeling to do and all those shitty men to date?

 

Erin Ryan: But we read it, guys, or skimmed it, rather, and here are some excerpts from this book. Sexy has become the new marketing buzzword. I may be a well-bred English girl, but I’m also a supermodel. A supermodel can make anything look sexy, and they say I’m the sexiest of them all.

 

Kendra James: Who needs well-written prose when the back cover looks the way the back cover does? Because you were reading that, and I’m simply distracted by that picture.

 

Erin Ryan: I’m getting mogged by a book cover from 1994. In 1995, Campbell aimed to take over the world of pop, releasing an album called Baby Woman. She appeared on the album cover, sitting on a toilet in a party dress with her legs spread, shaving her legs. Its first and only single was called Love and Tears, but it also included tracks called Life of Leisure and Ride a White Swan. The style of music can best be described as world music with lots of sonic layering and reverb to disguise the fact that Campbell can’t really sing. The Independent called Baby Woman one of the worst albums of all time, describing it as gob smacking hubris. I don’t understand. I listened to the music and nothing said hubristic to me, but alright, I’m not a music critic. Not satisfied until she became a 90s cultural dilettante, Campbell and some of her model friends ventured into the world of restaurants.

 

Kendra James: Which makes all the sense in the world, because when I think of models from the 1990s, I immediately think eating.

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi L. McPherson and Claudia Schiffer teamed up to make a sort of fashion version of Planet Hollywood, opening a fashion cafe in Rockefeller Center. In a 1998 Time magazine piece declaring the end of the supermodel era, the magazine’s Joel Stein writes, “‘Perhaps the greatest symbol of the end of the Supermodel is the fashion cafe.’ The glitzy fashion chain started to much fanfare in 1995 by celebrity part owners Schiffer, McPherson, and Campbell, and now teetering on the edge of bankruptcy.” Turlington, who later joined the venture, left the cafe last year, and the menu at the Rockefeller Center location can’t even spell the name of one of its co-owners correctly, offering Noami’s fish and chips.

 

Kendra James: The fashion cafe had shuttered by 1998. Poor Noami.

 

Erin Ryan: The uncredited co-star in many of Naomi’s 90s misadventures was cocaine. That’s right, model’s little helper. She was riding the white swan.

 

Kendra James: And that does help to explain the aggression, and probably also the overall obnoxiousness.

 

Erin Ryan: In 1994, when she was around 24 years old, Naomi tried cocaine for the first time. They were handing that shit out like Halloween candy at fashion shows back then. And it was around 1997 that Campbell would recall that a series of personal losses, especially the murder of her close friend Gianni Versace outside of his mansion in Miami, would lead to her using more.

 

Kendra James: By 1988, Campbell was a daily cocaine user, which meant that she was probably incredibly annoying in addition to being paranoid and volatile, boiling with an uncontainable rage that frequently sputtered out at the people closest to her—in other words, her employees.

 

Erin Ryan: Not to defend cocaine. How many times have I started a sentence that way? Not to define cocaine, but plenty of people use cocaine and they don’t end up assaulting people. Most people just end up listening to Charlie XCX or emerging from a bar bathroom with several new best friends, all of whom also enjoy doing cocaine.

 

Kendra James: Right, it’s an explanation for why I’m reciting Into the Woods in full, but it’s not an excuse.

 

Erin Ryan: In early September 1998, Naomi Campbell hired an assistant named Georgina Galanis. According to the Tampa Bay Times, days after bringing Galanis on, the woman claims that Campbell, quote, “hit her twice in the head with a telephone, punched her shoulder twice, and grabbed her neck and violently shook her head,” end quote. Galanis further alleged in court that Campbell punched her in the neck and slammed her head against a wall and tried to throw her from a moving car. Campbell was charged with assault and sued for millions of dollars. She settled the lawsuit for an undisclosed amount and appeared sufficiently remorseful for a Canadian court to let her off with anger management classes. Did the classes work? No, Campbell would go on to be accused of violence at least 10 more times by 2009 and convicted of assault three more times.

 

Kendra James: Naomi has said that she hit rock bottom in September of 1999 when she collapsed in the middle of a photoshoot. It was after this that she first checked into rehab and started going to NA and AA meetings.

 

Erin Ryan: But that didn’t contribute to the safety of her assistants. In June 2000, another assistant, Vanessa Frisbee, accused Campbell of another assault. Frisbee claimed that Campbell beat her up after Frisbee refused to hide Campbell’s affair with actor Joseph Fiennes from her boyfriend at the time, Flavio Briatore, founder of the Benetton Formula One racing team.

 

Kendra James: And we do need to pause here and point out that Flavio Briatore is also a huge piece of shit.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes. Okay. Colorful man sidebar. He started his career as an insurance salesman in Italy in the 1980s where he caught a few fraud convictions, including one involving fixing card games, and received two prison sentences. He fled to the U.S. Virgin Islands while running from the short, hairy arm of Italian law. He and Naomi Campbell got together sometime around 1998 at the near height of her drug use, and a year before he was arrested in Nairobi for fraud involving Kenyan real estate.

 

Kendra James: America’s sweethearts.

 

Erin Ryan: Flavio Briatore had been instrumental in the 1980s expansion of the United Colors of Benetton into countries where he wasn’t wanted by the law, and after the Benetton family bought a Formula One racing team in the 1990s, Briatore was put in charge. He was almost immediately accused of cheating, accusations which continued for decades, until in 2009 he was banned from Formula One Racing for life after convincing a member of his own team to crash a car on purpose during a race.

 

Kendra James: And it was like a bad crash. And I know that crashing a car on purpose probably sounds counterintuitive, but the TLDR of that is that he had the driver crash at a point that necessitated safety protocols, which ended up giving the rest of his team a winning advantage.

 

Erin Ryan: Now from 2012 to 2014, he was the host of the Italian version of The Apprentice. By the mid-2020s, he back at the helm of a Formula One team, albeit unofficially, I guess that ban didn’t really stick. According to the New York Daily News, Naomi and Flavio were engaged but broke up after Briatore accidentally invited one of Campbell’s exes to a yacht party, been there girl, which made Campbell mad, and when Briatore got back to London, he found that his living room was quote “filled with broken glass.”

 

Kendra James: I call this woman a Gotham City level supervillain for a reason, like this is baby joker shit. And like, we can’t say who is responsible for the field of shards of glass in the mansion. For legal reasons, it’s really impossible to say it could have been anybody.

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi would later claim that it was when she was with Flavio that she first met Jeffrey Epstein at her 31st birthday party in 2001, which we will talk more about later. 2001 is also the year that Naomi was a celebrity judge at the Miss Universe pageant. Now Kendra, I bet you know who owned the Miss Universe pageant in 2001.

 

Kendra James: Once again, one of America’s best. Would that be the former host of the American version of The Apprentice, Donald Trump?

 

Erin Ryan: Indeed it would be.

 

Kendra James: Yeah, her life around Y2K was a real spaghetti junction.

 

Erin Ryan: So back to Naomi. In 2004, a maid named Millicent Burton accused Campbell of scratching, slapping, and kicking her in her New York City apartment. Campbell also alleged that Burton had started it. Later that year, another former assistant named Simone Craig filed assault and battery charges in New York, claiming that Campbell had held her hostage in a hotel in Los Angeles. Campbell denied that and the case was eventually dismissed.

 

Kendra James: So my big question here is, what hotel was this? Are we talking like, was this an Eloise situation or are we looking at the Cecil?

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I think that makes a difference because I feel like if you’re in the Cecil in many ways you were being held hostage by your own decisions already. In 2005 Campbell got into it with another model named Marcelle Bittar in a restaurant in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Campbell’s people denied that the slap fight even occurred and said that it was Bittar who was acting strangely. Also in 2005 an actress and friend of Campbell’s named Yvonne Sciò says that Campbell punched and kicked her at a hotel in Rome. Campbell denies this.

 

Kendra James: There’s a ludicrous song called Pimpin’ All Over the World [laughter] and I’ve just been referring to it in my head as I read this. We’ve been in Canada, we’ve been Italy, we’re in Rome. She’s punching all over the world. It’s really quite something. [laughter]

 

Erin Ryan: In 2006, a former employee named Gaby Gibson called Campbell a violent super bigot in a lawsuit against the model, alleging that Campbell had assaulted and battered her, in addition to calling her names and threatening to arrest her, after Gibson couldn’t find this one specific pair of jeans that Campbell wanted. Also in 2006, former employee Amanda Brack sued Campbell, accusing her once again abuse that spanned three continents, including throwing her passport in a pool in Morocco.

 

Kendra James: That same year, Naomi was arrested outside of the home of an ex-boyfriend in London, causing a commotion in the wee hours of July 10th, as she demanded to get some of her things back.

 

Erin Ryan: Now this guy’s name was Badr Jafar, according to a New York Daily News write-up, and another super-rich guy from Dubai who, for her 35th birthday, had rented out several floors of the Burj Khalifa hotel and broke up with her, quote, “after she allegedly caused $54,000 worth of damage on his yacht this month when his chef suggested an appetizer of tomato ham and mozzarella with a white wine,” unquote.

 

Kendra James: She did like a Birkin touch. Exotic touch with some damage. [laughter] Cops ended up retrieving some of her things from Jafar’s home as she’d wanted, and she was let go without being charged.

 

Erin Ryan: Also in 2006, Campbell was arrested in London after allegedly attacking her drugs counselor who showed up to a police station with red cheeks as though she’d been slapped on both sides of her face. Naomi was let go without being charged.

 

Kendra James: And because she had yet to be charged, Campbell then yeeted a jewel-encrusted blackberry at the head of her housekeeper, Ana Scolavino, causing the woman to have a wound that required four staples.

 

Erin Ryan: Now, we don’t have to say allegedly in this case because Naomi admitted to throwing the phone, although she claimed that hitting her on the head was an accident. For this, she was arraigned for second degree assault, and this is the incident that finally led to the law catching up with Campbell in a real way. She pleaded guilty to misdemeanor assault in 2007, paid restitution and hospital bills for Scolavino, and then she received five days of community service as punishment.

 

Kendra James: Thus leading us to the most memorable Naomi Campbell incident of my adolescence.

 

Erin Ryan: It was iconic.

 

[AD BREAK]

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi showed up to community service wearing a series of couture outfits and treated the walk from the street to the entry of the New York Sanitation Department like her own personal catwalk. Now why did she do this?

 

Kendra James: Because she’s Naomi fucking Campbell.

 

Erin Ryan: In a W write up of the spectacle she explained the fashion show by saying quote, “the judge of my sentencing had promised that my car could drop me off at the door of the Sanitation Department every morning. I asked for that mostly because I’ve had a stalker. Then this gentleman from the sanitation decided that I had to be dropped off outside the gate so I would have to walk past the press. After I found out about this, I was in a car with my friends Norma Augenblick and Steven Klein and Norma said to Steven, you should shoot this.”.

 

Kendra James: And guess what? I think Norma was right.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, Norma, was absolutely right. On day one, Naomi wore a black fur coat by Giuliana Teso and carried a designer handbag for her court mandated community service. The next day, she wore the same Giuliana Teso fur again, and the bodyguard handed her Hermes Hawk Birkin bag to a uniformed police officer who dutifully carried the bag inside for her. On the last day of community service, she showed up in a metallic silver sequined Dolce& Gabbana fall 2007 demi couture gown, a diamond necklace and ring, stilettos, and an Hermes Kelly bag. She changed before doing her state-assigned labor of sweeping sanitation offices, and at the end of the day, changed back into the gown. And cat-walked out again to a waiting silver Bentley, which took her to a party that Elton John was throwing.

 

Kendra James: Hate that I love this look, but it’s a gorgeous look. Naomi herself considered that last Dolce and Gabbana dress so important that when the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington held an exhibition of her personal fashion archive, she offered it up to be displayed alongside some of her most iconic runway looks.

 

Erin Ryan: In W, Naomi seemed introspective about the bedazzled phone tossing that landed her at the Department of Sanitation, writing, quote, “I’m not saying this to excuse what I did. I threw the phone. I threw it, but I didn’t bash it. And that was wrong. I’m guilty. I take responsibility.”

 

Kendra James: She didn’t bash it.

 

Erin Ryan: She didn’t bash it.

 

Kendra James: Sounds like she was really ready to take responsibility and she really learned her lesson.

 

Erin Ryan: No, she absolutely did not learn her lesson. Less than a year later in 2008, Campbell assaulted two police officers on a British Airways flight over news that one of her bags did not make it onto the plane. She ended up pleading guilty to disorderly conduct and sentenced to 200 hours of community service, in addition to being threatened with a lifetime ban from British Airways.

 

Kendra James: Can you imagine a situation in a post 9/11 world where you would risk getting an airline ban?

 

Erin Ryan: Losing luggage sucks but like I’ve never been so untethered that I would be like okay there’s some cops better punch them like why you’re at an airport Naomi.

 

Kendra James: As we’ll find out, maybe this is partially why she needed to use a certain jet. Not that British Airways actually did ban her, but they did mine the incident for the PR.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, and finally we end Naomi’s Tour de Assault in Italy, where in 2009 she was on a getaway with her technically still-married boyfriend Vladimir Doronin when she attacked a photographer with her purse, scratching his eye. She was convicted in an Italian court in 2015 and given a suspended sentence of six months. Vladimir Doronin is another international man of mystery for Campbell. He’s Russian, he’s a billionaire, he deals in luxury properties in Moscow, and he’s involved in real estate in Miami. Nothing suspicious there. He also met Naomi in Cannes, famously not a hotbed of shady business. Yep, everything seems on the up and up with Vladimir.

 

Kendra James: Even though Campbell was first introduced to Jeffrey Epstein by Flavio Briatore, Doronin  was also Campbell’s most frequent plus one in the Epstein files.

 

Erin Ryan: Which, I swear we’re working our way to. But there are other points on Campbell’s 40-year villain arc that we should visit before the international sex trafficking ring. Let’s start with the blood diamonds. Naomi was tight with Nelson Mandela. He was one of the father figures she had who didn’t suck. She attended a dinner at his home in 1997, along with Mia Farrow and Liberian warlord Charles Taylor.

 

Kendra James: Nightmare blunt rotation.

 

Erin Ryan: Absolutely. Sorry, Mia. After dinner, two unidentified men associated with Taylor delivered a small pouch of rough diamonds to Campbell’s room. The next morning at breakfast, Campbell referred to them as dirty-looking stones. Those dirty- looking stones were part of how Charles Taylor was arming fighters in Sierra Leone’s Civil War, which enabled all manner of war-related atrocities, child soldiers, torture, widespread rape, mutilations, and so forth. Taylor was arrested for crimes against humanity in 2006, and his trial began in the Hague in 2008. By mid-2009, somebody, possibly Mia Farrow, ratted out Campbell to authorities. The gift of diamonds from Taylor to Campbell would prove that Taylor had rough diamonds in his possession prior to a 1997 arms shipment. Campbell was characteristically not cooperative. Here she is being asked about blood diamonds by a journalist and knocking the camera over.

 

[clip of interviewer]: You received a diamond from Charles—

 

[clip of Chris Rock]: I didn’t receive a diamond, and I’m not going to speak about that, thank you very much. And I am not here for that.

 

[clip of interviewer]: Did you have dinner though with Charles Taylor?

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: I had dinner with Nelson Mandela. Thank you very much.

 

[clip of interviewer]: Did his men bring you a diamond, you know, a diamond in the rough, sort of a large diamond?

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: No, we’re not answering these questions.

 

[clip of interviewer]: Well, we’ve been told that you didn’t help the prosecution sort of in this very important case.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: Thank you so much. Goodbye. [crash sound]

 

Erin Ryan: The code of that. It’s like one of those watch all the way to the end videos. Despite the fact that it majorly bummed her out to be inconvenienced for a war crime trial, Naomi Campbell was forced to do it anyway. She testified in August 2010, very reluctantly.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: When I was sleeping. I had a knock at my door and I opened my door and two men were there and gave me a pouch and said, a gift for you.

 

[clip of interviewer]: Did you ask them who they were?

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: No, I really, I was extremely tired. When they gave me the pouch, I just put it next to my bed and went back to bed. They were kind of dirty looking pebbles. They were not, they were dirty, I don’t know. I find when I’m used to seeing diamonds, I’m use to seeing diamonds shiny and in a box. Someone hadn’t said they were diamonds. I wouldn’t have guessed right away that they were diamonds. I don’t know anything about Charles Taylor. Never heard of him before. Never heard the country Liberia before. And never heard of the term of blood diamonds before. It’s not abnormal for me to get gifts. I get gifts given to me all the time at any hour of the night.

 

Erin Ryan: In her testimony, she said she didn’t know that the dirty-looking pebbles were diamonds at all at first, and didn’t that they’d come from Liberian warlord Charles Taylor. But further witnesses, including Mia Farrow, testify that Campbell had talked about being excited to receive the diamonds, and that she had known that they were from Taylor. In 2012, Taylor was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to 50 years in prison. He is currently rotting in prison in Durham, UK, 78 years young.

 

Kendra James: Mm, is he single?

 

Erin Ryan: I don’t know, but I do need to point out at this point that he is two years younger than the American president. And speaking of the Trump family, let’s talk about how Naomi Campbell got banned from being a charity trustee in the UK. To tell that story, we have to wind it back a bit to 2005, a big year for Naomi Campbell assaulting people, but also a big for Naomi’s charitable counter-programming. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Naomi launched Fashion for Relief, an organization that staged high-profile fashion shows in cultural hubs. In order to raise money for victims of tragedies and disasters.

 

Kendra James: Like the earthquake in Haiti, the Syrian civil war, maternal mortality, et cetera, things that most people agree do deserve help. So it would appear that Naomi, despite her personal demons, did care about doing good for the world. And I would just point out, again, in André Leon Talley’s memoir, The Chiffon Trenches, he actually does write about this and about how passionately she spoke up about these issues. And Erin, in an interview that you shared with me while we were preparing for this, it’s really something to hear her talk so passionately about something like how she believes that there should be a Vogue Africa and she doesn’t understand why that hasn’t happened. So there is a part of her again that does seem to care about something.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I mean, it’s hard to parse what is like for show and what is authentic. The problem with that is that her charity, after it existed for nearly 20 years and raised millions and millions of dollars, UK Charity Commission investigation found that Fashion for Relief had, quote, “multiple instances of misconduct and mismanagement.” Now, what kind of mis conduct and mis management? Well, the probe found that from 2016 to 2022, 91.5% of the money the charity raised went to throwing lavish parties. And also went to things like cigarettes, spa treatments. Those were also charged to the charity. Campbell’s partner in charity was named Bianka Hellmich and she was paid an insane salary.

 

Kendra James: So that leaves what, 8.5% of that money that went to actually helping people?

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, sometimes people need help attending fabulous parties though. But to make matters worse, the probe also found that partner organizations like Save the Children were sometimes not paid the proceeds they were promised from Fashion for Relief events. As a result of the probe, Campbell was banned from being a charity trustee in the UK for five years.

 

Kendra James: Oh, that’s why you mentioned the Trumps. It’s kind of like how they’ve been banned from running charities in New York State on account of the fact that they kept using the proceeds to throw parties.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I think they’re all kind of operating from the same blueprint here. Rather than just slinking off to the next shady billionaire or wait a few more years before trying to launch another charity, Campbell has chosen to fight this narrative. She’s claimed that the other trustee of Fashion for Relief had set up a fake email account and was pretending to be Campbell running the charity. In a statement, Campbell said, Ever since the Commission’s report, I have fought to uncover the facts. What has been unearthed so far is shocking. I want to shine a light on how easy it is to fake identities online. And prevent anybody else going through what I have been through. I want to ensure that those responsible are held accountable and justice is done.

 

Kendra James: Really laying the groundwork for, I don’t know how my email got into the Epstein files.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes. And with that, here we are. We finally made it. The reason we’re talking about Naomi Campbell in the first place, Donald Trump’s former best friend, Jeffrey Epstein.

 

Kendra James: We’re going to go back to the Flavio era.

 

Erin Ryan: Right. Epstein was first arrested for sex crimes in 2007.

 

Kendra James: So that means six years after Naomi says she was first introduced to him in 2001.

 

Erin Ryan: And Epstein was arrested for the second time in 2019 for another newer set of sex crimes. Shortly after this arrest, the Daily Mail ran a piece pointing out that Campbell had a history of spending time with a hair-raising cast of characters.

 

Kendra James: This happened shortly before Campbell was set to receive an award for her charity work. Charity work that in a few years would be exposed as more grifty than charity gifty.

 

Erin Ryan: But in 2019, the truth was still hidden, and the Daily Mail pointing out how many world-class dirtbags Campbell had chosen to spend time with over the years was going against the grain.

 

Kendra James: Jesus Christ. We’ve been through so many dirtbags already, who else are you talking about?

 

Erin Ryan: Thank you for asking, Kendra. Among them were the gunmaker Gaston Glock. Gaston Glock had a much younger wife who Campbell also socialized with. There’s a picture of them together in the article. Campbell had recently attended the 90th birthday party of the weapons profiteer. The male also spotlighted Naomi’s friendship with disgraced Hollywood sex monster Harvey Weinstein. And also, she was pals with Lalit Modi, an Indian cricket mogul who, like her ex-boyfriend Flavio, was on the run from the law in his home country. Due to his rampant corruption.

 

Kendra James: And I did have to check, that’s no relation to the current Indian Prime Minister.

 

Erin Ryan: That’s an important distinction. But the crown jewel-encrusted blackberry of the Daily Mail’s hit piece was the observation that Naomi Campbell had quite a history with the recently arrested pervert Jeffrey Epstein. The piece even included the now-infamous photos from Campbell’s 31st birthday party aboard a yacht that included Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and chillingly, then-15-year-old Virginia Roberts, who had in the intervening years publicly accused many in Epstein’s orbit of sexual abuse. Campbell made a weird video about the Daily Mail piece, speaking to an unnamed and unpictured reporter about the allegations, and she posted it to her own YouTube channel. So she says two things in quick succession here that don’t quite make sense. She repeated the claim that she first met Epstein in 2001 at her 31st birthday party. And then she said that he was always front and center at Victoria’s Secret fashion shows. Now, considering that Naomi Campbell walked in the Victoria’s secret fashion show before she met Jeffrey in 1996, 1997, and 1998, and Epstein is like the horniest creep alive and he was front and center, then in what world would it make sense that Epstein wouldn’t have been mingling with the models? Like according to the New York Times, Epstein was even known to pretend to be a Victoria’s Secret model scout in order to creep on women.

 

Kendra James: I mean you can read him in the files referencing and name-dropping Victoria’s Secret and Naomi just around town, as though it gives him a certain cachet, which at the time I’m sure it did. Further, in Virginia Roberts’ Giuffre’s memoir, which was published after she died by suicide in 2025, Giuffre refers to Campbell and Briatore as Epstein’s friends, which would make no sense if Campbell was first meeting Epstein at her birthday party.

 

Erin Ryan: Additionally, Naomi claimed that she wasn’t that close with Epstein. She said she didn’t know that he’d done crimes at all, despite the fact that they’d been pictured together several times after he’d already been jailed for sex crimes in Florida in 2008. She claims that during 2008-2013 she was living in Russia and plainly she just didn’t know anything about what was going on in the U.S. during that time.

 

Kendra James: Yes, maybe she brought some earmuffs with her when she returned from Russia and wore them when she was in and around New York and Miami. Maybe she didn’t look at a newspaper. Maybe none of her friends, who also knew Jeffrey Epstein, were like, psst, Naomi, he’s a sex offender now.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, maybe, but for whatever reason, Campbell is sticking to her implausible sounding story. In a video she posted to her YouTube channel, Naomi said, what Epstein has done is indefensible and when I heard it, sickened me to my stomach just like everybody else. I’ve had my fair share of sexual predators and thank God I had good people around who protected me from this. I stand with the victims, they are scarred for life.

 

Kendra James: Epstein document dumps challenge this characterization of her relationship with Epstein. He wasn’t somebody she barely knew. They were friends. She appears in the files at least 300 times. As of this recording, there are 27 pages of documents to click through.

 

Erin Ryan: That is so, that’s so much, so much time in the Epstein files. How do we know Epstein and Campbell were friends? Well, he was invited to Campbell’s 34th birthday in Saint-Tropez, a 2010 Dolce & Gabbana anniversary exhibition in Paris, a fundraiser in Moscow. One 2015 email from Naomi to one of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistants read, I want to see Jeffrey.

 

Kendra James: It’s also far-fetched that an international model as tangled up in Epstein’s social and business network as she was, would have no idea that somebody she partied with was in jail.

 

Erin Ryan: In 2016, Campbell asked Epstein to borrow his jet for a quick trip from New York to Miami.

 

Kendra James: The jet? I’m sorry, would that be the Lolita Express?

 

Erin Ryan: Oh yes, that’s the plane. Here the assistant is relaying messages from Naomi to Epstein. Assistant, Naomi is following up on using the plane, she said she spoke to you about this and she hopes you call her soon. She needs to know. Epstein, tell her I left due to snow. Assistant, Naomi has called back twice now saying she doesn’t have any backup plan as she really thought from you this would work. Says she’s booked a hotel and car and driver and mentions something about redacted’s mom. She’s wondering if the plane can’t take you where you are going. And then go back and get her and take her where she needs to be. She’s certainly fretting on this and hopes he will call her.

 

Kendra James: Oh no, not fretting. I will say, this is my favorite exchange of theirs. It’s so funny. It’s like so funny that she’s just like, yeah, of course I get to use this jet. I’m not gonna make any backup plans because I just assume someone’s gonna let me use their jet, someone. The U.S. Justice Department’s Epstein files release shows that unnamed victims told FBI investigators that they met Campbell at Epstein’s mansion. That they saw her at his private office, and that they her on his weird little sex island carrying a coffin-sized piece of luggage.

 

Kendra James: So I myself went down a pretty deep Naomi Campbell Epstein files rabbit hole. In case you weren’t watching the Oxygen Network in 2013, there was this show called The Face, and that was Naomi Campbell’s answer to America’s Next Top Model. It was structured more like The Voice, and contestants would compete on teams under the mentorship of three top models. Naomi was one of those mentors in the American, Australian, and UK versions, and also an executive producer for The Oxygen Show. It wasn’t hugely popular. And if you know it at all, it’s probably because of this clip that went semi-viral, in a 2013 sense, of Naomi shading her fellow mentor, 2010’s Canadian top model, Coco Rocha.

 

[clip of Naomi Campbell]: I don’t think so, I would not let that go, not with the lipstick color you were wearing, dear. So check your lipstick before you come and talk to me.

 

Erin Ryan: [laughter] Have you ever used that, like in the wild? Check your lipstick before you come and talk to me.

 

Kendra James: That quote was part of my lexicon probably from 2014, like at least until 2016.

 

Erin Ryan: I think you can bring it back. A lot of stuff from 2016 is back.

 

Kendra James: I would like to. Out of curiosity, I threw the names of every contestant on the US version into the Justice Department’s Epstein search site, and funny enough, of those 24 women who competed on the show over its two seasons in America, only a handful of names popped up in the files. Well, here’s the thing, they were all Team Naomi.

 

Erin Ryan: Oh.

 

Kendra James: One of the names that does come up is a contestant, Kira Dikhtyar, who is on record as having a mutual friendship with Epstein. So friendly that, per the files, they shared a Skype call together one year on Christmas Eve. The Washington Post actually wrote about their friendship when they interviewed her in 2022, saying, quote, “Dikhtyar said that she first met Epstein at the age of 17. But unlike scores of other women, she said he never touched her. Instead, the two forged a friendship that extended beyond 2008, when Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida’s state court for soliciting underage girls for prostitution,” quote from Dikhtyar. “Yes, it’s true. I was friends with Jeffrey Epstein. I’m not defending anything,” end quote, she says, of the financier. This obviously doesn’t prove anything. It could be absolutely nothing and I’m also not a journalist. I am just like a weird cultural rabbit hole enthusiast. But I definitely found it interesting that of all the contestants connected to the face in America, the only contestant names that I could find in the Epstein files were young women who had competed on his friend Naomi Campbell’s team.

 

Erin Ryan: That is quite interesting. In response to this rising tide of evidence that she either knew about it and did nothing or was too stupid to notice the horror around her perpetuated by her friend, Campbell still denies any participation in or knowledge of anything Epstein did to hurt anybody. She recently posted to Instagram, quote, “I said it in 2019, I’ll say it again. Don’t come at me when there is no wrongdoing on my part. I stand in complete solidarity with survivors.” She’s also issued strong denials through her attorney. But here’s what we have to point out, how Epstein worked and how Naomi Campbell’s presence in his life made his crimes easier for him. Now, both the sex crimes he was arrested for in Florida and then the ones he was arrest for in 2019 in New York followed a similar pattern. We’ve learned from the Justice Department’s drop of Epstein-related materials that Epstein was running kind of like a MLM style sex trade scheme, like girls would get recruited. They’d move up by recruiting more girls. And by that analogy, his longtime right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell, a former fucking guy, was at one point kind of like the top Mary Kay lady of a ring of sexual perversion.

 

Kendra James: Ghislaine would have been driving that pink Cadillac.

 

Erin Ryan: Yes, and to further that analogy. Naomi Campbell would have sort of like the keynote speaker at the national convention because some girls who were ultimately victimized by Epstein or one of the men in his orbit were lured by the prospect of being paid to give him a massage and make money. Only to be coerced or forced into an unwanted sexual encounter, but others, many others, were lured in by Epstein dangling modeling careers in front of them. These girls were kind of passed around, and Campbell, as the most prominent model by far in Epstein’s group of friends, lent legitimacy to those empty promises of modeling careers. Also in the Epstein files, it shows that the modeling industry is a huge loophole for the international sex trade. It allows young models to come into the U.S. on visas that allowed them to work. So they were here legally. They were usually O-1 visas, which are supposed to be reserved for people of special abilities. But modeling pays shit unless you’re like Naomi Campbell successful. So unless these girls were willing to do things besides model on the side, they ran out of money quickly. And there’s no annual limit on the number of O-1 visas issued. And it didn’t seem like Epstein and his associates’ habitual requests for them ever caught the eye of immigration officials before Epstein’s death. And the O-1 visa program basically gave Epstein an everlasting spigot of women who were technically here legally but were in such an economically precarious position that sex work or something very close to it was like their only option. And Naomi’s closeness with Epstein, whether she knew it or not, was one of the reasons these girls thought that in the end, it would all be worth it. If Bond movies have taught us anything, it’s that if you’re hot enough, you can get away with an awful lot of bad behavior before anybody stops you because they’re having so much fun looking at you doing it. Psychologists call it the halo effect. 30 Rock’s John Hamm arc called it the bubble. Most of us know it as pretty privilege. And Naomi Campbell has had it for her entire life.

 

Kendra James: She has to know that her reputation is not stellar. In recent years, she’s hired a PR firm to monitor and edit her Wikipedia page. Some of those edits have removed references to her album Baby Woman and that whole thing with Mike Tyson.

 

Erin Ryan: Naomi Campbell is a great case study in how politicians, media figures, and CEOs don’t have a monopoly on also being bad people. In fact, Campbell’s story gives us an illuminating front row seat into how the fashion industry has tangled itself into the degenerate rich person class and how it launders all manner of horror and cruelty under the banner of art and culture. And how people who were victimized by it sometimes become the victimizers themselves. So there you have it, Kendra, Naomi Campbell. How would you rate her on our matrix of f*cking guys?

 

Kendra James: So I think she’s an opportunist of the highest order. I mean, you don’t, look up a picture. I’m sure we’ve shown you a picture in this of Flavio Briatore. She was not attaching herself to that man for, you know, the looks. Now, opportunity speaks volumes. And then she’s a mix of scheming and reckless. Reckless, obviously, from the multiple assault charges. But I just don’t know if I can quite call her sociopathic. But definitely opportunist and somewhere between reckless and scheming.

 

Erin Ryan: Yeah, I think she’s she’s a really interesting person. I think that like we really get a sense of uh you pointed this out to me Kendra that she’s, she’s a real Gemini. She is—

 

Kendra James: A real Gemini.

 

Erin Ryan: The most Gemini Gemini to have ever Gemini. She’s somebody that just has like there’s pain in her past that really you feel for and she has fought hard and worked hard and you’re like I do have to hand it to Naomi Campbell. But then also there’s all this other stuff and it’s like every time she has an opportunity to do the right thing she kind of like zags and does the wrong thing and it’s kind of frustrating to watch I would say scheming, but I also think that in her mind. It’s survival I think she’s at every level that she’s ascended to, she’s still like views herself as a survivor and not somebody who is ambitious. And so I like, I would say scheming sociopath, although the reckless assault things is very prevalent. And then I would also say she’s an opportunist for sure.

 

Kendra James: Absolutely. I mean, if a warlord is handing me something, I’m simply not going to take it.

 

Erin Ryan: You can, you have the, we have free will. We can simply not take things that are handed to us.

 

Kendra James: And that about wraps up the time we have for this episode of This F*cking Guy. If you like what you’ve seen, hit subscribe, share with your friends, and leave us a comment if you’ve got an idea for a future f*cking guy you think we should spotlight.

 

Erin Ryan: This episode was written and researched by me with a huge research and writing assist from Kendra James. All the rest of our credits, as well as links to our sources, like a bunch of 90s gossip columns we found in the Wayback machine. You can find those all in our show notes. Trust me, the bibliography is always a fun read. Take care, be well, don’t go out with Mike Tyson.

 

Kendra James: And as always, fuck that guy.

 

Erin Ryan: Fuck that guy.