Tracking Down ANTM’s Most Elusive Former Contestant
She's Literally Saving Lives. Suck It, Twiggy
Name one successful model whose career was launched by America’s Next Top Model. Quickly.
You probably can’t — and that’s not your fault. Over the course of 24 “cycles”, the reality competition show produced a range of notable actors, media personalities, and yes, working models. But no one’s come close to replicating the kind of success in the fashion world that host Tyra Banks or her co-star luminaries (Janice Dickinson, Twiggy, etc.) enjoyed. Regardless, fans remain invested in tracking ANTM alums and their subsequent careers, some of which have taken dark turns (C1 winner Adrianne Curry-Rhode is now an Avon-shilling QAnon adherent). But there’s one person whose whereabouts the fandom hasn’t been able to pinpoint…until now. SUSPENSE.
In 2007, Victoria Marshman — originally from Westport, CT — competed in cycle 9. A medieval history student at Yale, she was cast as the “smart but still has fashion model proportions” one. She didn’t give a shit and regularly disputed the judges’ feedback, making for good television if not endearing herself to production. She was eliminated fourth and returned to New Haven’s ivy towers, essentially vanishing from public view.
Eagle-eyed fans later spotted her in a 2011 YouTube video of Americans responding to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death.
And for a while…that was it.
One year ago, a Reddit user alleged that she was stationed with the Army in Hawaii. Another Redditor followed up and found Victoria’s photo on Sisters of Service's website. The organization is “a sisterhood of American female veterans from the Cultural Support Teams (CST)…who during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan worked around the clock to evacuate the Afghan women who fought by our sides.”
With some Internet sleuthing, I determined that her last public appearance was actually earlier this year, via an Atlantic article called 'We Are Not Ordinary People'. In May, George Packer wrote about Victoria and her sustained, single-minded efforts to enable Afghani women and their families’ safe passage out of the country:
Border guards searched their bags and examined their documents. “Why is a Hazara married to a Tajik?” a Talib demanded. “You should have married a Hazara, and you should have married a Tajik. Why did you crossbreed? Why does this family exist?”
“In our eyes, we don’t see black and white,” Noori replied. All that mattered was whether someone was a good human being. Noori’s answer didn’t please the guards. “Why are you leaving?” they asked. “Why aren’t you happy here in Afghanistan?”
Noori showed them hospital documents requiring medical treatment for her C-section. The baby’s name caught a guard’s eye.
“Why Victoria? Why didn’t you give her a proper Islamic name?”
Noori dodged the question. It would have been dangerous, maybe fatal, to tell the Talib that she had named her daughter after a United States Army reserve captain named Victoria Marshman.
In fact, he first covered Victoria’s efforts last March; in that article, she was assigned the pseudonym ‘Alice Spence.’ Alongside her mother Ann Marshman and “three men working in law, business, and entertainment, scattered across the country,” she operates Rescue Afghan Women Now (RAWN), a group dedicated to aiding women living under Taliban rule post-US withdrawal. She does it all from Honolulu minus lobbying trips to D.C.
When a woman reaches an extreme state—when Talibs have discovered a safe house, when a relative has been kidnapped or killed, when money has run out, when suicide seems imminent—Marshman, working with the undercover Afghan staff of two American humanitarian organizations, pays for passports, visas, and the overland journey across the border. Then she takes responsibility for supporting the women and their family through the process, which could stretch years into the future, of applying for refugee status and admittance into the country at whose side they once fought in a two-decade war.
There you have it. Victoria Marshman’s saving lives by putting her brain (and nerve) to excellent use — slightly more important than posing for fashion editorials, no? And no wonder she thrived under hostile Middle Eastern conditions. Compared to America’s Next Top Model, I’m sure Kabul was a breeze.
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Shameless Self-Promotion
After slowing my Twitter posts to a virtual halt and turning down multiple Bluesky invitations (flex), I buckled and joined Threads. Follow me there @pamnotanderson for jokes, takes and ruminations on life. Comedians are a bit like modern-day philosophers, you see.
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Ciao for now!