If Ms. Sutton was betrayed by Ms. Tapscott in the way the suit lays out, by being directed toward a predator, how should the law respond? “Any time you are working with children, there is a heightened responsibility to keep them safe,” said Carrie Goldberg, a Brooklyn lawyer who has represented many adult victims of child sex abuse. The problem for young models, particularly during the ’80s and ’90s, was that “they weren’t seen as children, but legally they are, and they were.”
Ms. Sutton’s lawyers will first have to prove — in the absence of text chains and emails, which did not exist 35 years ago — that Ms. Tapscott knew about Mr. Marie’s proclivities and endangered her anyway. In response to an investigation into Mr. Marie’s conduct and the various accusations against him, published last fall by The Guardian, Ms. Tapscott did not claim obliviousness but said instead: “We didn’t have the language then to know that this was wrong, and even if we did, who would we report it to? We were like a family and there was no HR department.” She went on to say that she had “tremendous regret about not doing more at the time.” In regard to Ms. Sutton’s suit, Ms. Tapscott declined to comment.
In the summer of 1986, according to the suit, Ms. Sutton told Ms. Tapscott what had happened to her, and Ms. Tapscott reported the news to Mr. Casablancas, the man in charge, via written memo. Mr. Casablancas, who died in 2013, was said to advise Mr. Marie simply to be more cautious in the future. Mr. Casablancas was in no position to offer a moral counter example. What he described as his affair with the model Stephanie Seymour took place when she was 15 and he was 41. He was married at the time but that relationship ended. At 51, he married again, this time to a 17-year-old.
It takes only a quick saunter through the annals of recent history to realize how little cultural condemnation was directed at this sort of behavior. Even as recently as 2017, just eight months before the #MeToo movement exploded, Netflix released the documentary “Casablancas: The Man Who Loved Women,” directed by a former Elite booker, Hubert Woroniecki, who told The Wall Street Journal that it was not his job to “make an investigation.” (The article in which that quote appeared ran under the headline: “A New Netflix Documentary Tells the Story of Elite Model Management’s Colorful Founder.”)
I asked Ms. Sutton what she hoped to gain by bringing her case at this moment, just as the deadline was closing. She said she was motivated in large part by her anger over Bill Cosby’s release from prison, and by watching her two daughters enter adolescence only to see clearly how young and unformed girls of that age really are. “They are children,’’ she told me. A lawsuit like this also comes with the potential to encourage other victims to come forward.
Exactly a year ago, Ms. Sutton, along with 12 other people, addressed a letter to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo urging him to support the Adult Survivors Act, which would extend the statute of limitations on civil claims to those who suffered sexual abuse when they were 18 or older. Given the frequency with which women and men in their late teens and early 20s are preyed upon, the law is a logical corollary to the Child Victims Act. Although the State Senate passed the bill earlier this year, the Assembly did not bring it to the floor for a vote before adjourning. Now, perhaps it will going forward. As State Senator Brad Hoylman, the bill’s sponsor in that chamber, put it, “Wouldn’t that be a fitting coda to the end of the Cuomo administration?”