Another day, another gut-churning, soul-destroying story of how low some humans will (allegedly) go in order to sexually degrade other humans for their own gratification. Last night’s Panorama accused Mike Jeffries, former boss of the “sex meets Ivy League” fashion brand Abercrombie & Fitch, of assaulting young aspiring male models at orgies in his Hamptons retreat, in Marrakech, in Nice, in St Barts, in Manhattan and in Paris. It started grim and got grimmer.
Jeffries – who built the failed company into a $2bn brand but abruptly departed in 2014 after 22 years - and his male partner Matthew Smith refuse to comment on the claims. Their alleged fixer Jim Jacobson, who apparently wears a snakeskin prosthetic over a nose destroyed by bad plastic surgery, claims “[everyone] who attended these events went in with their eyes open”.
Against this, reporter Rianna Croxford had the stories of eight young men who described a polished and expensive grooming operation. Seven felt seriously damaged by the experience, and I seriously wonder about the man who didn’t. Two gay men with challenging backgrounds – David Bradberry and Barrett Pall – went on the record about being schmoozed, stripped, shaved naked, and coerced into oral and/or anal sex, in the hope of appearing in A&F’s catalogue. A disguised, straight, third man, “Alex” believes he was drugged, raped and infected with HIV at a party in Morocco.
In some ways, this tale feels bone-wearyingly familiar. “Making it in the fashion industry is tough. And models can face exploitation,” said talking head Sara Ziff, a former fashion model and filmmaker who now works with the pressure group Model Alliance. Well, duh! Who’d have guessed an industry that enables old men to exploit the supple bodies of young women would also have a division of predators interested in the washboard abs and hip-hooked denims of A&F’s male models? The company was previously pilloried in the 2022 Netflix documentary White Hot: the Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch, for its exclusive whiteness and body fascism. Again, duh!
But Panorama probed deeper and dirtier. Another interviewee, attorney Brad Edwards – who represented Jeffrey Epstein’s victims – hit the other nail on the head, outlining the reputational and legal ramifications of any attempted lawsuit. Bradberry had briefly worked in porn and Pall had been paid for sex before meeting Jacobson.
“The fact some of the men have had sex for money in the past… it is a factor,” Edwards sighed. Wherever there’s a #MeToo moment, the legal backlash is the same: they knew what they were doing; they did it before; they were asking for it.
Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in 1892 as an outfitter of “elite outdoorsman” and kitted out generations of whiskered, aspirational Yanks before going bankrupt in 1977. The business passed through several hands until Limited Brands bought it in 1988, installing Jeffries four years later. In photos and footage, he looks like a heavily masticated version of Gary Busey.
News reports, and a former assistant, characterise Jeffries as “brilliant”, “driven”, “energetic and boisterous” and “insane” (the latter term, after an on-air legal warning, recast as praise).
Certainly, he oversaw the company’s sexualisation of preppiness – denim peeling away from lithe snogging bodies in drooling black and white, mostly shot by Bruce Weber. In 2008 Jeffries gave a rare interview to the BBC, while being fitted for a suit on Savile Row, to mark A&F’s first European store on Burlington Gardens.
That shop, which saw gaggles of teenagers crowd around its entrance on most days during its heyday, closed in 2021. Jeffries’ departure from the company in 2014 followed complaints from a pension fund invested in the business, over payouts for his alleged misconduct (supported on Panorama by another anonymous source).
In one year when A&F was at its most profitable Jeffries earned $71m. His alleged victims were apparently paid $2,500 for their “time” at each mass-molestation. Asked what he’d say to Jeffries if he met him, Bradberry said: “Was it worth it? Did you get what you needed?” And then, heartbreakingly: “Do you remember me?”
