"You’re a mannequin, which is what I write in the book. Truly just being used as a body and a face. And it wasn’t like that. There were girls a little bit older than me being like, 'Oh my God you look so cute, do you like your outfit?' That’s why I think I dance so funny and stuff. When you’re like relaxed with your girlfriends and you’re dancing around and you just feel completely comfortable. So that was the majority of the shoot," she explained. "That’s why when a lot of people would say things like, 'Oh this video is misogynistic, why did you decide to do it, aren’t you embarrassed?' Basically, I was like, 'Get off my back, f*** off. It was my choice and I did feel powerful in that moment. And guess what, now I’m famous, so I’m like making more money than I definitely did then so how can you assume I’m not empowered?'"

The point at which Ratajkowski's experience changed happened later in the day when she was filming a scene alone with Thicke. After leaving the set that day, however, the memory disappeared.

"I don’t want to say I forgot. I would say that I just completely put it out of my mind because that also makes it sound like it was a choice. It wasn’t a choice. I wasn’t like, I’m just not gonna remember that part," she explained.

It later came back to her when Thicke's name was in the news.

"I was just laying in bed and went to Robin Thicke’s Instagram because I think his girlfriend had just gotten pregnant or something. He was on E News. And I was blocked. And I was like, why am I blocked? And sat there for a second and was like, did I say something? Like in the press. And then I remembered this moment when he was kind of drunk and he was in a little bit of a not great mood and we were shooting by ourselves and he put his hands on my breasts really quickly," she recalled.

Ratajkowski then said that Martel stopped the music and there was a "weird moment" on set before they ultimately kept shooting. "I couldn’t have complained in that moment. I was 21, I was an actual nobody, a person on a wall in a modeling agency that you could pick [...]. It’s a true, true meat market industry. So I didn’t complain and I just went home and I never told anybody about it really."

The model had noticed that she was blocked from Thicke's social media once before, which she brought to Martel's attention. When Ratajkowski suggested that it might have been about something that happened on the set, she claimed that Martel didn't respond.

Ratajkowski's accusations against Thicke made headlines in October as an excerpt from her book — and this essay in particular — was leaked.

"The whole reason I wrote this book was to tell my story and be in control of the narrative," she told Cooper. "I wanted it to be in my own words. And in a 5,000-word essay that really explains all the aspects of that day. The parts that were good, the parts that were bad and what this meant to me and why it was so defining to me. Sort of a huge part of the evolution of my politics and beliefs."