The model who posed nude atop the Wall Street bull for Peter Beard is suing the photographer and his “possessive and estranged wife,” Nejma Beard, claiming they swindled her out of her life savings.
Leggy Natalie White, a friend of Beard’s for nine years, had her lawyer Gloria Allred file suit in Manhattan Supreme Court yesterday claiming she was ripped off — and so was an all-star team of models, including Pamela Anderson, Chanel Iman, Helena Christensen, Nina Agdal, Alexandra Richards, Angela Lindvall and Hannah Davis.
“Mr. Beard proposed that Ms. White leverage her valuable contacts and reputation in the modeling world, and invest her considerable life savings arranging, funding and producing two giant Polaroid shoots of dozens of the most notable supermodels,” the complaint states.
White was to receive the first 25 pieces from each shoot, and the models would each receive one piece. But White says she only got 16 pieces total and the models didn’t get any.
“Once [Nejma] Beard learned of the project, she forbade Mr. Beard and actively prevented him from abiding by his contractual commitment,” the suit alleges.
Beard, a Yale man with a house in Montauk and a ranch in Kenya, was married to model Cheryl Tiegs and discovered the stunning Iman, who would later marry David Bowie.
According to the suit, “Mr. Beard regularly expressed to Ms. White his frustration that [Nejma] strictly controls all his finances and does not allow him access to discretionary funds.”
Beard supposedly complained Nejma made him sleep on the marble floor of their apartment at the Osborne on West 57th Street and “baselessly had him involuntarily committed to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.”
The papers also allege that Beard calls his wife “an Afghan trench-warfare terrorist” he rescued from “the wilds of Kenya.”
Neither Allred nor a lawyer for the Beards had any comment.