Do we like Heidi Klum?
Our score: 7 out of 10. A clean record on harm and a decent one on character, but the digging turned up less on her views than we'd like.
Heidi Klum was born in Bergisch Gladbach, West Germany, in 1973. At 18 she won a German modelling contest, moved to New York and ended up a Victoria's Secret regular. She had originally planned to be a designer, which explains a lot about the next chapter.
That chapter was Project Runway. She helped develop it, hosted it from its December 2004 debut and executive-produced it, winning an Emmy for hosting in 2013. She left in 2018 after 16 seasons and came back for season 21 in 2025. Disney has since renewed it for season 22, with Nina Garcia and new judge Law Roach alongside her.
The drag stoush is the closest thing to a real controversy. In 2019 ProSieben picked her to host the German drag competition Queen of Drags. Berlin queer-scene figures started a petition against it, arguing she had no real link to drag culture, while drag performer Olivia Jones backed her and joined the show. It was a fair argument about who gets the gig, not a claim that she'd said anything nasty.
Harm check: nothing came up. We found no anti-LGBTQ+ remarks, no conspiracy-theory slide and no culture-war campaigning from her. In 2022 she credited Gottmik, the drag artist who had worked as her makeup artist, with teaching her how to be an ally. When Donald Trump told the New York Times in 2015 that she was “no longer a 10,” she answered with a cheeky video, not a feud. Honestly, though, she says little about politics, so the record is thin.
The most serious thing attached to her name is an allegation, not a finding. In 2020, newly unsealed court papers from a lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell had Virginia Giuffre listing Klum among celebrities she said she saw on Jeffrey Epstein's plane. Klum said she was mistakenly named and had never been on his planes, and her lawyer called the claim totally false. Nothing in what we read shows any court finding on it.
The good stuff is steady rather than splashy. She has backed UNICEF for years, fronting its Trick-or-Treat campaign in 2011 and promoting the return of its orange collection box in 2024. This year's noise, such as the viral Grammys latex dress that copped a serve in the press, is fashion goss, and she's done nothing there that breaks our house rule.