Supermodel Naomi Campbell is opening up about her use of cocaine to deal with her depression.
“Grief had been a very strange thing in my life because it doesn’t always [show],” Campbell said in the new AppleTV+ documentary The Super Model. “I go into a shock and freak out when it actually happens, and then later is when I break. But I kept the sadness inside, I just dealt with it.”
The grief in her life most notably came from her abandonment issues as a child and the death of her close friend, Gianni Versace.
When speaking on her childhood abandonment, Campbell said, “There’s a lot of issues that I have from childhood. Well, for instance, not knowing your father, not seeing your mother. That brings up a lot of — it manifests a lot of feelings. One of those feelings, absolutely is anger. It’s a manifestation of a deeper issue, I think, anger. And that for me, I think is based on insecurity, self-esteem and loneliness.”
The grief problem and addiction issues only intensified when Versace was murdered outside his Miami home in 1997. She would battle addiction for five years, even collapsing during a photoshoot in 1999.
“When you try to cover something up, your feelings — you spoke about abandonment. I tried to cover that with something,” Campbell confesses. “You can’t cover it. I was killing myself. It was very hurtful.”
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After the collapse, Campbell checked herself into rehab. “It was one of the best and only things I could have done for myself at that time,” she reflected.
Now, Campbell is 23 years sober.
“It’s taken me many years to work on and deal with, and it does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools how to deal with it now when it comes up.”
