Lifestyle

Model makes comeback after razor slashing

Whenever she looks in the mirror these days, 18-year-old Jazmin Drain is wistful, thinking about how things could have been different.

Just one year ago, the statuesque 6-foot teen from Freeport, LI, had a promising modeling career.

That was before a jealous classmate and longtime bully at Freeport High School stabbed her in the face and leg, and slashed her across her left cheek, requiring painful plastic surgery, and leaving her once-bright future uncertain.

On May 21 of last year, Jazmin was physically assaulted by a bully at her high school. A small scar remains.

Today, she is finally regaining her confidence as she poses on the rooftop of the Flatiron Hotel, with the Empire State Building as a backdrop, for a photo shoot with The Post.

After a brutal attack — and plastic surgery — model Jazmin Drain is ready to get her life, and career, back on track.Anne Wermiel/NY Post

“I don’t have to deal with [bullies] anymore and I am doing my own thing,” says Jazmin. “God has a plan for me and my future career in modeling.”

You would never know this rising catwalker was once a self-conscious tomboy.

When she was a skinny 4-year-old who towered over her fellow pre-schoolers, Jazmin’s dad thought his daughter had found her calling — in a basketball peewee league. Ten years on, the girl who loved church, Kim Kardashian and her two best friends seemed destined for the running track, not the fashion runway.

Still, when her mother, Yvonne, a health-care technician, heard about the open casting call for the Barbizon School of Modeling on Long Island in 2009, she thought her diamond-in-the-rough daughter would be perfect. Jazmin was already a big fan of fellow tomboy-turned-glamazon Tyra Banks. “I was obsessed with ‘America’s Next Top Model,’ ” she says. “I loved looking at the clothes and the hairstyles — it all looked so exciting and glamorous.”

Until that point, the then-14-year-old had only ever worn a dress to church.

Her first audition was daunting — 1,000 beautiful girls were vying for only 75 spots. But after hours of practicing her strut up and down her hallway at home, Jazmin became one of them.

“I couldn’t believe I was picked,” she says. “I was happy, but I wasn’t getting ahead of myself.”

After her first fashion show that summer, dad Ronald, a contractor, raved, “She got on the stage, working it, and I was so proud of her.”

But a more demanding modeling schedule meant less hang time with her friends — and more curiosity about her outside modeling life from her classmates.

With fun fashion shoots, a turn as a real-life mannequin in an Old Navy store window and a stint on VH1’s “Basketball Wives” during a Jackie Christie fashion show, she was soaring on the runway while continuing to excel at school.

The math and science whiz — who can dissect a pig’s heart without blinking an eye — was routinely on the high-honor roll. She’d tutor other kids in algebra and trig — not bad for a model strutting dozens of hours a week after school until 10 p.m. weeknights and during the weekends. But now, she says, “Modeling felt like a full-time job.”

Still, the glitz and glamour was intoxicating — and so were all the creative minds. “Meeting all these people, I felt, ‘I’m at home,’ ” she says. “But at home, I wanted to be somewhere else.”

God has a plan for me and my future career in modeling.

 - Jazmin Drain
In the high-school world, conformity is key, and sticking out for any reason can raise the ire of envious classmates. With her height, Jazmin could forget about anonymity. And her good looks put her at a disadvantage.

Bullying has become a nationwide focus in recent years, due in part to several well-publicized teen suicides that were a result of harassment from classmates. As more schools attempt to put anti-bullying programs in place, studies show that 49 percent of children in grades 4 through 12 reported being bullied by other students at school at least once during the past month, according to stopbullying.gov.

While bullying has always existed, technology now makes it easy for torment to occur after hours on social media, which schools are powerless to police or regulate.

When a photo shoot would surface online, or when Jazmin would appear on TV, it never took long for things at school to turn ominous: “I noticed negativity,” she says. “They made fun of me for my height, but I tried not to let it get to me. I was the only model in school.”

During sophomore year, the girl who would become Jazmin’s assailant needled her, belittling her career as a real model. Another girl spit in her face.

Jazmin was stunned.

“After she spit in my face, she threatened to beat me up. This was someone I was friends with until middle school.

“She didn’t like me. She tried to push my buttons, telling people not to ‘believe the hype’ about my modeling career.”

There were threatening calls to her house and demeaning epithets hurled at her in the hallways.

Anne Wermiel/NY Post
Her parents say they pleaded with Freeport High School to let her transfer to nearby high schools that had already agreed to accept Jazmin, but the school promised to protect her. They denied the request for a transfer. Yvonne started taking anti-anxiety pills to relieve the stress from her daughter’s dire school situation.

Anne Wermiel/NY Post
Jazmin was always on guard for a new verbal assault or physical attack. “I dreaded going to school. Watching my back all the time was horribly stressful,” she says.

“I never felt relaxed. Freeport [High School] told us I’d be safe there, that they’d ‘protect’ me.”

Every move would come after careful consideration. “I couldn’t even do extra-curriculars. I had to make the first bus so they wouldn’t bully me. I couldn’t be at peace.”

Meanwhile, as a newly minted Wilhelmina model, her career was clicking. She was making upward of $800 per show; she had an agent and decided to pursue fashion or design in college.

But things at school were continuing to deteriorate. She was attacked during a homecoming game, when assailants ripped a gold chain from her neck and left her with an eyelid injury. A quick-thinking teacher locked a frightened Jazmin in a car to prevent more trouble.

Jazmin was home-schooled for the remainder of her junior year.

By the time senior year rolled around, she returned for her final year, which proceeded with relative calm. Then, on May 21, with just two weeks left before graduation, everything changed.

“It was a normal day at school, except for people coming up to me, warning she was going to beat me up,” says Jazmin.

Heading down the hallway, about to leave at the end of the day, Jazmin thought she was in the clear. Suddenly, she saw her tormenter come lunging at her — reaching over the school security guard tasked with protecting the model. The classmate opened up her cellphone case, withdrew a razor blade and, in one swift movement, carved a line of blood from the bridge of Jazmin’s nose to her left cheek. She then stabbed her in the leg with the blade, and repeatedly punched her in the face.

“My first thought was shock, disbelief,” says Jazmin. “My second was, ‘Is my modeling career finished?’ I was so scared.”

As onlookers gathered, school staffers pulled the pair apart, and a friend of Jazmin’s helped her to her feet. She was taken to the school office, where she was helped into a wheelchair.

What’s most astonishing, according to the Drain family, is that the school didn’t notify the police, detain the assailant or call an ambulance as Jazmin lay waiting for her father to come and take her to the hospital.

The only time she’d ever been there before was as a volunteer candy striper. Now, she was suddenly in the ER, getting worked on by a team of specialists.

Jazmin at a Post photoshoot in Madison Square Park.Anne Wermiel/NY Post

“I was so close to being free of the bullies,” says Jazmin, who attended her prom with swollen, black-and-blue eyes, 11 facial stitches, a fractured nose and leg wounds.

Anne Wermiel/NY Post
After the attack came sinus problems, headaches and difficulty sleeping. And the one thing in life that brought her more joy than anything was off the table — modeling: “I couldn’t walk the runway at Brooklyn Fashion Week,” she says.

Photo shoots were canceled. A doctor told the crestfallen model she’d have facial scars forever. Still, a plastic surgeon was able to transform the gash into a faint yet visible reminder of that day.

Last month, Jazmin and her parents filed a complaint against Freeport High School in the Eastern District of New York — also naming the assistant principal and security guard — claiming that they failed to protect the youngster after numerous threats and warnings from a dangerous fellow student. “[Jazmin’s] parents made it unequivocally clear that they did not ‘believe that the Freeport Public School District can keep Jazmin safe’ after enduring months of Jazmin being bullied, harassed and attacked both within and outside Freeport High School,” the Drains’ complaint alleges.

They are asking for $21 million in damages.

“The same school that promised to protect me allowed the culture of bullying to fester for so long,” says Jazmin.

According to the complaint, the school was made aware of the bullying as early as June 2011. It goes on to claim that, after a November 2011 incident in which Jazmin was spit on by a student and a police report was filed, assistant principal Joseph Mille emailed Yvonne Drain: “I got your message, no worries, I got your back.”

The same school that promised to protect me allowed the culture of bullying to fester for so long.

 - Jazmin Drain
The assailant who attacked Jazmin with the razor was later arrested and charged as a minor for assault in the third degree and criminal possession of a weapon with an attempt to use in the fourth degree, both class A misdemeanors.

Her criminal case is still pending with the district attorney’s office. According to the school district, the assailant graduated in January of this year, one semester late. The school district declines to comment otherwise on the incident.

Meanwhile, Jazmin hopes to continue modeling high fashion and runway. In the last few months, she has appeared in shoots for Fashion Avenue News magazine and runwaynews.com. But, with the exception of her shoot for The Post, she’s too self-conscious about the scar to do beauty — close-up shots for products — especially when she still attends to the wounds daily, massaging them.

“Today, nearly a year later, I try not to think about the attack, but I can still feel the [surgeon’s] needle,” says Jazmin, who has since graduated from high school and enrolled at Nassau Community College. “After everything, I started seeing a psychiatrist, and it relieves a lot of the stress.

“I would tell anyone going through this not to stay silent: Tell someone! Believe in yourself. Don’t let them break your spirits.”