Building on a long-running and ongoing investigation by journalist Lucy Osborne and The Guardian, the powerful testimony and archive documentary series will reveal how the modelling industry has facilitated and validated endemic sexual abuse for decades. The Sky Original series will launch on Sky Documentaries in the UK and Ireland, and on Sky in Germany and Italy, and the series title will be announced soon. Further broadcast partners globally will be announced in due course.
Their new three-part series will shine a spotlight on the life-changing events experienced by models over decades, revealing not only the behaviours of prominent individuals but also how the allure and practices of the industry were able to facilitate abuse that often saw predators operating in plain sight. The project will interweave powerful personal testimony and archive footage, involving filming in locations in America and Europe.
The series will be produced by an all-female team including award-winning investigative journalist Lucy Osborne, who has been investigating this subject for many years, and is led by a combined unit including executive producers Jacqueline Edenbrow, Samantha Anstiss and Rebecca Templar. Wonderhood Studios and the Guardian had been developing separate projects covering the same subject for many months before coming together last year to collaborate.
The Sky Original documentary has been commissioned for Sky Documentaries by Zai Bennett, Managing Director of Content, Poppy Dixon, Director, Documentaries and Factual. The series is produced in association with Sky Studios, and will air on Sky in the UK, Ireland, Germany and Italy.
Sky Documentaries is the home of world-class, real life stories from award-winning and emerging film makers, including new Sky Original documentaries, as well as acquisitions from HBO, SHOWTIME® and beyond. With a mix of feature length documentaries and limited series that challenge, provoke and entertain, the channel explores a broad range of topics from sport and real-world controversies through to biographies of some of the world’s most famous and infamous people.
Poppy Dixon, Director, Documentaries & Factual, Sky says:
“This series promises to shine a light on practices which have historically gone unchallenged in the fashion industry. Sky Documentaries showcases challenging and thought-provoking documentaries, and I’m honoured to partner with Wonderhood and The Guardian for this important series.”
Jacqueline Edenbrow, executive producer, Guardian News & Media says:
“Following a committed and long-running special investigation into wrongdoing in the modelling industry we are excited to be working together with Wonderhood Studios to build on Lucy Osborne and the Guardian’s reporting to create a powerful documentary series.”
Samantha Anstiss, Chief Creative Officer of Wonderhood Studios says:
“We are very pleased to be able to work alongside The Guardian on this series. We’re passionate about collaborating to get the stories of women from across the modelling industry told. This has always been a world of beguiling glamour and opportunity, but as the testimonies of so many survivors reveal, it became a much darker place. We feel privileged to be able to help to get the voices of women heard and hope the series will go some way to effecting change.”
Lucy Osborne, producer and investigative journalist says:
“I am delighted to be working with such a fantastic team to help tell these women’s stories and finally give the fashion industry its MeToo reckoning. We look forward to creating a series that will also sensitively explore the bigger picture - how abuse is facilitated, how victims are silenced and the lasting impact on women.”
More details will be announced in due course.
Notes to editors
About Guardian News & Media
Guardian News & Media (GNM) publishes theguardian.com, one of the world’s leading English-language news websites. Traffic from outside of the UK now represents around two-thirds of the Guardian’s total digital audience. In the UK, GNM publishes the Guardian newspaper six days a week, first published in 1821, and the world’s oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer.
About Wonderhood Studios
Wonderhood Studios is a unique creative company that is both a full-strength creative agency and a production company making high-quality television and film. Driven by audience insight and new forms of collaboration, Wonderhood is fully independent and works with some of the most talented and original creators, brand partners, platforms and channels in the world.
About Sky
Sky is Europe’s leading media and entertainment company and is proud to be part of the Comcast group. Across six countries, we connect our 24 million customers to the best entertainment, sports, news, arts and to our own award-winning original content.
Our technology, including the market leading Sky Q, connects people to everything they love - TV, music, games, online video, fitness and educational content, all in one place, easy. Our streaming service, NOW TV, brings viewers all the enjoyment of Sky with the flexibility of a contract-free service.
Building on the success of Sky Originals like Chernobyl, I Hate Suzie and Brassic, we are doubling our investment in original content by 2024 through Sky Studios. Sky News provides impartial and trustworthy journalism for free, while Sky Arts, the UK’s only dedicated free-to-air arts channel, makes the arts accessible for everyone. Our new TV and movie studio, Sky Studios Elstree, is expected to create over 2,000 new jobs and generate an additional £3 billion of production investment in the UK over the first five years alone.
We believe that we can be a force for good in the communities in which we operate. We’re committed to being Europe’s first net zero carbon entertainment company by 2030. We take pride in our approach to diversity and inclusion: we’ve been recognised by The Times and Stonewall for our commitment to diversity and we’ve put in place a new programme to invest £30million across our markets over the next three years to tackle racial injustice.
About NOW TV
NOW TV is a leading UK streaming service, giving you the best TV, box sets, movies, sports and kids entertainment whenever, and wherever, you want it. Pick from the range of content passes including Entertainment, Sky Cinema, Sky Sports, Kids and reality TV with hayu.
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