Linda Evangelista: Supermodel poses for first photoshoot since fat-freezing disaster
Canadian supermodel Linda Evangelista, one of the most photographed people in the world, is speaking out about her cosmetic nightmare after living in seclusion for almost five years.
The 56-year-old from St Catharines, Ontario, opened up about the emotional and physical pain she suffered in recent years after undergoing CoolSculpting, a popular "fat freezing" procedure approved by the FDA that has been promoted as a noninvasive alternative to liposuction. The supermodel said the procedure left her "permanently deformed" and "brutally disfigured," prompting her to file a lawsuit in September against CoolSculpting's parent company Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc. for $50 million in damages. She alleged that she's been unable to work since undergoing seven sessions of CoolSculpting from August 2015 to February 2016
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Speaking to People, Evangelista revealed how she's had to deal with the hard lumps of fatty tissue as a result of the procedure. “I loved being up on the catwalk. Now I dread running into someone I know," she said. “I can’t live like this anymore, in hiding and shame. I just couldn’t live in this pain any longer. I’m willing to finally speak.” The supermodel recounted how she noticed within three months of the treatment that the bulges were growing instead of shrinking. She tried to change her diet and began exercising more. “I tried to fix it myself, thinking I was doing something wrong,” she said. “I got to where I wasn’t eating at all. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Go behind the scenes of this week's cover story on the PEOPLE Every Day podcast, where we're breaking down everything supermodel Linda Evangelista had to say about her life changing cosmetic procedure. https://t.co/eIACoME5GW pic.twitter.com/45zy6QrNSC
— People (@people) February 16, 2022
Evangelista eventually went to the doctor in June 2016. “I dropped my robe for him. I was bawling, and I said, ‘I haven’t eaten, I’m starving. What am I doing wrong?'” she said. The doctor subsequently diagnosed her with paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH) -- a rare side effect that reportedly affects less than one percent of CoolSculpting patients. “I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’" Evangelista remembered. "And he told me no amount of dieting, and no amount of exercise was ever going to fix it.”
CoolSculpting told her doctor they wanted to "make it right" and offered to pay for liposuction, she says, but she eventually ended up paying for it out of her own pocket after she refused to sign a confidentiality agreement. After undergoing the first of two full-body liposuction surgeries, Evangelista said "it wasn't even a little bit better." She explained that "the bulges are protrusions. And they’re hard. If I walk without a girdle in a dress, I will have chafing to the point of almost bleeding. Because it’s not like soft fat rubbing, it’s like hard fat rubbing.”
The Canadian fashion model, who made some of her last public appearances in 2015 prior to undergoing the procedure, explained how she could no longer "put my arms flat along my side." She bemoaned, “I don’t think designers are going to want to dress me with that… sticking out of my body.”
“I don’t look in the mirror,” she told People. “It doesn’t look like me…. Why do we feel the need to do these things [to our bodies]? I always knew I would age. And I know that there are things a body goes through. But I just didn’t think I would look like this. I don’t recognize myself physically, but I don’t recognize myself as a person any longer either. She [meaning Linda Evangelista, supermodel] is sort of gone," she explained, adding, “I hope I can shed myself of some of the shame and help other people who are in the same situation as me. That’s my goal.”
Evangelista assured the magazine that she was "not going to hide anymore."