Naomi Campbell was ‘killing’ herself with cocaine grieving Gianni Versace
This supermodel is getting super honest about grief.
In the Apple TV+ docuseries “The Super Models,” which dropped Wednesday, Naomi Campbell admits to slowly “killing” herself in the ’90s with a drug addiction that helped her suppress her feelings, such as her devastation over Gianni Versace’s shocking murder.
“Grief has been a very strange thing in my life because it doesn’t always [show],” Campbell, 53, shared in the four-episode series. “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.”
Campbell revealed she especially struggled with grief when Versace, her good friend and legendary designer, was gunned down outside his South Beach mansion in July 1997.
“[Late designer] Azzedine Alaïa was my papa. With him, I learnt about chosen families. The same for Gianni Versace,” Campbell explained.
“He was very sensitive to feeling me, like, he pushed me. 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,” Campbell recalled.
The mother of two continued: “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–t thing, it really is.”
“You think, ‘Oh, it’s gonna heal that wound.’ It doesn’t. It can cause such huge fear and anxiety. So I got really angry,” she confessed.
Campbell famously checked into rehab in 1999 after collapsing at a photoshoot following five years of cocaine addiction.
She claimed in 2004 that cocaine was the only drug she ever used and said she didn’t take it while walking the catwalk.
Reflecting on that time in the docuseries, Campbell said, “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. I was killing myself. It was very hurtful.”
“The Super Models,” which explores the groundbreaking careers of Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, also circled back to Campbell’s 2000 interview with Barbara Walters.
At the time, the British-born beauty said she struggled with abandonment issues from her parents.
“It does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools to deal with it now when it comes up,” Campbell stated in the docuseries. “I have to think of something outside of myself — something greater than myself.”
The Post has contacted a rep for Campbell for comment.
Elsewhere in the docuseries, Crawford, 57, slammed Oprah Winfrey, 69, for treating her “like the chattel” while appearing on her talk show in 1986.
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