Supermodel, Naomi Campbell is opening up about her addictions. In the new docuseries,The Super Models on Apple TV+, she said she had to turn to drugs in order to cope with the sudden death of Gianni Versace.
“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— thing, it really is,” Campbell said. “You think, ‘Oh, it’s gonna heal that wound.’ It doesn’t,” she continued. “It can cause such huge fear and anxiety. So I got really angry.”
Campbell revealed that through Versace and another fashion designer, Azzedine Alaïa, she learned about chosen families.
“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.
She went on to explain that the way she battled grief was not as normal as other people. The model said that she would tend to go into shock and then break down later on. That eventually led to her addiction to cocaine. Her addiction became her demise in 1999 when she had her infamous collapse while on set for a photoshoot.
“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,” she admitted. “I was killing myself. It was very hurtful.”
Campbell said that this ended up pushing her to go into rehab.
“It’s taken me many years to work on and deal with,” she added. “And it does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools how to deal with it now when it comes up.”