Naomi Campbell opened up about her past struggles with addiction on a recent episode of “The Super Models,” saying she used drugs to mask emotional pain.
“Addiction is such a — it’s just a bullshit thing, it really is. You think, ‘Oh, it’s gonna heal that wound.’ It doesn’t,” Campbell said on the docuseries. Campbell said she turned to drugs as a way of dealing with pain from her childhood, and that she also used drugs as an outlet to deal with the grief she felt after the sudden death of her dear friend, fashion designer Gianni Versace.
“When I started using, that was one of the things I tried to cover up, was grief,” she said.
Five decades of Naomi Campbell walking the Michael Kors runway.
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Campbell, 53, said she considered the Versace family to be her “chosen” family, and reflected on the close relationships they shared. Versace was murdered outside his South Beach residence in 1997. The designer’s death seemingly affected the supermodel greatly and shifted the balance of her life.
“He was very sensitive to feeling me, like, he pushed me,” Campbell said. “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.”
She said it was a “very strange thing” to try handling her grief because those feelings “[don’t] always show.” The supermodel admitted that when she goes “into a shock” at the onset of grief that will “break” afterwards.
“I kept the sadness inside, I just dealt with it,” she added.
Christy Turlington Burns, Linda Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, and Cindy Crawford close #VogueWorld 2023 in a fashion finale for the ages: https://t.co/17ABY2lohh pic.twitter.com/Frsqb38PkX
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The iconic supermodel candidly discussed the numerous ways drug addiction impacted her life. (RELATED: Naomi Campbell Shares Major Life Update)
“It can cause such huge fear and anxiety. So I got really angry,” she said.
Campbell battled addiction for nearly five years before her infamous collapse during a photoshoot in 1999, according to People. “I was killing myself. It was very hurtful,” she said.
Campbell eventually checked into rehab and was able to turn her life around.
“It’s taken me many years to work on and deal with,” she said. “And it does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools how to deal with it now when it comes up.”