Model Responds to Terry Richardson’s Open Letter : ’Unjustifiable Shit’

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  • Model Responds to Terry Richardson’s Open Letter: ’Unjustifiable Shit’ - Jezebel
    http://jezebel.com/model-responds-to-terry-richardsons-open-letter-unju-1551199745

    And, furthermore, his suggestion that he neither threatened nor coerced anyone on set is simply (and likely willfully) specious. He knows that there’s an uneven power dynamic between him — an established, renowned, prolifically name-dropping fashion photographer — and the 19-year-old woman modeling for him. Peck also mentions that she knows models who were sent home from castings for refusing to participate in things that made them uncomfortable — that threat is implied, it’s exacerbated by the uneven power dynamic, and, again, Richardson knows it. Furthermore, Richardson has an assistant, Leslie Lessen, on set to camouflage and normalize the pressure he puts on models to mutely comply with his harassment. Lessen’s entire job, as Peck puts it, is “to make the girls feel like they’re lame prudes if they don’t do all the super cool sex acts she and Terry are requesting” and then do damage control afterwards. Terry Richardson never made an explicit threat because he didn’t have to. That doesn’t absolve him of culpability for his actions.

    “The bare minimum of consent required to stay out of jail is not an appropriate yardstick by which to deem one’s actions ethical,” writes Peck. Terry Richardson gets off on violating boundaries, and he gets away with it because of our culture of silence, rampant victim-blaming and our ridiculously low standards of what constitutes consent. There’s nothing in the world that could justify that — certainly not his mediocre and uninspired “art.”

    #Terry_Richardson