The Terry Richardson Timeline of Skeez
It’s no secret that Terry Richardson, mustachioed purveyor of porno-chic photography, is a shameless pervert. The toxic hornball made a name for himself shooting pretty young things in the Nineties, and the fashion world’s favorite creepy uncle is still up to his old tricks, perving out on any young dilettante willing to take off her clothes. Only, now he just gets paid a lot more money to do it.
Over the years, he’s won the patronage of major fashion houses like Marc Jacobs and Tom Ford, and is regularly published in magazines like Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone and Vogue. His celebrity subjects have included the scantily clad likes of Kate Moss, Miley Cyrus, Mila Kunis and Beyoncé, and he’s even photographed President Obama, though POTUS opted to keep his clothes on.
Uncle Terry, as he encourages women to call him, has never tried to hide his penchant for the obscene and excessively raunchy, which makes him nearly impossible to scandalize. His business card was once reported to be embossed with the phrase “Snap’in the best and Rape’in the rest,” and his book, Terryworld, basically amounts to hardcore porn for your coffee table. The 48-year-old is also remarkably comfortable in his own ink-stained skin, and he enjoys turning the camera himself (as well as his 48-year-old member).
The fact that Richardson is an alleged sexual predator has never seemed to bother certain famous friends, like Jared Leto and Chloe Sevigny, or the vast majority of magazine editors. In the past 15 years, many young women have come forward to say that he violated or denigrated them in some unspeakable way, from well-established models like Liskula Cohen to teenage amateurs desperate to boost their careers. Regardless, his phone keeps on ringing.
This weekend, models Sarah Ziff and Alice Shoemaker of Model Alliance addressed longstanding allegations in an appearance on HuffPost Live. Ziff, who vowed to never work with Richardson again, said he “will ask you to take your clothes off at the casting, and in some cases, give him sexual favors.”
Then another young woman took to Reddit to detail her own scarring experience with Richardson when she was a 19-year-old art student. “He had me posing on the couch and then I had my back to him and just literally felt him start licking my ass, like every part of it, and the assistant was taking pictures the whole time,” she wrote.
The question has always been, do such deeds warrant blackballing from the fashion industry? Or is his sleazy behavior, as his supporters have argued, just a part of who he is? Below, we laid out Richardson’s perviest antics through time, so you can decide for yourself.