Former supermodel and actress Paulina Porizkova has opened up about the pattern of sexual harassment she witnessed in the industry when she was a teenager.
The Czech-born model, 60, posted a video on Instagram on Thursday detailing some unpleasant incidents she experienced when she was just 15 years old, just beginning her career.
“Sometimes the people I was meeting were in offices, well-dressed, but other times they were middle-aged men who lived in messy apartments and wanted to take a few casual photos of me, you know, preferably topless,” she said of the “tour” calls she received from modeling agencies. “I lost count of the number of men in open-necked bathrobes who greeted me in hotel rooms and apartments sent by agencies and clients.”
“I took everything for granted,” Ms. Porizkova continued, “and my job was to learn how to take off my clothes, put them back on, and creatively fend off the horny men without pissing them off and losing my job.”
The storied Sports Illustrated model said it wasn’t until the 1990s, after watching an Oprah segment about sexual harassment in the workplace, that she realized what was happening to her.
Connecting her experience to the ongoing controversy surrounding the release of new investigative documents on Jeffrey Epstein, a former financier convicted of trafficking underage girls, Porizkova hashtagged the video with the phrases “Epstein,” “Epstein Files” and “justice.”
“You take a child and no matter what situation you put them in, they adapt. That’s the great thing about children. They’re infinitely adaptable, and they’re also completely self-involved. So it’s easy to blame them for everything you want and for them to blindly accept that,” she said. “Sure, it can be hurtful and it can be bad. But if an adult tells you this is how it’s supposed to be, then who are you, a child, to protest?
“This makes children the easiest targets,” she continued. Porizkova, who spoke squarely to the camera, seemed to condemn anyone who suggested that teenagers are at an age where they are not considered children.
“If you don’t know exactly how old your child is, you either don’t have children or you don’t have the humanity to remember that you were a child,” she concluded.
