More than 20 years later, it’s still an iconic moment, but as Tyra Banks shared in the new Netflix documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model, “that was very tough for me.”

In the seventh episode of America’s Next Top Model’s fourth cycle, Tyra calls back the two contestants she’d just eliminated, Tiffany Richardson and Rebecca Epley.

“Can you guys stand in front of me?” Tyra asked. “I just want to say one more thing to you. Rebecca, I admire your emotion right now, it shows to me that this was something that’s very important to you. Tiffany, I’m extremely disappointed in you. This is a joke to you. You’ve been through anger management. You’ve been through your grandmother getting her lights turned off to buy you a swimsuit for this competition, and you go over there and you joke and you laugh. This is serious to these girls, and this should be serious to you.”

Tiffany attempted to defend herself, which only made Tyra more upset.

“But this is not, be quiet Tiffany, be quiet,” she yelled. “What is wrong with you? Stop it! I have never in my life yelled at a girl like this. When my mother yells like this it’s because she loves me. I was rooting for you; we were all rooting for you. How dare you! Learn something from this. When you go to bed at night you lay there and you take responsibility for yourself ‘cause nobody’s gonna take responsibility for you. You rollin’ your eyes and you act like this because you’ve heard it all before, you’ve heard it all before. You don’t know where the hell I come from, you have no idea what I’ve been through, but I’m not a victim, I grow from it and I learn. Take responsibility for yourself.”

That moment has launched millions of GIFs, memes and parodies. But as shocking as the scene was on TV, the reality was even more harsh, according to the people who were there to witness it.

“There was a lot more that was really said, and some of the things that were said were really not well-intentioned,” ‘ANTM’ creative director Jay Manuel said in the documentary. I will probably never repeat the lines that were actually said in that room that day.”

“All I know is the next week we had all the lawyers on set,” Nolè Marin, judge, said.

Tiffany didn’t participate in the documentary but did provide further details on what Tyra said to her in an interview published by BuzzFeed in 2017.

The outlet reported that, “the argument was ‘1,000 times worse’ in reality. Richardson was hesitant to elaborate, but when pressed for more details, said she recalled Banks yelling at her, ‘You can go back to your house and sleep on your mattress on the floor with your baby,’ in front of the other judges, contestants, and crew members.

“Richardson wouldn’t reveal further information about what may have been edited out of Banks’s tirade, but that particular comment, she said, ‘stayed in the back of my mind,’” the article continued. “[Senior producer Heather] Cocks said that though she wasn’t there during the elimination, she was heavily involved in the editing process, and she couldn’t remember Banks saying that in any of the transcripts. She did, however, confirm that the tirade was trimmed, mainly due to time constraints.”

Looking back 20 years later for the documentary, Tyra seemed to understand the seriousness of her moment with Tiffany, while also feeling like her anger was justified.

“I went too far, you know, I lost it,” Tyra later said in the documentary. “It was probably bigger than her, it was family, friends, society, Black girls, all the challenges that we have, so many people saw that we’re not good enough, I think all that was in that moment. That’s some Black girl stuff that goes real deep inside of me, but I knew I went too far.”

‘Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model’ is now streaming on Netflix.

(Photos: Hulu; Netflix)