Campsite Media.

It's nineteen ninety four and Paul and his old college buddy David Ridon are on a plane to London.

It's been years since their Ferrari road trip to Houston, that fateful cross country rampage that launched Paul's.

Career with the Lynd Agency.

Now Paul is a big shot agent representing some of the most recognizable models in the world.

He's won a bunch of model wars.

He even recruited David away from what he was doing professionally, real estate and made him CEO of IT Models, So David Sherdon is no longer just Paul's party buddy.

We're making money and the brand was good, but he was always kind of on the edge of derailing it by doing something fucking stupid.

As we know, Paul at this point has a massive ego, a drug habit, and very poor impulse control.

So David got the unenviable task of being the adult in the room, which makes this trip to London very high stakes, because what with all the partying and losing a lawsuit after punching yet another guy at a nightclub, Paul is pretty broke and this trip could change that.

David and Paul are on their way to London to sign a deal where David says they'll sell a chunk of their company for three million dollars.

According to David, the.

Investor who wants to buy a steak in Eate Models is none other than Tom Barrick, who you may know as President Trump's real estate mogul buddy.

Now, we reached out to him and he did not comment, but he was indicted for being a foreign agent for the United Arab Emirates.

He was eventually acquitted by a jury and he is now our American Ambassador to Turkey.

But way back then in the mid nineties, was just a regular old billionaire and making investments, whether it was small companies or big And David is a real estate guy at heart.

He's a businessman, so he's totally starstruck.

God love Tom Barrick.

He's an amazing man, and he wanted to have a hand in creating and I think they probably wanted a hand and all of the benefits that come with running a modeling agency, like all the women that are everywhere all the time, coming to the parties and the dinners.

I'm sure that had something to do with it.

They arrive in London and they check into their rooms and just note this is David's recollection, this whole story, not Paul's.

Paul ends up in this massive suite.

I end up in this small room by the water bucket closet.

They're due to meet Barrick the next day to close the deal, but Paul has other things on his mind, and.

He proceeds to go on this friggin bender with booze weed coke girls in his suite.

He's raging.

I don't even know, you know, I'm a little tired of him anyway, because he's always doing some stupid shit, and he's too cold for school, and it's just always you know, this is that it's probably his worst period of his identity at this point.

And then it comes time to meet Tom Barrick.

According to David, he's at a private dining room in Clarridge's Hotel, which is a posh Art Deco favorite of the rich and famous, has been since the nineteenth century.

It's just a short jaunt from Buckingham Palace.

Here's how David says, the night went down.

So friggin elegant, or in this little cave room downstairs is probably fourteen people set up as nice a place, said I've ever been, you know, beautiful servant.

My date is there, Tom is there his day to some senate are there?

Where's Paul?

Under the Paul will be here any second.

I'm going to cover him for Paul again.

So there's a long stretch of awkward, forced conversation in this luxury dining room.

Oh no, no, Pul's coming any minute yet, fumbaball.

There's no mobile phone, so no one's calling.

Anybody's like, what the fuck is Paul?

And then finally the grand.

Entrance, Paul shows up, unshaved, a mess, tuxedo shirt open, no bow tie, just like completely open to like halfway down tuxedo jacking on, but the collars all rolled up, and it's all He's just like the coolest guy in the world.

I've been partying with all these chicks all night or two days, so sorry, I'm late that kind of thing.

And Barrick is a serious fucking man.

I mean, he's like, there's a billionaire.

It's like, and he looks at him, and it was right in front of my eye.

It was like a ping pong match.

It was the two of them and me in the middle, and he said something to him like where the fuck have you been?

You know, like this thing started along.

With what and Paul' said no, no, you understand that was like and then barr said something like, now, dude, that's that is uncool, and Paul, like typical Paul, throwing a punch.

He's like, well, then fuck something this, fuck you, or fuck fuck this or so he says something.

That was like way out of line.

And then Barrack said, and this is a quote.

You know what, Paul, I wouldn't buy peanuts from a monkey like you.

In plain English.

The deals off, Paul and David head all the way back to LA without having sold a single peanut.

On the way home, I'm like, dude, I can't do this anymore.

He's like, well, you fucked that whole thing up.

I'm like me, I fucked the whole thing up.

Brother, Take a look at the mirror and see what really happened.

And from that point forward, I left.

I quit the company right then and there.

Now Paul's down a friend and a coworker, down a sh share of three million dollars, and has just been on the receiving end of a brutal, old timey insult.

Paul could have taken any one of these things as a sign he needs to turn his life around.

But what's happening here is kind of obvious, right.

Paul has finally become exactly who he always wanted to be.

He's a big shot.

He's made his imprint on the modeling industry.

He's representing the biggest stars.

He's partying in Europe with his tubsedo unbuttoned, and he.

Is absolutely miserable.

The huge ego is just cover for the fact the deep down he knows he's given everything he has, every ounce of effort into making the world a worse place.

He's gotten a ton of young women into a terrible business.

For every Carrie Young who has come out, okay, there's a Jennifer Jimenez who pays to high a price for her career.

Paul has wasted his one and precious life and he needs to figure out what the hell he's going to do about it.

From iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media, I'm Vanessa Boriotis and this is Model War's episode eight.

A big factor in Paul's disillusionment with the modeling industry and his abject terror at where his life was heading was his sister Deborah, because she was not doing well.

Now.

Debrah had been battling cancer since she was a teenager, with Paul by her side.

You might remember his trick of putting chocolate wrappers in her sock so that she could wiggle her toes after waking up in the hospital and know that she was still alive.

She had gone on to get married and to adopt two children, but her cancer was advancing.

She was near the end.

She was losing life force.

I would pick up Deborah's body and I'd put it on the fucking toilet and I'd wash her.

All this was happening while Paul was at the height of his career.

Every time I go to see my sister Deva, she'd like be like, how's Naomi, how's Stephanie.

I'm like, you're fucking got chemo in your body and you're asking me about these two girls.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

And as the days go by, Paul is still rolling calls, talking to his clients big girls, supermodels.

But one day he just loses it.

They said, fuck you who, man, We're only making fifty thousand dollars today, and there's some other bitch making seventy five thousand dollars.

I said, you're fucking kidding me.

You're fucking kidding me.

My sister's fighting for her fucking life and you're pissed off if you made fifty thousand dollars today.

Fuck you.

And then I swore I would never be a modeling agent ever again.

But Paul still has his company.

In the wake of all the model wars, he pulls back from the business and he hopes it'll just run itself.

And I locked myself in my house for a year, and I never stepped outside my house.

One year.

I'd have parties there, people come and visit me, my staff would come and see me.

I couldn't do it anymore.

I couldn't create one more fucking kid.

I swore that I would never make anyone famous ever again.

When you're sitting there watching your sister fight for a fucking life and you're talking about Vogue, for God's sakes.

So Deborah is still in decline and Paul is in isolation while it models continues without him.

I just said fuck the world, and I just decided to not talk to people, to talk to people, but just in my surroundings, but not to make anybody kept the agencies open.

They weren't doing as good as they should have because I wasn't there overseeing them.

Paul's just hanging out in his house, smoking a lot of weed.

Literally twelve months inside my house, never going out at all, except I had a backyard, had a pool that would go from the outside of my house to the inside of my house.

So a booker at it Models comes up with an idea of how to lure him back out of his well appointed cave.

They came to me, they said, Paul, I know you like to smoke pot There's this girl named Lazette for Dow.

She's fifteen years old and she's in Holland.

And Holland at the time is like mecca for potheads.

You just walk into a cafe and buy amazing weed.

This is long before legalization in California.

Paul doesn't really want to leave his house, but he finally agrees to fly to Amsterdam to meet this girl and her parents.

I get to Holland and I got to go to a little city called vap.

So Paul's traveling through the Dutch countryside he's probably passing windmills or canals, fields of tulips.

He's basically in a van go painting.

And there little cobblestone street that I walk down and I get to the door of this person's, this kid's family's house, and I can't knock on the door.

I can't do it.

I can't bring another kid into my fucking sick world.

So I go, I leave.

I'd never knock on the door.

I go to a coffee shop.

I spoke a joint of purple ganja, I have an espresso.

I get enough courage, I go back on a knock on the door.

And I knock on the door, and I and Jok and Avert.

That's that's Lisette's mom and dad, Yoka and Avertt.

They greet me with some crumb cakes, like these apple crumb cakes.

I started eating on stone.

I started eating these crap apple crumb cakes.

And I look over and there's a six foot girl true story, and I'm like, oh shit, that's the most beautiful kid I've ever seen in my fucking life.

Yeah.

I mean, I had pictures of her, but she didn't look like that, like white pearly skin and just like you gotta be kidding.

Me, And just seeing this girl brings back the old Paul.

I'm talking super agent Paul.

He launches into his pitch like he never took a year off from being the monster who roamed the modeling industry.

And I'm in my rap.

Now I can make your daughter famous.

I'm Paul Fisher.

I represent the biggest stars in the freaking world.

YadA, YadA, YadA.

And then halfway through my fucking rap, I get a ca and I just stop, and I say to Yoknabord, I say, hey, guys, mom and dad, I'm a liar.

I'm a piece of shit.

If anybody ever knocks on this door again, slam the door in their face.

Don't ever let your daughter model.

She will become overly sexualized.

She will have a bunch of old fucking men hitting on her.

She'll start doing fucking drugs, She'll start making ten thousand bucks a day.

And then when you ask her to clean her fucking room, she will not do it.

I'm begging you, don't let her do it.

And then I walked back down that cobblestone street, crying my freaking eyes out, swearing that I'm done.

Paul flies back to La, gets back in whatever fancy car he was driving at this time, re enters his life of seclusion in the house with the private indoor outdoor pool, and then, like many an addict before him, he gives in.

It's a full scale model agent relapse.

He's back in the trenches.

I brought Lazette into my home and live with me in La and her boyfriend Yasper.

I said to the pairs that day when I met him, I said, she'll dump the boy.

He can come out, but in two three weeks from now, she's gonna dump him.

And sure enough, she dumps Gasper.

She becomes a star.

And while we won't get into the particulars of Lazette's story, Paul has seen this movie a bunch of times and he can offer some general insight.

I think anytime you ask a young person five times a day, twenty five times a week, one hundred times a month, twelve hundred times a year to live on a microscope and have their physical features judged, they're gonna see shit that nobody else sees.

So if they don't become a famous model, they suffer because they look in the mirror and they don't like what they see because they've been rejected all day long by people that don't even like girls in the first place.

And if they do succeed, they start making ten, fifteen, twenty thousand dollars a day and they don't even know or appreciate what it takes to make five bucks or a thousand bucks.

You got to be kidding me and Paul watching all of this is really really done.

This time I closed down my agency's La New York Miami forty agents Boom closed it all down, yes, ma'am.

And no one cares.

Oh I got ghosted by every single supermodel I ever created, every single one of them.

Fuck me, bar none, bar none.

Prior to that year.

Oh yeah, absolutely they ghosted me hundred percent, one hundred percent on thousand percent, none of them.

Remember day one you knocked on my door carry oders, or day one Stephanie, you were only making two hundred grand a year.

He is really, really, really done.

And then I became bankrupt.

I lost everything.

I lost all my money, I lost my home, I lost my buildings, I lost everything.

Yeah, I was back stealing food at Ralph's again, this time Ralphs in La.

Yeah.

I felt I just knew I couldn't do that anymore.

It's full circle to the end of the Land agency, when Paul was completely broke, and now he has no choice but to figure out a new life.

Remember that moment when Paul had just arrived in New York City.

He went to a club and he saw the head of the Elite modeling agency, John Casablancis, boogying down, just surrounded by gorgeous.

Models, everyone kissing the fucking ring.

I want that.

During Paul's time as a model agent, the top agents had huge amounts of power, and as we learned from the story of Jennifer Hejrmenez, that power was often wielded against the most vulnerable people.

It's been reported that John Casablancas had a sexual relationship with Paul's eventual client, supermodel Stephanie Seymour, when she was only sixteen years old, and he was far from the only model agent to do something like that.

It took all the way until the turn of this century for this behavior to have any sort of reckoning.

In nineteen ninety nine, the BBC produced a bombshell documentary on sexual predation at Elite to catch Gerard Marie bragging about his plans to seduce the very young contestants of an elite modeling competition.

Now, there were legal problems with the coverage, so we aren't quoting from it here, but many models have come out to say that they experienced sexual assault related to elite back then.

Some of the men who were accused are still alive, but John Casablancas died of cancer in twenty thirteen when he was seventy years old.

Eileen Ford never forgave the young upstart who started the model wars, but she did survive Casablancas by one year.

She died in twenty fourteen when she was ninety two years old, and Jennifer Jimenez she survived in the industry long enough to see most of the old guard finally go away.

It's sad.

It's sad what some of those people did to young girls.

It's horrible what those men did to young girls.

Yeah, Gerald Marie, John Castleblancas, all those guys, Karen's Agency, like all those shame on you.

I was groomed, you know, I was groomed by all these people.

When the whole Jeffrey Epstein client list thing, like the guy that owned Karen Models He's one of those people that came into my home.

There's so many of them.

I saw all of them around throughout the years of me modeling, you know, the decades.

Of me modeling.

Paul didn't have success in changing the culture of the old card.

It's hard to sum up his career like that, but he made la modeling a thing, a force to be reckoned with, and he definitely worked to protect his own clients to try to provide them with the success that he had and lost many times over the years.

Elite Board and the rest are still around today.

The Instagram age has definitely changed the dynamics of the industry and created a whole new group of influencers whose faces are gorgeous, but they probably don't have the height or the stature to walk runways today.

To be a well known model, you can be short.

I mean, Kylie Jenner is five six, But for a Kendall Jenner, her sister, who is five to eleven and has chosen a much more traditional modeling career, a lot of the same pressures must have existed at least in the beginning.

Jennifer fremens again.

If you're under eighteen, don't do it.

Full time for a living.

And if you do do it full time for a living, make sure your mom and dad are on board and that you have a family support and that you there's a rule that we talk about in recovery.

You say that rule sixty two.

Don't take yourself so seriously.

You know, Like I mean, it's like, let's just not take because I took everything so frick and seriously, and like I can never become.

My whole thing was I was such a people.

Please, that's like my main ism that I suffer from from alcoholic It's papable pleasing, Like I'll become whatever you want me to become, because if you become, if I become that, then maybe you'll like me.

And if you like me, maybe I'll like myself.

Well, that's not how we live life today, ladies and gentlemen.

You own yourself and don't.

Settle for less.

Like if you're a model, if you're under eighteen, you want a model, do it on the weekends, do it in summers.

Don't make that just your sole thing.

You have so many phases.

And if you want a model, like do it the right way, find the right agency.

If they're asking you, Guys, to pay for something, tell them up your ass, like walk away.

Please do not don't.

Pay money to do things with photographers, and do not let anybody touch your body in an inappropriate way, you know, And if you feel uncomfortable about doing something, then talk about it and say it, like speak your truth.

And if you can't handle that and the rejection and know there's going to be a lot of rejection, even in Hollywood, you know, like there's a lot of rejection.

I mean, I think rejections everywhere in this in this day and age.

But you know, a rejection on what you looked like and who you are like when you're giving your heart and soul to what you're doing, is a really big fucking bummer for you.

Like it bums you out hard.

So just know, like it's you're a chameleon.

You know that that's what we are with chameleons.

Still, things in the industry are more egalitarian in some ways.

You know, to become a famous model, you have to live in New York City, you had to go through the whole European trip in Paris was such an important market.

Now people are creating stars right out of freaking Alabama.

Now there's people in Alabama going directly to Vogue, people in Oklahoma going directly to Calvin, people in you know, all over the world, small little towns bypassing the big New York agencies.

So we just talked about how the modeling industry has changed over the past decade or so, and we also heard from Jennifer Jimenez.

But where did the other people in our story end up.

Like Paul's friend, former male escort, Billy Dijiglio, Well, he eventually met the fate of so many relentless hustlers out there.

They ended up making a million dollars a year profit from mepenthetamine I was selling and this guy Oka Hawaii, so I was having me send him stuff, and I guess he got busted over there and he set me up.

That was gone for ten years and ten months.

Now he's out of jail, living in Nevada with his girlfriend Mary, and he's still a part of Omar and Paul's lives.

Oh and let's not forget about Larry Lynde and Michael Fitzmorris.

Whatever happened to those guys sometime after the collapse of the Land Agency.

It seems that they got in trouble for fraud for selling some sports car franchises in Florida.

According to documents, they ended up paying thousands in fines, but eventually got supervised release and probation.

Larry died in twenty eleven.

Paul, for his part, called Michael Fitzmorris after Larry's death and they reconnected.

He says, I had to have to thank you.

If it wasn't for you and Larry, he says, I wouldn't be who I am today.

So I says, well, thank you.

I appreciate that.

So that's and we were close enough that thirty nine years doesn't matter, you know.

I mean, I know it sounds like a long time, but now we can get together and be like yesterday.

Friendship is more important than money or anything else.

Is the most important thing in life, because without friendship, what good is money?

And maybe there's even a possibility for a second act.

All I can say is I.

Wish we could do it again, you know, and maybe I can with Paul.

You know, maybe I can help Paul out if.

He needs help, you know, Is there's any way he needs help.

Its financial?

Whatever, I ran into.

A lot of money, put at you like that.

I sold thousands and thousands of acres for a lot of Paul knows he's seeing the deal and I sent it to him, and so if he needs help in anyway, I'll be there for him.

As for Paul, he ended up finding faith at the Kabala Center.

Interestingly enough, spirituality led Paul Fisher back into the modeling industry.

He says, his teacher insisted.

Lea says, you have to.

You have to.

You have to.

You have to spread the light, and you have to spread everything we've just taught you.

You can't keep it to yourself.

Man, can't sit on the top of a mountain pray.

That's not what you're here for.

You got to go back in.

So now Paul is back in the game.

He runs a boutique agency and only represents a few clients and that's it.

After sticking with us through all of this, that's what he's doing.

This business plays chicks on your mind and it sucks.

It's not real life.

What's real life is wiggling your toes to see if you're alive or not.

That's real life.

And I've tried to make an impact and I don't know if I have or not.

I don't know.

I don't know, I don't know.

But the life you live is real life, whether or not it feels real.

And the wars you fight are the wars you fight, modeling or otherwise.

And the impact you have, the legacy you leave, that's for history to judge.

We're all finished with Paul's story now, but next week we'll be back to wrap up Model Wars.

We've got two episodes left, so please tune in.

Model Wars was a production of iHeart Podcasts and Campside Media.

Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Model Wars was executive produced and hosted by Vanessa Gregoriotis.

Our senior writer was Michael kanyon Meyer.

Julia K.

S Levine was our producer and reporter.

Our senior producer was Lily Houston Smith, and our assistant editor was Emma Simonoff.

We had story and production.

Help from Shoshi Shmulowitz, Ali Haney, and Blake Rook.

Our production manager was Ashley Warren and our studio recordist was Ewan Lei Tremuen.

Sound design, mix and engineering by Mark McCadam.

iHeart Podcasts executive producers were Jennifer Bassett and Katrina Norbel.

The show was also executive produced by Rachel winter In, Campside Media's Josh Dean, Adam Hoff, and Matt Schaer.

If you'd like to access behind the scenes content from Model Wars and Campside Media, please go to join campside dot com.

That's j O I N C A M P s I d E dot com.

If you enjoyed Model Wars, please rate and review the show wherever you get your podcasts.

Thanks so much for listening.