Naomi Campbell opened up about the drug addiction she used to “cover up” the grief she was carrying during the early years of her modeling career.
The iconic supermodel spoke candidly in Apple TV+’s docuseries “The Super Models,” revealing her past struggles with substance abuse. Campbell recalled the dark period in her life that started after the sudden death of her friend Gianni Versace, People reports.
“When I started using, that was one of the things I tried to cover up, was grief. Addiction is such a — it’s just a bulls— thing, it really is,” Campbell says in the doc.
“You think, ‘Oh, it’s gonna heal that wound.’ It doesn’t,” she shared. “It can cause such huge fear and anxiety. So I got really angry.”
For Campbell, who grew up in a single-parent household in London before finding early success as a model, Versace became part of her “chosen family.” Having built a close bond with the late founder of high-fashion label Versace, Campbell took his 1997 murder outside his Miami mansion that much harder.
“He was very sensitive to feeling me — like, he pushed me,” Campbell recalled. “He would push me to step outside and go further when I didn’t think I had it within myself to do it.”
“So, when he died, my grief became very bad.”
The rising model was also dealing with abandonment issues stemming from her fatherless childhood and loss of time with her mother. Campbell says her grief was a “very strange thing” to have to manage, as it “doesn’t always show.”
The fashion star notes the “shock” she initially went into when it happened, then having a “break” later on.
“I kept the sadness inside, I just dealt with it,” she said.
Campbell struggled with addiction for five years until she collapsed on set in 1999 and checked herself into rehab.
“When you try to cover something up, your feelings — you spoke about abandonment. I tried to cover that with something. You can’t cover it,” she admitted.
“I was killing myself. It was very hurtful.”
Now, as a 53-year-old mother of two, Campbell considers the rehab stint as “one of the best” decisions she made for herself during that challenging time.
“It’s taken me many years to work on and deal with,” Campbell shared. “And it does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools how to deal with it now when it comes up.”
“The Super Models” details the success stories of Campbell and fellow modeling legends Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington, and Linda Evangelista. The ladies sat down for the cameras to relive their respective rises in the modeling world.
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