Legendary supermodel Carré Otis sues Gérald Marie for raping her at age 17

When Carré Otis, one of the most legendary supermodels of the 90s, came to New York to try her luck in the world of fashion, she settled in a kind of industrial warehouse alongside other aspiring successful models.

Some of these young women were accompanied and protected by their mothers, but Otis, who had fled a broken family and a miserable life in California years before, was completely alone.

As recounted in her biography

, published a decade ago, that vulnerability was exploited by men like the powerful Gérald Marie, who at that time ran the renowned Elite modeling agency in Europe, and whom she accuses of having abused her while she was still a minor. The model, who today has changed her last name to married, Sutton, filed a formal accusation against the executive this past Thursday. The lawsuit claims that, in 1986, when she was 17, she was repeatedly sexually assaulted by Gérald Marie, also citing as an accomplice another employee of the modeling agency, Trudi Tapscott, who would later work at

magazine

earlier. founding his own agency in 2018, Model Coaches.

Following the rise of the

movement

, Marie had already been identified as a sexual predator by up to eleven women, and last year the Paris Prosecutor's Office opened a preliminary investigation against one of the most powerful men in the modeling world for “ rape and sexual assault, as well as rape and sexual assault against minors ”. The alleged abuses, both against Otis and the rest of the women, would have occurred between the 80s and 90s, for which they would have already prescribed, but the lawsuit that Otis has just presented would be protected by the New York Child Victims Law, which allows survivors of child sexual abuse to file civil lawsuits against their offenders no matter how long has elapsed.

According to the lawsuit, the two executives of the Elite agency, Marie himself and Tapscott, managed to get Otis to move into the Frenchman's apartment while still a teenager, without informing him, as he has narrated to

, that "the modeling agency was sending her to live in the house of a sex offender", something that had already been talked about in the industry since the 80s. At that time, Marie was engaged to the famous

Linda Evangelista, with whom he would later marry. Taking advantage of the fact that the model was out of town, Otis settled in one of the rooms of the executive's huge Parisian apartment. He himself became one of his first suppliers of cocaine, a substance to which he would spend several years hooked. As he recounted in his memoirs, at night they would meet in the bathroom to snort together. And on several of those occasions, he raped her. She was 17 and he was 25 years older. Otis is not the only model who has denounced Marie's abuse: Jill Dodd, Ebba Karlsson or Karen Mulder, who had to receive psychiatric treatment for this reason, have also accused him of demanding sexual favors and raping them.

After experiencing other episodes of sexual violence throughout her life (she was “sexually harassed, abused and exploited by the director and producers” of the film

his film debut, and lived a stormy marriage to actor Mickey Rourke), Otis managed to cope with his addictions and the eating disorders he suffered ("recovering from anorexia was harder than giving up drugs," he said). In 2005, and after years in which it was impossible for her to "maintain intimate relationships" with men and "regain confidence in women," she married environmental researcher Matthew Sutton, with whom she has two daughters. Today he lives on a farm in California with his family and shares snapshots of that new life on his Instagram account, where he defines himself as an activist, as well as a model, and where he also often remembers the campaigns shot by photographers of the stature by Bruce Weber that took her to the top of fashion.