Every industry built around one person holding power over another's career has, at some point, produced the same headline. A gymnastics doctor. A parish priest. A scoutmaster. A university physician. In every one of these cases, the story that eventually broke wasn't only about the person who caused harm. It was about the people and institutions around him who knew, or could have known, and chose not to act, because acting cost something real, a reputation, a donor, a champion athlete, a star photographer's next campaign. Modeling has never had its own Larry Nassar moment, no single case that forced the entire industry to rebuild itself from the ground up. That absence gets read, often, as evidence the industry doesn't have this problem. The research says otherwise.
Sport has Larry Nassar, convicted on both state and federal charges, and the U.S. Center for SafeSport that exists directly because of what his case exposed. The Catholic Church has decades of documented clergy abuse, and a national policy response, the 2002 Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People, that every diocese in the country now has to answer to. The Boy Scouts of America has tens of thousands of claims filed in its own bankruptcy proceeding, and a mandatory Youth Protection Training program that resulted directly from that reckoning. Modeling has neither a Nassar-scale case nor a comparable national response. It has one state, New York, with a real labor law addressing any of this, and nothing at the federal level at all.
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd has a name for the piece of this that goes beyond the original harm. She calls it institutional betrayal, and the idea, stripped of the academic language, is simple enough. It's one thing to be hurt by a person. It's a separate injury, layered on top of the first one, when the people or organizations around you, the ones you trusted to have your back, either don't act, don't believe you, or make you feel foolish for having asked in the first place. That second injury is often what lingers longest, because a single bad person can be avoided once you know to avoid him. An institution that won't protect you leaves you with nowhere safe to stand at all (Smith & Freyd, American Psychologist, 2014). This article is about why modeling, and boudoir photography specifically, sits structurally closer to that second kind of injury than most people realize, and what little exists right now to change it.
The eight conditions that make this possible
None of the cases in this article happened because an industry attracted uniquely bad people. They happened because certain structural conditions, repeated across sport, the Church, scouting, and modeling alike, make harm easier to commit and easier to hide. These are not abstract. Each one shows up, concretely, in the cases that follow.
1. Isolation from parents, guardians, or any outside witness
Training camps, castings, private fittings, and one-on-one shoots all share the same structure, the person with less power is physically separated from anyone who could see what happens next. A gymnast traveling without her parents, a novice model shooting alone with a photographer she found online, and an altar boy left alone with a priest are, structurally, in the same position. The setting does the isolating before any single bad actor has to do anything at all.
2. Unsupervised one-on-one contact treated as normal
Every one of these fields has a legitimate reason for private, one-on-one time to exist, coaching correction, a private fitting, a portrait sitting. That legitimacy is exactly what makes it useful cover. Nobody questions a closed studio door because closed studio doors are how the work gets done. The normalcy of the setting is the same thing that makes a violation inside it so hard to name in the moment.
3. Career-gatekeeping power concentrated in one person
A single coach can end an athlete's Olympic hopes. A single bishop could reassign or silence a priest without any outside review. A single modeling agent or photographer can decide whether a young model's career happens at all. When one person holds that much unilateral control over someone else's future, disagreeing with him, or reporting him, carries a cost that has nothing to do with whether the report is true.
4. Built-in ambiguity about appropriate physical contact
Coaching sometimes requires touch. Medical treatment requires touch. Wardrobe adjustments on a shoot sometimes involve touch. That ambiguity is not evidence of bad intent by itself, most of it is genuinely necessary. But it also means a line can be crossed inside a category of contact that already has a legitimate reason to exist, which makes the crossing itself much harder to prove and much easier to deny.
5. A culture of secrecy or loyalty reinforced by group identity
Teams protect teammates. Parishes protect the parish. Modeling agencies protect their top earners and their relationships with in-demand photographers. Group loyalty is not inherently corrupt, most of the time it's simply how any close-knit profession holds together. But that same loyalty becomes a wall when someone inside the group needs the group to believe her over one of its own.
6. Diffusion of responsibility across overlapping organizations
The Nassar case is the clearest example of this on record. The FBI, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, USA Gymnastics, and Michigan State University each independently held pieces of the information that could have stopped him years earlier, and each one failed to act, in part because each assumed accountability sat with one of the others. Modeling has this same fragmentation built in by default, an agency, a photographer, a casting director, and a client can each disclaim responsibility for a single model's safety on any given shoot, and there is no equivalent of a national governing body to catch what falls between them.
7. A financial or reputational incentive for the institution not to report
Reporting a star athlete's coach, a beloved priest, or a top-booking photographer costs the institution something real, donors, parishioners, advertising revenue, a working relationship with a major client. That cost is rarely the deciding factor stated out loud, but it shapes which complaints get taken seriously and which get quietly managed instead.
8. Youth or financial precarity that limits the ability to report or walk away
Most Model Alliance survey respondents began modeling before age 16. A young model, or any model who genuinely needs the income from her next booking, is in a materially worse position to say no, walk away, or file a report than someone with savings and other options. This factor compounds every other one on this list, since the person most exposed to the first seven risk factors is frequently the same person least able to afford the consequences of speaking up about them.
Where this pattern was documented first, and what followed
Sport, the Church, and scouting all eventually produced a public reckoning and, however imperfect, an institutional response. Looking at what those responses actually were, and were not, is the clearest way to see exactly what modeling is still missing.
Elite Youth Sport
A representative study of 4,043 Dutch and Belgian adults found that 14 percent reported experiencing sexual violence in an organized sport context before age 18, a figure since replicated in Switzerland, Germany, and among elite U.S. athletes. The DOJ Inspector General's own report on the FBI's handling of the Larry Nassar case documented a 14-month gap between the Bureau first receiving actionable information and opening a formal investigation, during which more athletes were abused. A 2019 Senate investigation found that the FBI, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, USA Gymnastics, and Michigan State University had each independently held pieces of the picture and each failed to act.
What followed was concrete. The U.S. Center for SafeSport now exists as an independent body with authority to investigate and sanction abuse across Olympic-affiliated sports, a direct outcome of this case being made public.
Sources: RAINN (general reference), Vertommen et al., Child Abuse & Neglect (2016).
The Catholic Church
The John Jay College report commissioned by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops documented 4,392 accused priests and 10,667 victims. Its central structural finding, drawn from its own 2011 follow-up study, was that most offenders were "situational generalists" who abused whoever was structurally accessible to them, not a fixed predator type identifiable in advance. Access, not individual pathology, was the deciding factor (John Jay College, 2011, hosted by the USCCB).
What followed was the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. Adopted in 2002, it now requires every diocese in the country to follow a set of reporting and prevention standards, however unevenly enforced in practice.
Boy Scouts of America
Roughly 82,000 to 90,000 abuse claims were filed in the BSA's own bankruptcy proceeding, spanning nearly a century of documented harm. No peer-reviewed prevalence study exists here the way it does for sport, the documentation is legal and journalistic rather than epidemiological, which corroborates the pattern without adding independent statistical weight to it.
What followed was a mandatory Youth Protection Training program, required of every adult volunteer in the organization.
Each of these institutions eventually built something, imperfect, sometimes reactive, sometimes only forced into existence by litigation, but something. A body with investigative authority. A national charter. A mandatory training requirement. Modeling has produced none of these at a national level. The next section covers why, using the documented cases inside fashion and modeling itself.
Fashion and modeling
The cases below are organized by how they can actually be verified, criminal conviction first, then extensively reported allegations that never resulted in criminal charges. That second category requires real care. None of the individuals named below have been criminally convicted of the conduct described. Where allegations are described, they are described as allegations, reported by named accusers to reputable investigative outlets, with the subject's own denial included wherever one exists on the record. Readers are encouraged to read the original reporting directly, links to the primary sources are included throughout.
Robert Koester
Operating under the name "Frank Model Management," Koester lured teenage girls, some as young as 15, with modeling promises, drugged them with GHB, and sexually assaulted and recorded the abuse. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
Jean-Luc Brunel
The founder of MC2 Model Management was arrested in December 2020 on charges of rape, sexual assault of minors, and human trafficking, tied to allegations that he used his modeling agency to funnel young women to Jeffrey Epstein. He died in a French prison in February 2022, awaiting trial. In response, the Model Alliance formally petitioned the New York Attorney General and Congress for an investigation into modeling agencies' broader role in this pattern, the clearest documented instance of institutional, not merely individual, failure in this entire history.
Sources: CNN, Model Alliance's own letters.
Patrick Demarchelier
The Boston Globe's Spotlight Team, the same investigative unit behind the newspaper's Catholic Church coverage, published an investigation in February 2018 after speaking with more than 50 models about roughly two dozen industry figures. Seven women accused Demarchelier specifically, one former photo assistant on the record with a detailed account, plus six models, describing groping, forced physical contact, and repeated sexual propositions, including toward a model who was a teenager at the time. No criminal charges were ever filed and no civil suit was ever brought. Demarchelier denied the allegations on the record: "It's impossible that the multiple complaints against him are true... People lie and they tell stories. It's ridiculous... I have never, never, never touched a model inappropriately." Condé Nast confirmed it would stop working with him days before the story ran, a real, named institutional consequence that stands independent of any criminal finding. He died in 2022; no further reporting or legal action followed.
Read the original reporting: The Boston Globe, "Beauty and the Ugly Truth".
Bruce Weber and Mario Testino
A New York Times investigation published in January 2018 documented 15 models accusing Weber of coerced nudity and sexual acts during shoots, and 13 accusing Testino of groping and unwanted advances. Condé Nast dropped both photographers and issued a new industry conduct code as a direct result. No criminal charges were filed against either man.
Read the original reporting: Business of Fashion's recap of the New York Times investigation.
Terry Richardson
Multiple named models have described incidents independently and on the record over the years, including Caron Bernstein, who alleged rape during a 2003 shoot, Jamie Peck, who described groping, and Anna del Gaizo, who alleged rape in reporting covered by Rolling Stone. Condé Nast, Vogue, H&M, Valentino, and Diesel all severed ties with Richardson following the reporting. He was never criminally charged and denies all allegations.
Read the original reporting: The Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone.
Gérald Marie
The former head of Elite Model Management's European division was accused of rape and sexual assault dating to the 1980s and 90s by three named former models, along with a BBC journalist who says she was assaulted while investigating him undercover. A French criminal investigation was opened but closed in February 2023 because the statute of limitations had passed, a time-bar, not a finding that the allegations were untrue. Separately, former model Carré Otis filed suit in 2019 under New York's Child Victims Act, alleging a predatory culture at Elite involving Marie and a senior executive.
Read the original reporting: BBC.
The absence of a boudoir-specific scandal is not the same as an absence of risk
Every structural risk factor described earlier in this article, isolation, unsupervised one-on-one contact, single-gatekeeper power, financial precarity, applies at least as strongly to independent boudoir photography as it does to mainstream fashion, arguably more so, since boudoir sessions typically happen with no agency, no second shooter, and no client-side accountability structure standing between a model and a photographer at all. And yet this research turned up only one documented, charged (not yet confirmed convicted) boudoir-specific case nationally, a 2024 San Antonio incident in which a photographer was arrested after a client alleged she was given wine, lost consciousness, and woke believing she had been assaulted during the shoot (KSAT).
That is a genuinely thin record next to fashion's. It should not be read as reassurance. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, boudoir is a smaller, more localized industry than mainstream fashion, without the brand-name recognizability that turns a single incident into national coverage. A case that would generate a Boston Globe investigation if it involved a Vogue photographer generates a single local news segment if it involves an independent boudoir studio. The next section explains, with real numbers, exactly why that gap in documentation should be expected rather than trusted.
What the underreporting data actually shows
General sexual assault reporting to police sits at roughly 25 to 31 percent, according to RAINN's analysis of federal crime victimization data (RAINN). Workplace harassment reporting is far lower still, the EEOC's own task force found that 87 to 94 percent of people who experience workplace harassment never file a formal complaint, and of an estimated 5 million people harassed at work annually, only about 9,200 file a formal charge (EEOC). The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that 58 percent of workplace crimes between 2007 and 2015 were never reported to police at all (BJS).
Freelance and gig workers report even less, largely because they lack the internal HR channel a traditional employee has, a 2018 survey found 54 percent of freelancers report experiencing sexual harassment (Freelancers Union). This matters enormously for modeling specifically, because U.S. models are classified as independent contractors, which under federal law generally excludes them from Title VII protection altogether, no employer-employee relationship typically means no legal standing to sue over workplace sexual harassment in the first place (legal analysis of the classification gap). Model Alliance's own published survey found that 28 percent of respondents felt pressured to have sex with someone on the job and 30 percent reported inappropriate touching, and that fewer than a third of harassed models felt able to report to their agency at all (Model Alliance).
Stack these numbers together and the conclusion is unavoidable. General reporting is already low, workplace reporting is far lower, and the independent-contractor structure that defines both mainstream modeling and boudoir photography removes even the internal-complaint pathway a traditional employee has. A thin public record in an industry with this exact structure is precisely what the data predicts. It is not proof the underlying problem is thin too.
New York did something. Nobody else has.
In December 2024, New York signed the Fashion Workers Act into law, effective in 2025. It is, as of this writing, the only comprehensive modeling-industry labor statute anywhere in the United States. It requires modeling and creative management agencies to register with the state, hold a fiduciary duty toward the models they represent, disclose full compensation before work begins, cap commissions at 20 percent, ban upfront or signing fees, and, critically, maintain a written sexual harassment policy with an anti-retaliation clause. It gives models the right to file complaints directly with the state Department of Labor or Attorney General, and a private right of action to sue for damages and attorneys' fees on their own behalf (New York State Department of Labor).
No other state has passed anything close to it. Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and every other city that markets itself as a fashion or entertainment capital has produced no equivalent legislation. This is not a minor oversight. It means that outside New York, a model working with an agency has essentially no state-level labor protection specific to her industry, no commission cap, no mandatory harassment policy, no fiduciary standard, nothing beyond whatever general contract or tort law might apply after the fact. And even New York's law, real as it is, sidesteps rather than closes the underlying problem, it regulates agencies without reclassifying models as employees, so the Title VII gap described above remains legally open everywhere, New York included. No models' union with collective bargaining power exists anywhere in the country. The Model Alliance's RESPECT Program has a defined standard for brands and agencies to sign onto voluntarily, but no company could be independently verified as having actually executed that agreement (Model Alliance). Compare that to an unrelated but structurally similar industry. Dancers at a North Hollywood strip club voted 17 to 0 in 2023 to unionize, the first unionized strip club in the country in decades, after years of misclassification as independent contractors nearly identical to modeling's own (LA Public Press). Workers in a comparably precarious position built something. Modeling, industry-wide, still has not.
Why the offenders so rarely disappear
K-12 education has documented this mechanism with unusual clarity, and it explains something about every case described above. An Associated Press investigation found more than 2,500 educators had their credentials revoked, denied, or sanctioned over a five-year period following sexual misconduct allegations, and documented a specific, recurring practice behind many of the cases that never reach that point. A school, facing a credible complaint against a teacher or coach, quietly lets him resign rather than fire him outright, sometimes even providing a letter of recommendation, so he can move on to the next district before anyone there learns why he left. The practice has a name inside the profession, passing the trash. It persists in part because state law and union bargaining agreements often legally prevent one district from disclosing an open investigation to the district considering hiring him next (ProPublica). The U.S. Department of Education, as recently as this year, opened investigations into 20 school districts across 15 states specifically over this handling.
The mechanism is not unique to schools. It is the same diffusion of responsibility described earlier in this article as one of the eight structural risk factors, and it is precisely what makes an institution's quiet handling of a complaint so much more common than a headline-generating firing. A photographer quietly dropped by one agency simply signs with another. A coach asked to resign is hired by a program two states away that never called for a reference. The transfer, the relocation, the resignation dressed up as a mutual parting, all of it serves the same function. It resolves the institution's immediate liability without ever generating the kind of public record that would warn the next person he works with. It is expedient, socially, professionally, and often legally, in a way that an actual investigation rarely is. Modeling, with no national governing body, no shared reporting database between agencies, and no equivalent of a credentialing system that could be revoked, is arguably more exposed to this exact mechanism than any of the institutions described in this article, because there is no license to pull and no central record to check in the first place.
None of this is reason for despair. It is reason for precision. Vetting a photographer before a session, covered in my companion piece on vetting, knowing the warning signs covered in red flags to watch for, and staying in the habit of situational awareness covered in the Cooper Color Code, all matter more, not less, in an industry that has not yet built the institutional safeguards other fields eventually did. New York's Fashion Workers Act shows real change is possible when enough people demand it. It should be the floor other states build on, not the ceiling the rest of the industry gets to point to instead of doing the same work.
Thank you all for reading.
Stay Creative, and Stay Safe.
Jeshua.