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Naomi Campbell recounted how she nearly lost her life to drug addiction during the pinnacle of her modeling career in the 1990s.
In a new AppleTV+ docuseries, the world-renowned supermodel disclosed that she resorted to cocaine to help deal with the emotional pain caused by childhood trauma and the untimely death of her dear friend, Italian designer Gianni Versace, which further exacerbated her grief.
“I guess when I started using, that was one of the things I tried to cover up, was grief,” Campbell admitted.
“You can’t cover it. I was killing myself. It was very hurtful,” she painfully recalled.
According to the documentary, titled The Super Models, the turning point in the runway model’s life came when Versace, Campbell’s friend and mentor, was murdered outside his Miami Beach home in 1997.
Sharing her thoughts on addiction, the 53-year-old English model acknowledged, “Addiction is such 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.”
Campbell, who was the first black woman to appear on the covers of Time and Vogue France, battled addiction for five tumultuous years, even experiencing a public collapse during a photoshoot in 1999.
Shaken by the incident, Campbell checked into rehab that same year, a decision she now describes as “the best and only thing [she] could have done for [her]self.”
In addition to her struggle with addiction, Campbell has also been candid about childhood abandonment issues stemming from her father abandoning her mother, leading to unresolved emotions manifesting in feelings of “insecurity, [low] self-esteem, and loneliness.”