Model Behavior: Aoki Lee Simmons Stars in Fierce New Anti-SeaWorld Campaign for PETA
For Immediate Release:
April 4, 2025
Contact:
Allyson Spellman 202-483-7382
Top model Aoki Lee Simmons is making the leap from the catwalk into the … fishbowl? The it-girl is back in front of the camera in a new PETA campaign to call attention to the suffering endured by orcas and other marine mammals trapped in SeaWorld’s barren concrete tanks. In an accompanying behind-the-scenes video spot, Lee Simmons shares how cramming herself into a tiny glass bowl for the shoot “was not my favorite” and urges everyone to “imagine living that way.”
“I remember when I was young, and I first learned the conditions of orcas and dolphins and all those animals in captivity that you would see at SeaWorld shows, and it was horrifying,” Lee Simmons says. “It’s really, to them, like no space … it’s like hell on Earth living that way.”
In nature, orcas have sophisticated social relationships, working cooperatively to find food and traveling vast distances in the open ocean every day. But at SeaWorld, they’re housed in tanks so cramped and shallow that they can do little more than float listlessly or swim in endless circles while fending off attacks from their stressed tankmates. More than 40 orcas and over 500 other dolphins and whales have died—many prematurely—in SeaWorld’s dismal tanks, where Corky, the longest-held captive orca in the world, currently languishes after being torn from her family off the coast of British Columbia in 1969.
“That version of captivity to Corky is like us standing in a closet forever,” Lee Simmons says. “I think if you could just feel what they’re feeling and imagine yourself living that way, it’ll click for you.”
“If you wouldn’t want to live in a fishbowl, which I don’t think any of us do … don’t go to SeaWorld,” Simmons concludes.
Simmons is part of a long list of celebrities—including Bella Thorne, Joan Jett, Lala Kent, Noah Cyrus, Nikki Glaser, P!nk, and Steve Aoki—who have teamed up with PETA to speak out against marine parks.
PETA—whose motto reads, in part, that “animals are not ours to use for entertainment”—points out that Every Animal Is Someone and offers free Empathy Kitsfor people who need a lesson in kindness. For more information, please visit PETA.org or follow PETA on X, Facebook, or Instagram.
