Aspiring models: if your prospective agent claims to your parents he's a good Christian and then invites you to pay to live in his pseudo-harem with other teen models, perhaps you should run in the other direction. Hayden Holt is suing former agent Aristeo Tengco, whom she claims repeatedly groped her and refused to pay her when she fled his apartment-turned-model boarding house. According to her lawsuit, 19-year-old Holt was “working and living under relentless and severe and pervasive sex-based hostility and fear.”
Holt, who works under the name Hayden D’Wolf, says Tengco spotted her at a modeling competition last summer after she graduated high school, and offered her a contract. He talked her parents into letting her go with him by “giving them a big speech about being a big Christian, about how I’d have a safe place to stay in New York.” Tengco runs Emmanuel New York Models out of his Second Ave. apartment—he outfitted his four-bedroom, two-bathroom pad with bunk beds for the models to be able to live, so long as they pay him rent.
Holt says she ignored the warning signs, including other models who were angrily moving out of the apartment when she moved in, at first: “I was getting jobs, modeling jobs—my dream, my passion, I love it—but I knew I was being treated wrong,” she told the Post. She claims Tengco started touching her inappropriately in "an unwelcome sexual manner.”
By November, Holt and a 15-year-old model from Idaho also living there had enough: “Me and her finally talked about what was going on...that’s when I realized this was really messed up." They both fled, but Holt says Tengco withheld all the money she made during her short modeling career.
Tengco lawyer says that Holt is just trying to extort him. For his part, Tengco insisted to the Daily News that he did nothing wrong, and none of the other models who had lived with him over the last nine years "ever complained before." "I just hope there's no drama created by all of this," he said. “It’s given me so much trauma and stress.”
