Child Models and Unregulated Power: The Fashion Workers Act of 2025 as a Response to Industry Exploitation

The New York State Fashion Workers Act of 2025 addresses a critical gap in agency regulations within existing child labor protections. The act regulates model management companies for the first time. It closes an enforcement loophole left intact by past legislation, which allowed agencies to exercise control over models while avoiding accountability by classifying them as independent contractors.

Before its enactment, legislation failed to regulate model management companies that control and profit from minors, leaving agencies unaccountable through independent contractor classifications.¹ The Fashion Workers Act works to combat these oversights by defining the modeling industry under New York Labor Law, establishing safeguards against child sexual abuse, and placing enforceable limits on model management agencies’ control over minors’ labor and working conditions.

Historically, child modeling work existed outside current regulations that protected other child entertainment sectors such as film, television, and music. While other sectors of child performance were protected as early as 2003 through the New York Child Performers Education and Trust Law,² models were not until 2013. According to the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA), the 2003 act provided “safeguards for child wages and ensured education standards for thousands of children working in New York’s entertainment industry.” ³The 2003 law established the requirement for child performers, excluding child models, to have trust accounts for earnings⁴, as well as some education protections⁵- a system that was partly modeled after the Coogan Act of California, which was signed into California state law in 1939, and strictly enforced trust accounts be put in place for child actors that would include part of their earnings.⁶

In October 2013, former Governor Andrew M. Cuomo signed new amendments to New York’s Labor Law and Arts and Cultural Affairs Law that extended the existing protections for child performers to include child models.⁷ These amendments expanded the statutory definition of “child performer” to cover runway and print models under 18, thereby entitling them to the same protections as other young entertainers. Consequently, child models are now legally required to obtain a Child Performer Permit issued by the Department of Labor before engaging in modeling work within New York. ⁸ While the 2013 extension of child performer protections formally included child models, it failed to directly regulate model management companies or address the broader labor and accountability issues later targeted by the 2025 Fashion Workers Act. Although Labor Law § 140⁹ empowered enforcement of certain violations under Arts and Cultural Affairs Law § 35.05¹⁰ relating to child models, the act primarily established requirements regarding wages, trust accounts, permits, and education.¹¹ Despite these protections, child models remained only partially incorporated into New York labor law, leaving significant gaps in oversight and enforcement surrounding the modeling agencies and employers that profited from their labor.

In Doe v. Wilhelmina Models, Inc, Jane Doe sued two sets of defendants over alleged sexual abuse and inappropriate sexual photographs taken of her as a minor: Wilhelmina Models, Inc., the modeling agency that represented her, and Cal Tan, LLC, a seller of suntanning products for which Doe was hired to model in a print marketing campaign for.¹² At the time the photographs were taken, New York Penal Law defined a “sexual performance” to include visual depictions of a minor engaging in “sexual conduct,” which encompassed a lewd exhibition of the genitals.¹³ Although the statute did not expressly define what constituted a lewd exhibition, courts evaluate the overall content and context of the image to determine whether it meets the statutory threshold, rather than focusing solely on whether genitalia are explicitly displayed. This distinction is important, for it establishes that under New York State penal law, sexual exploitation may be inferred from the full context of a photoshoot, including posing, wardrobe, direction, and the possibility that nude photographs captured genitalia. However, it’s important to note that this standard can be difficult to prove, as courts must rely on contextual factors and competing interpretations of the image rather than simply explicit visual content alone.

The trial court dismissed Doe’s complaint, but the Appellate Division held that Doe did adequately plead predicate conduct–permitting revival under the Child Victims Act based on the “sexual performance” theory. As a result, the court ultimately found that Doe adequately alleged New York residency at the time of the alleged acts, and as such, that New York limitations law could govern her claims.¹⁴ The trial court, therefore, dismissed the action. On appeal, the New York Appellate Division, First Department, did not simply deny the appeal. Still, it modified the trial court’s ruling—reinstating the causes of action against Wilhelmina and reinstating the invasion of privacy claim against Cal Tan/New Sunshine, while affirming dismissal of the remaining claims against Sal Tan. This dismissal occurred within a regulatory framework that, at the time, failed to extend child-performer protections to models. The court’s issue of burden of proof within the modeling industry must be understood against the limited labor protections offered to child models at the time of the alleged misconduct—protections that the Legislature did not address until the Fashion Workers Act, much later.

The decentralized, minimally supervised structure of modeling work complicated the application of the 2013 child labor protections. Although the modeling agency's alleged misconduct involved the exploitation of young models and its failure to protect them adequately, the industry's structure allowed agencies to avoid direct accountability by presenting themselves as intermediaries rather than employers. Before the 2013 amendment, and unlike other child-entertainment sectors, the modeling industry was characterized by decentralized workplaces, informal hiring practices, and a lack of chaperone- or teacher-on-set requirements. These protections exist in other areas of the child performance industry. Yet, before the 2013 amendments, child models were excluded from many of these protections, and even after formal inclusion, agency oversight remained incomplete. Modeling agencies frequently classify them as independent contractors or temporary talent rather than performers. Moreover, modeling engagements are often arranged through agency submissions, direct bookings, or international placements with minimal standardized oversight.¹⁵ This informality diffuses accountability across agencies, brands, photographers, and sometimes foreign entities. Often, abuse persists precisely because modeling work is not performed on fixed sets and is rarely supervised by production companies with compliance departments — conditions that distinguish modeling from television or film work and amplify the consequences of regulatory gaps. Child models often work in private studios, hotel rooms, or shoots abroad where neither a guardian nor a designated welfare worker is required to be present. ¹⁶The structural conditions create environments where children are often isolated from adults, making them substantially more vulnerable to sexual coercion and abuse. The results of this isolation can be seen in cases like Doe v. Wilhelmina Models Inc, where Jane Doe alleged exploitation occurring under conditions of inadequate supervision and institutional oversight.

The 2013 legislation marked a significant shift in the history of fashion labor and its regulation of child modeling work. Before its enactment, child models, despite being part of a multi-million dollar industry, worked outside the traditional scope of labor protections, and were largely overlooked by government agencies and existing federal legislation.¹⁷ However, the 2013 legislation was undermined by the fact that the very agencies that manage minors were not directly regulated, as the Fashion Workers Act later required. A core reason the 2013 amendments failed to protect minors from abuse is that modeling agencies could still avoid direct accountability by operating as intermediaries rather than as the legally responsible employer. By classifying models—including children—as independent contractors,¹⁸ agencies had few direct statutory obligations as management companies to provide safe working conditions, prevent harassment, or monitor the environments in which models were placed. Therefore, while the 2013 legislation imposed permits, trust accounts, employee certificates, notices of use, limits on hours, meal and rest breaks, and responsible-person requirements on child performers under 16, it left untouched the structural power that modeling agencies exercised over young models' careers. As a result, the statutory protections granted to child models in 2013 failed to translate into the workplace, including protections against sexual abuse within the workplace environment. The legislative memorandum accompanying the New York State Fashion Workers Act specifically identified persistent problems of sexual abuse and financial exploitation as stemming from a lack of accountability within the industry. The memorandum, thus, aims to explain that the Act was intended to close the loophole that had allowed model management companies to evade legal responsibility by classifying themselves outside the scope of existing employment agency regulations.¹⁹ Before the 2025 law’s enactment, the entities responsible for hiring, managing, and placing minors remained unregulated. Without agency oversight, safeguards against sexual abuse remained lacking. Underage models, like Jane Doe, were therefore left without adequate protection from the agency-driven conditions that made abuse possible. The absence of employer classification meant that no single actor was legally responsible for ensuring safe working conditions, allowing exploitation risks to persist under the fragmented, unregulated industry practices used by modeling agencies. ​

Research cited by the New York Senate and attributed to the Model Alliance and Human Rights Watch found in 2012 that female print and runway models frequently reported being pressured to pose nude, being alone in rooms with adult men, being touched without consent, and being silenced out of fear of losing their jobs.²⁰ These abuses revealed that the issue did not lie solely in the absence of child-labor rules, but in the lack of an enforcement mechanism to ensure their implementation. Because modeling agencies controlled access to work assignments, bookings, and career advancement, they held significant leverage over minors, allowing risks of abuse and coercion to persist without a clear enforcement pathway. The New York State Fashion Workers Act later addressed this imbalance by imposing fiduciary duties on model management companies, requiring registration and disclosure, and creating enforcement mechanisms to address abuse, harassment, retaliation, and financial exploitation.

²¹In February 2019, former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed the Child Victims Act into law. The law created “lookback windows” for victims of child sexual abuse. The windows were temporary “lookback” periods where filing deadlines were suspended. This allowed survivors of sexual abuse to bring civil claims against perpetrators and enablers even if the abuse happened decades earlier. The law allowed victims like Jane Doe in Doe v. Wilhelmina Models, Inc. to refile and revive time-barred claims, thereby permitting her to seek accountability from the agency. Quoting the Senate Introducer’s Memorandum, the court explained that the Child Victims Act’s primary purpose is to “open the doors of justice,”²², thus creating a one-year window for adult survivors whose claims had otherwise expired. By extending the warranted time for bringing civil actions for physical, psychological or other injury suffered as a result of child sexual abuse against any party whose intentional or negligent acts or omissions are alleged to have resulted in the abuse, the Act enabled plaintiffs such as Jane Doe to pursue claims not only against individual abusers, but also against institutions and agencies alleged to have facilitated or failed to prevent the abuse.

Although the Child Victims Act revived time-barred claims and expanded civil liability, it did not alter the concentrated authority agencies exercised over young models’ travel, housing, and finances. In the case of Sutton v. Tapscott, American model Carré Otis, whose legal name is Carré Sutton, alleged that Elite executives exercised extensive control over her living arrangements, transportation, and access to work while she was a minor model. According to the complaint, Tapscott acted as the “housemother for the child models,” overseeing their housing, transportation to jobs, and other basic needs, while Sutton lived in Tapscott’s apartment and remained financially dependent on the agency because of her low wages.²³ Sutton, who was recruited by the modeling agency Elite Model Management as a teenager and sent to Paris, was allegedly sexually abused by the head of Elite’s European agencies.²⁴ In her complaint, Sutton recounts that as a seventeen-year-old, she was sent to Paris under the guise of career advancement, only to be isolated, controlled, and repeatedly assaulted. She describes being told that living with the agency head was necessary for her success and that she felt unable to refuse without jeopardizing her livelihood. Agency accountability cannot merely be understood as a lawsuit after abuse has already occurred, for such mechanisms do not constrain the day-to-day authority agencies hold over minors. Elite Model Management’s power as an agency under legislation that fails to regulate its control over travel, housing, and professional placements demonstrates how, without meaningful limits on agency control over working conditions, exploitation is enabled by the very systems meant to protect underage models.

The Second Circuit held that Sutton plausibly alleged facts supporting an inference that Tapscott knew or should have known that sending Sutton to live with Gérald Marie in Paris placed her at risk of sexual assault. Trudi Tapscott, an American executive at Elite Model Management, allegedly knew that Carré was at risk due to Gérald Marie—the former European president of Elite’s European agencies—having a known reputation within the industry for sexual misconduct toward young models.²⁵ As a senior executive responsible for overseeing new and often underage talent, Tapscott was allegedly aware of Marie’s behavior, or at a minimum, of credible complaints against him. The claim asserts that by placing a minor in his custody under the guise of advancing her career, Tapscott knowingly exposed her to foreseeable harm.²⁶ The Fashion Workers Act of 2025 directly addresses this gap by imposing regulatory oversight on model management groups—providing enforcement and accountability on agency control without any legal responsibility that child labor protections in the fashion industry have lacked for more than a decade.²⁷

Under the Fashion Workers Act, abuses by modeling agencies were challenged, a sharp contrast to the 2013 legislation that left a loophole to continue inappropriate conduct toward their models, especially those who are underage. The Act required model management companies to “establish a company policy that addresses abuse, harassment, and other inappropriate behavior.” Such policy requirements are vital in practice, as they shift accountability for agency conduct from courtrooms to enforceable workplace standards that modeling agencies are now legally required to maintain. Such a policy establishes a threshold for accountability that makes it harder to ignore, minimize, or treat harmful conduct as an isolated incident. Instead, agencies are now required to take affirmative steps to prevent unreasonable risks of danger. By placing the industry under the jurisdiction of the New York Department of Labor, the legislature made clear that compliance was mandatory and not discretionary; abuse and harassment would be subject to formal legal oversight and enforcement.

In addition to requiring a written abuse-and-harassment policy, the Fashion Workers Act introduces several structural safeguards, including: fiduciary duties requiring agencies to act in models’ best interests; due diligence obligations to prevent unsafe working conditions; limits on power of attorney agreements; the right for models to bring an agent, manager, or chaperone to jobs and castings; informed written consent requirements for sexually explicit material and digital replicas; transparency requirements regarding contracts and financial deductions; and anti-retaliation protections for models who report misconduct or decline unsafe work. ²⁸These safeguards directly target the documented patterns of sexual exploitation involving underage models. The Act prohibits agencies from requiring minors to sign power-of-attorney agreements, a practice that historically enabled agencies to exercise sweeping control over a child’s finances, travel, and bookings—including placements involving nudity or sexually suggestive content. In 2013, Louisa Raske filed claims against the modeling agency Next Management, alleging violations of labor laws and exploitation under agency contracts. The case addressed allegations that the agency exercised significant control over the model’s professional opportunities through power-of-attorney (POA) agreements in her contract. A POA can allow an agency to act on behalf of a minor regarding finances, travel, and bookings. However, there is a significant risk in this broad discretion – for it can facilitate exploitation and pressure minors into accepting unsafe assignments. Raske v. Next Mgt., LLC. demonstrates how tensions between agency control and individual labor rights can affect young models’ capacity to protect their own interests.²⁹ Ultimately, the prohibition of requiring POA agreements as a condition of representation, as well as limiting what POA covers, reflects the Fashion Worker Act's central aim: to limit agency power over minors by removing the legal loopholes that allow agencies to continue exercising excessive control over minors’ labor–and thereby reduce the power of the structures that enable such exploitation.³⁰

The Act further mandates that work that “required nudity or other sexually explicit material”³¹ must be disclosed in writing in advance, and that no minor may participate without informed consent obtained from both the model and, where applicable, a parent or guardian.³² The Fashion Workers Act also imposes a legal obligation on management companies to require that no assignment for a minor poses an “unreasonable risk of danger,” a standard that explicitly encompasses environments in which sexual coercion or abuse might occur, as well as establishes a preventative legal standard designed to protect child models from exploitation before harm occurs. Unlike past legislation, such as the Child Victims Act, which limited liability to cases where abuse had to be proven before a case could be filed, the 2025 law creates preventive duties and compliance obligations, ensuring management companies assess whether a job’s conditions could reasonably expose a minor to harm before the harm occurs. In practice, this includes environments where power imbalances, lack of supervision, or isolation could facilitate sexual coercion or abuse. Because risk is now defined so broadly, the Fashion Workers Act addresses not only overt misconduct but also the power structures that make exploitation more likely, thereby shifting responsibility onto model management companies to avoid placing minors in vulnerable situations in the first place.

For the first time, these duties are backed by both the state enforcement and private legal action: The Department of Labor and the private right of action that allows minors—through their guardians—to seek redress when these protections are violated. Specifically, the Act permits models to bring claims against model management companies for breaches of statutory duties and prohibitions, as well as to file complaints with the Department of Labor.³³ The 2013 statute extended child-performer protections to child models. Still, it did not directly regulate model management companies’ control over bookings, placements, and working conditions, which could enable or fail to prevent the mistreatment of models. The Fashion Workers Act, by contrast, imposes affirmative duties on model management companies, creates enforceable rights for models, and introduces oversight from the Department of Labor. It remedies what the Senate identifies as the defining flaw of earlier child-entertainment regulation in the context of modeling.

Although the Fashion Workers Act applies to both adults and minors, one of its most important impacts is on the conditions that have historically exposed underage models to sexual abuse: unsupervised workplaces, undisclosed sexualized content, and unchecked agency power. By finally placing agencies under regulatory oversight, the New York Fashion Workers Act of 2025 targets the structural gap that allowed sexual exploitation of minors to persist even after the 2013 reforms.