The glamour faded fast. Less than a month after Maja arrived in Milan last fall, her agent took her to a hospital, where doctors discovered internal injuries and an infection resulting from a violent gang rape. Maja told investigators she had been attacked by three men in a discotheque bathroom. She also said that it was not the first time she had been sexually assaulted in Italy. According to the police report, she had engaged in “sex with multiple partners on many occasions,” but she said she was always “too far gone” on drink and drugs to resist.
Models have always had easy access to sex and drugs, and many have been ruined by them. But as the average age of fashion models throughout much of Europe slips from 16 to 15 and even 14–they are routinely known as baby models–there is a growing debate over who is responsible for their well-being. If an Italian prosecutor gets his way, it will soon be the modeling agencies that “discover” them. Rather than arresting Maja’s alleged attackers, prosecutor Marco Ghezzi is charging Mandelli and his partner, Alberto Righini, with abandonment, which in Italy includes neglect, child abuse and endangering a minor’s life. If convicted, the two face a maximum five years in prison. Righini and Mandelli insist they are innocent. “We do not assume total responsibility for the models,” Mandelli told NEWSWEEK.
Who should? Many in the fashion industry believe it is up to the teenagers’ parents. “We’re not babysitters,” insists David Brown, head of D’ Management Group, a top modeling agency in Milan. “The parents are legally responsible for their children until they are 18.” Others believe models are hardly behaving differently from their peers flipping burgers. “If teenagers want to get in trouble, they will,” says veteran Italian fashion photographer Bardo Fabiani. With agents hovering over them, bookers organizing their schedules and drivers chauffeuring them from one appointment to the next, Fabiani argues, “girls in the fashion business are actually more protected than in any other work environment.”
That’s what Maja’s father thought, too. When he brought her to Milan, he met with her management team and sat in on her orientation. Flash gave her a mobile phone and the keys to a shared flat in Milan’s historic district, an arrangement that her father–a single parent–approved. By the time he left two days later, he felt confident that Maja was in good hands: her agents would keep her busy during the day with appointments and photo shoots. Sure, she’d be on her own at night and on weekends, but the agency made her sign an agreement stating that she wouldn’t leave the apartment at night. Unfortunately, they couldn’t make her keep it.
Young models didn’t always have such free rein. In the past, girls under 18 usually had a parent or chaperone to keep an eye on them. When Brooke Shields arrived in Italy in 1979 to do the Italian Bazaar cover, “she was 12 years old, and her mother was by her side every minute of the day,” remembers Brown. But after the Iron Curtain fell in the late 1980s, everything changed. “There was a huge influx of Eastern-bloc girls, a lot of 14-year-olds, looking for their fame and fortune,” recalls Robert Ferrell, director of the Marilyn Agency in Paris. Hungry for freedom and fun, they worked during the day and cruised nightclubs at night.
Manipulative adults were rampant. Ferrari-driving playboys would lurk in hotel lobbies in Milan to see which keys the girls would pick up at the front desk, then inundate them with flowers and phone calls until the girls gave in. Models swapped stories of country weekends where men would slip drugs into their drinks and then sexually assault them. “These people were hangers-on who surrounded us like leeches,” says Terry Broome, a former American model who served nine years in an Italian prison for shooting to death a 40-year-old Milanese playboy in 1984.
Things haven’t changed much. In 1999 a BBC reporter went undercover and discovered that Paris-based agents were seducing models as young as 13 and providing them with cocaine. Prosecutor Ghezzi recently conducted a two-year investigation into the Milan fashion industry and said he was appalled by “the lack of supervision from agencies like Flash.” “Everybody watches these girls while they work,” Ghezzi told NEWSWEEK. “But nobody is watching out for them after work.”
Within the European Union, only France has enacted strict legislation protecting minors working as models. In 1990 the government passed a law that requires all models to be at least 16. If they are under 18, they must have written parental consent–and provide their birth certificate to prove the consenting adults are their parents. Foreign models must have working papers. Furthermore, 90 percent of their earnings are put into a holding account at a state-run bank until they are 18. As a result, Ferrell says, “you don’t get so many 16-year-old girls anymore.”
Not in France. But no other European countries have laws to protect minors working as models. (In the United States, laws for working minors vary by state; there are none restricting teenage models in New York.) Agencies in Belgium, Germany and Italy regularly import young girls to pose for fashion magazines and designers’ advertising campaigns.
Perhaps Maja’s experience will help change that. The case is now in the hands of a Milan judge who must determine if there is sufficient evidence against Mandelli and Righini to warrant an indictment and trial. Either way, Ghezzi hopes that the case will instigate wider age and work regulations. The Syndicat des Agences Mannequins, a union of modeling agencies in Paris, is fighting for a Europewide law that would effectively eliminate the employment of underage models. Even top designers are calling for change. “The agencies should have a legal duty for the period the girls are entrusted to them,” Giorgio Armani told the Milan daily Corriere della Sera. Mandelli, too, supports reform. “The industry does need to be regulated,” he told NEWSWEEK. “I just hope it is not at the expense of my colleague and me going to prison.”
