Campsite Media.

So we've been telling this story for a while now, and you may feel that Paul Fisher has been getting off a little light, but that's about to change.

Got to get out of New York.

I'm coming back to Los Angeles.

I literally didn't have suitcases and shit like that.

I think I had won, and everything else was like in a brown paper bag.

And I flew back to Los Angeles.

A friend picked me up at the airport on his yellow motorcycle.

We're driving down the one oh one freeway.

I'm on the back of his motorcycle, no helmet, two freaking brown bags that I'm gripped onto, and this asshole He's going in and out of traffic on this freaking yellow motorcycle and we take a spill.

I go sprawling across the Venturo one oh one.

Ambulance comes takes me to the emergency hospital.

I called my mom and my dad.

I say, you guys got to come pick up pick me up.

So not a great homecoming.

And this is after Paul's mom had convinced him to give up his dream of becoming a model Asian in New York and just moved back to La which Paul was also freaked out about because it basically meant telling Paul to come home to his father, the liquor salesman that he didn't get along with, and admit that he's a failure.

They got me in the car, my dad started freaking yelling at me.

You gave up your college education, you threw away your degree, and now look at you.

And he was pissed off and he was screaming at me.

My mom was trying to tell him the calm is ass down.

And we stopped at a red light and I got out of the car and I just started walking and I had nothing I had.

That was the lowest part.

That was the lowest point in my life.

I had no money, I didn't know who to call.

I didn't know what the fuck to do.

But Paul doesn't one to linger on his low moments very long.

He goes on to possibly new lower moments because after the car crash on the yellow motorcycle, a friend picks him up.

She lets him crash at her place, she gives some food, helps them care for his wounds.

She acts like a sister to him, really, just like Paul helped his sister Deborah, who's still in and out of the hospital for her cancer treatment.

And into this scene of helping and healing comes the guy who's interested in having Paul find girls to have sex with him.

I mean, nothing new there, but Paul didn't think he was going to have to do this again.

After Brazil.

He says, I'm having a couple parties.

I need your special skill set.

And now Paul's approaching rock bottom.

My job was to go out and find beautiful girls at nightclubs in La and they could some sleep within, some nod and I remember one day I got a phone call from one of those girls and they said, Paul, your friend shit on me.

And I know he shits on everybody.

He's an asshole.

She says, no, no, no, no, no, he shit on me.

I said, I know that's who he is.

She says, sh he actually defecated on me.

Paul.

Time for Paul to find a new job.

From iHeart Podcasts in Campside Media, I'm Vanessa Grigoriatis and this is Model Wars episode five.

Now you might be thinking, oh boohoo, Paul has to retreat back to Los Angeles, California, one of the most famous and wealthy cities in the world.

Place where you have a lot of fun.

Our favorite Jeufro pimp, Paul Fisher, is just in so much trouble.

But at this time in the early eighties, as far as the modeling industry is concerned, LA is a backwater.

There's no modeling done in LA.

I mean very little, swimsuits, nothing, nothing, stupid shit.

That's not where real models go.

Real models go to Europe, Paris, lond and Milan to become real models.

That's what I learned.

So, of course Paul is going to try to get back into the modeling business here and dominate.

But if he's going to start another modeling business, he has two choices.

He can return to New York, where he's already blacklisted at every agency or often true, he can try to change which the power structure of the industry, and Paul being Paul, he's inclined towards the more outrageous option.

So one of the few modeling agencies making a GOVID in LA at that time is East West.

That's quite a name.

It's hard not to notice that even the big LA agency feels like it has to reference the East coast.

East West is run by a South African immigrant named David Altman.

Here's David la In the eighties was you know, glam metal bands, Motley Crue, Poison, Guns n' Roses.

You know, we're talking the Sunset Strip, people with big hair.

You'd walk down Sunset Boulevard, You'd come out of a restaurant in the middle of the night and then oh, my god, that's boy George, that's Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince.

Allman actually got his start in the industry in New York, especially when he was dating a model, a fellow South African named Alexi Singer.

She's got big, bright eyes, strikingly precise features, and don't forget her ears.

Clients would say to me, oh my god, have you seen that ears?

And it was like, yeah, great ears, you know, amazing ears for looking at and presumably for hearing.

So Alexa was on the cover of many magazines in the eighties and the nineties.

It was weird for me, you know, as the boyfriend, because she would sometimes be on the cover of Vogue, Self, Mademoiselle Glamor.

And in those days in New York, he had the newsstand, which was this wooden structure on the sidewalk and you'd walk past the newsstand.

It would be like embarrassing that she would have.

You know, she would be on the cover of five or six magazines all at the same time.

It was almost unfair.

When David and Alexa moved to la they started East West.

They set up shop on Hollywood Boulevard, across from the Stars on the Walk of Fame.

Their office was designed to look a lot like the interiors that models would see when they arrived Elite or Ford in New York City.

In other words, East West is basically tailor made for Paul Fisher's West Coast comeback.

Middle of the day.

He has five portfolios under each arm, and he walks in and he says to me, I heard about you.

I love the name East West, and that can help you grow your business.

David notices that Paul seems to be wearing his interview best.

He was wearing one of those vests, those tank top vests, but those.

Ones that you see in New York.

They wear them in the summertime with holes in it, you know, those ventilated holes.

Yep, Paul is in a mesh vest.

But he feels like the interview is going pretty well.

I loved him immediately.

His energy you know, he's a compulsive, hard worker.

He's like the Jurisale battery.

My brother, who was my partner, loved him immediately.

But David Altman has a harder time convincing his staff to love Paul.

Other agents in the office basically took one look at him and said, look, if you hire this maniac, weati here.

It takes a special kind of guide to create a staff revolt after one interview.

His energy, I think, in that kind of work environment was perceived by other people as potentially threatening, and they understood that with that energy, it wouldn't take very long for him to be in charge.

So David starts working to win over his staff.

But Paul is getting desperate.

He's out of his friend's place.

He's living on borrowed time in a studio apartment.

I had been evicted out of that studio apartment for not paying rent for two months.

I had to be out that morning.

I had a white Berlinetta, a white Berlinetta Camaro, no gas, no money to my freaking name, I'm going back for my fourth interview.

I wake up in the morning, I know I can't go back to the place because now I'm a Victag's why the night before I take all my belongings, which is like a stereo and a couple of paying I like nothing.

But that night Paul's last Romanian crap gets stolen out of his car.

Now I go over to David Allman for my fourth and freaking final interview.

Don't have a place to live now, don't have any clothes, not one piece of clothing left on my freaking name.

The car is like running on freaking fumes.

I walk in to meet David Allman and after fifteen minutes he goes, you know what we decided Paul, one of my bookers.

She thinks you're too intense and too aggressive.

We just don't think we have a home for you.

And I went, whoa, David.

I got no money, bro, Everything was just taken out of my car.

I said, by the way, if you don't want to hire me, I don't want to work for you.

If you think that woman that used to work at Wilhelmina is going to take you to the fucking Promised Land, then you deserve her.

I could take this place and put it on the freaking map, bro.

With everything I just learned in New York, I could run this place, not her.

The staff is West had read the situation perfectly.

In other words, he went into another room.

He spoke to his brother Michael.

He came back, he said, he said, come with me, and he moved me into his home, and he bought me clothes and he took care of me.

He was sleeping in his car.

Okay, he lived in my house for a while.

It's called identifying potential and then resourcing the potential, and then empowering the potential so that they can be the best that.

They can be.

So now that Paul has a job, he makes it his mission to put Los Angeles on the modeling map.

Bro people laughed at LA.

If there's one hundred modeling jobs a day done in New York, there's three TV commercials done in New York.

In LA, there's one hundred TV commercials done in LA.

Three modeling jobs.

Remember, it's the magazines in New York that are running the fashion industry.

So that's where Paul is setting his sights.

How do I take girls that live in LA and book them directly into New York, bypass the New York modeling agencies and go directly to Vogue.

I knew them.

I knew the editors.

I had met them when I was in New York.

I met mister Avadat, I met mister School, I met them all.

I hung out with all these people for minutes here in minutes there.

I knew them, I knew of them.

And so what I did is I said, you know what, fucking fucking le fuck Fords and Gwillian Klick.

I'm going directly to the New York clients.

Yeah, Paul's ready to run another model war.

He's talking about Wilhelmina and Click.

Those are two other major modeling agencies which are both based in New York.

I would wake up at five o'clock in the morning.

David would be freaking sleeping his ass off with his brother.

I'd be inside the agency, literally sleeping in the office.

I would walk into the office at seven thirty eight o'clock in the morning and it would walk in and he was like sleeping.

He was sleeping in the office.

I was like, dude, what's up.

And he would go to the restroom and he'd splash water on his face, run water through his hair, brush his teeth with his finger, and then looking good.

I want to get up at five o'clock by the time New York opened up.

I'm an animal.

I'm directly booking into New York.

So I'm taking girls that live in LA and I'm booking them directly into New York.

And my reputation spread like freaking wildfire, and they hated me.

The New York agency's freaking hated me.

I'm becoming John Casablancas.

But in LA, I'm the man for sure.

Okay, So that's what's going on in LA.

But Omar still in New York.

He's landed a job actually with John Casablancas's agency Elite.

But now Paul convinces Omar to move to LA and to build East West's men's division, and.

We want to show him how this shit is done.

The band is back together and Paul has all the success that he ever wanted, so now it's time for him to throw it all away.

As Paul and Omar are scheming to revitalize LA's modeling scene, David Altman made sure he was smack in the middle of Hollywood's A list.

There was no shortage of egos, and unfortunately, Paul's continued to be his worst enemy.

There was a woman who opened a restaurant in a nightclub on Beverly Boulevard called Helena's Invitation, Only she had to invite you, so you couldn't apply to be a member.

She would have to look at you and go, do you want to be a member, And then she'd write her home number down on a napkin.

You could pay her a lot of money which would allow you to come to Helena's and bring one person.

The next table next to you was that was Sean, and that was Madonna, and then over there was Jack Nicholson.

And what was Jack Nicholson doing?

He was doing in real life, like with his eyebrows what he did in the movies.

And there was Warren Bay.

Anyway, it was a fantastic SCE.

In this intimate, shoulder to shoulder celebrity setting.

It sometimes mixed in interesting ways with all that eighties macho bullshit that was wafting through the air.

If you went to Helena's, which I did, and you sat next to Madonna and Sean Penn, and you looked at Madonna in a way that Sean thought was inappropriate, maybe three seconds longer than Sean thought it should be.

Anything could happen.

In this telling.

The eighties were all about guys putting a lot of product in their hair and going out with their girlfriends, often models, and then fighting people.

You know.

Axel Rose had a reputation for being very aggressive.

Mickey Rourke.

You know, Mickey would walk out a restaurants and got pissed off that the paparazzi.

Were there, and he took a swing at them.

It was normal.

Introduce So Paul says, he's not at Helenez on the particular night we're going to describe.

He's actually at another exclusive club that's called Flaming Colossus that was once described by the La Times as a place for black clad fashion models and the sort of expatriate continentals who designed sportswear or do a little cinematography on the side.

I had a girlfriend at the time, beautiful black girl named Katrina.

I was in love, two years in love, and then one day we broke up and I walked into the nightclub and there was Katrina was some freaking big old dude with his arm around her.

In the paleolithic era known as the nineteen eighties, this is an act of war.

I beat him to a pope, dragged him through the fucking club.

He ended up in the hospital.

I went to work Monday morning, and David Alman looked at me and he said, hey, hey, hey, hey, that boy you put in the hospital.

That's Pam Piper's brother.

Pam Piper was one of our most famous models at the time.

I said, see, well, so what is that I have to do with anything.

You're gonna have to apologize to Pam and to the boy.

Go to the hospital and apologize.

Fuck you go apologize, or I have to fire.

You said, you're gonna fire me.

I run this place.

I run la.

You can't fire my ass.

I'll take the whole fucking place down.

I'll take everybody with me.

He said, well, you're fired.

If you don't do it, he fired me.

David Alman fired me.

She was upset because her brother, you know, apparently, you know, was roughed up, and I think simultaneously, like maybe.

He was annoying me.

I don't really remember, like maybe Paul was annoying me, you.

Know, that seems unlikely.

I think Pam.

Issued me an ultimatum, if you don't give him the bullet, I'm out of here.

And she was somebody that was highly respected by other models, So he suddenly became a risk.

So Pam basically like called me up and said, look, you know what, if you don't you know, this guy's like a complete nutjob.

If you don't get rid of him, I'm out of here.

So I gave him the push.

You know, basically, Paul is out of a job.

Yet again, some of us would be despondent, but you could say that Paul goes into Jerry Maguire mode.

You remember the scene.

It's when Jerry's leaving his fancy sports agency and he's trying to convince the entire staff to leave with him.

Anybody else wants to come with me.

This moment will be the moment of something real and fun and inspiring in this god forsaken business, and we will do it together.

I went over to my little apartment that I had.

I called every one of the models to come with me.

We had like one hundred and fifty miles at the time.

Who's coming with me?

Who's coming with me?

Nobody returned my call.

They all told me to fuck off, including Omar.

This is embarrassing.

Omar ran the men's Omar had one hundred and fifty guys.

I said, Omar, come over.

He goes, Paul, you don't got no money, I said, I do.

I just borrowed ten thousand dollars from my grandpa.

He was, Paul, how are you going to compete with anybody doing with ten thousand bucks?

I said, all the models are going to come with me.

He said, no, they're not, Paul.

No one's coming with you.

What what?

No one is coming with Paul.

It looks like he's out of luck and on his own.

So Paul made his big plea as he was ousted from East West, but it looked like nobody wanted to go with him, not even Omar, who we all assumed was the renee Zellwegger to Tom Cruise's Jerry McGuire.

But just like Jerry McGuire, it turns out Paul does have one person in his corner.

I will go with you one young model.

Thank you.

She's actually only thirteen or fourteen years old, and her name is Jennifer Jimenez.

And Paul is over the moon about this.

She walked into my agency and I looked at her and I laughed, and I said, okay, first of all, take off all that makeup, little girl, and we're gonna shave your head, then you're can you would meet a friend of min named Bruce Weber.

What yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, You're gonna take off all that makeup.

I'm gonna make you look like a little boy, and then you're gonna go meet Bruce Webber.

She came back the next day, head shaved, no makeup on.

I introduced her to Bruce Webber.

Bruce Webber booked her for the Azzadine Olaya campaign and walk in the fashion show, booker for Calvin Klein, and she was off and running.

Put her on the cover of Americanelle.

Was the youngest girl ever on the cover of Americanell.

So it's just Jennifer, this one middle school kid who's gonna come over and she's gonna join Paul.

You can be with an agency, but it's the agent that actually represents you, that loves you, that's who you really want to be with.

So in the modeling business, you can be with any name brand, fancy agency.

You want to be with, But does your agent love you and Paul love Jennifer.

So yeah, so Jennifer went did the I mean I had no for me?

It wasn't even a quick and of course Jennifer went with Baul.

So Paul founds a new agency in his apartment with Jennifer Jimenez as his only client.

It's called IT Models.

How did I come up with the name it?

I had placed Jennifer with an agency in Paris called City See it Y, one of the biggest agencies in Paris.

When Jennifer came over to my agency, I couldn't afford stickers, I couldn't afford portfolios.

So this little fourteen year old girl has her city model's portfolio on our on my table, my kitchen table.

I don't have an office, I have a studio apartment.

And she takes a piece of tape.

She covers up the y, covers up the sea.

She goes, Paul, we don't need portfolios.

We just call it it.

You just cover up the sea and cover up the wy.

I can keep my old portfolio from Paris.

I went, you gotta be freaking kidding me.

It was born.

So Paul and this teenage girl are joining forces that IT Models, and Paul is once again clawing his way back into the modeling industry, and little by little it's starting to work.

We're going to get into all of that but before we are really overdue to discuss what is modeling at its core, especially when you're dealing with young girls.

What is this world that Paul's trying to climb to the top of.

Next episode, Jennifer Jimenez is going to explain it, and some of it is going to be dark.

Not all modeling stories are this dark.

Some of them really aren't.

But we think it's time for you to hear from one of the girls themselves.

I kept saying, you should get your daughter into modeling, you should get your daughter into money.

Abnormal became the new normal for me, you know, and I was being looked at for the moment I started as an object.

I was remember this one teacher, drama teacher of all teachers, and she was like, oh, you think you're going to get away with everything because you have a pretty face.

And I just looked at her like she has no idea.

I just came back from Tokyo.

I've been sexually assaulted, like I'm paying for my family, like for us to survive, and she's making fun of like me being pretty or ugly or something like co fuck yourself, lady.

That's next time on Model Wars.

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 Kenyon Meyer.

Julia K.

S Levine was our producer and reporter.

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

We had story and production help from Shoshi Shmolowitz, Ali Haney, and Blake Rook.

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