In case you didn’t know, there are a lot of allegations mounting about photographer Terry Richardson. You know, the one with the mutton chops and the plastic glasses, famed for his thumbs-aloft cheesy grins in photoshoots with every single celebrity from Beyoncé to Miley Cyrus and Jared Leto to Obama. The allegations are from several models who have come out to say that they were sexually abused or harassed on shoots with the photographer.
One of those models is Jamie Peck. She first wrote her story of alleged sexual harassment at ‘Uncle Terry’’s hands four years ago, saying that the first time she posed for him, nothing of huge note happened: ‘Got naked, danced around a bit, smiled, squeezed my tits together, yada yada.’
It was only on the second shoot that he asked her for a handjob and she obliged because she felt coerced by the atmosphere. ‘He was so darn friendly and happy about it all, and his assistants were so stoked on it as well, that I didn’t want to be the killjoy in the room.’
But now a new 7,000+ word profile of Richardson in New York Magazine has done the rounds on the internet – and in it, the photographer says all those young models willingly took part in those sexual photoshoots. The writer also cites a second explicit shoot that Jamie took part in with Richardson, implying that there’s a question mark over why she didn’t refuse to work with Richardson again.
It has forced Jamie into a response. Writing a piece for The Guardian, the model claims that the writer had sent an email of the sexually explicit photos and that ‘a close reading of my face reveals nothing, even to me. The lights are on, but no one’s home.’ But she admits that she’s forgotten some of the alleged abuse she’s suffered, and it’s only since looking at the photos that she’s realised it happened. Though she has a ‘vague memory of “Uncle Terry” groping me without asking… I didn’t precisely recall [it] happening in the shoot I wrote about. It made me wonder what else I wasn’t remembering.’
How could this happen? Well, it’s a thing, Jamie says: ‘Trauma – particularly sexual trauma – affects memory, often in ways that allow predators to traumatise their victims while simultaneously rendering them unreliable witnesses to their own lives.’
She also took umbrage to the normalised way in which the interviewer dealt with Richardson as a subject matter. As well as detailing the abuse allegations – none of which have reached a criminal court, for whatever reason, perhaps due to his overwhelming power in the fashion industry and what Peck calls the ‘yes men’ surrounding him – the piece looked into the history of Richardson’s life, how he was brought up around his parents’ infidelities and relationships, and indicates that his photographs are so sexually charged (read: pornographic) because of his upbringing.
The obvious question Jamie wants answered is: ‘Was meaningful consent given for the sex acts in these images?’ and, according to her, the answer is ‘no’. And, following on from that, she wonders: ‘Is the more important question, how did he get this way? Or rather, how do we stop him?’
Though two civil cases against Terry Richardson have been settled, there are yet to be any criminal charges made against him. Several outlets and magazines are currently boycotting him.
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Picture: Rex
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.