‘America’s Next Top Model’ Alum India Gants Reveals The Warning She Received From Tyra Banks Ahead Of The Finale — And If She Abided By It

America’s Next Top Model fans received some intel from Cycle 23 champ India Gants.

The ANTM alum took to TikTok last week and claimed that the show’s creator and executive producer, Tyra Banks, said to her that “if [she] told anybody that [she’d] won America’s Next Top Model before it actually aired on TV, that they would fly [her] back, reshoot the finale, and have the other girl win,” per Entertainment Weekly.

“It is a really big deal if you leak the secret of America’s Next Top Model, and she was trying to make that very, very clear to me,” she said. “I was told I couldn’t tell my family or my significant other or my closest friends, nobody. But, I think enough time has passed where I can confess who I told.”

Decider reached out to representatives for Banks for comment.

While Gants highlighted in the video (which was in response to a fan) that she obviously “wanted to keep the secret,” she noted that she had to “make plans for [her] life,” citing the example of if she were to move to New York, her “significant other at the time had to know.”

“My mom, she loves to talk and share about her kids, which is awesome, but I was pretty nervous that if I told my mom, she would tell everybody,” she shared. “So, I ended up telling my dad. Actually, first, I told my boyfriend at the time, and after him I told my dad. I waited a really long time before I told my mom.”

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While she eventually told her mother, Gants said she “didn’t tell any of [her] three siblings,” and that they “actually got to watch the finale in real time.” The same went for her friends, who were “texting her like crazy” once the finale aired.

In a 2017 interview with People following her victory, Gants told the outlet that she had “known for quite some time, but it’s really exciting to have the whole public know as well.”

Other alums of the reality competition series have shared their experiences online since the show ended, including Cycle 4 winner Naima Mora, who revealed on TikTok in October 2023 that she was dropped from Ford Models after shaving her head and gaining weight, claiming that the agency was “very disappointed in working with [her] because [she] didn’t fit the industry standard and the status quo of what a model and what ‘beautiful’ looked like at the time.”