British supermodel Naomi Campbell has admitted that she nearly died due to drug addiction while at the peak of her modeling career in the 1990s.
“I was killing myself”
The globally renowned supermodel revealed that she used cocaine as a means to cope with emotional pain stemming from childhood trauma and the premature death of a close friend.
“I think one of the things I was trying to hide was the grief when I started using, but it didn’t take the grief away. I was killing myself. It was very painful,” Naomi recollected.
In the documentary, the turning point that pushed her to the bottom was the death of her friend and mentor, Italian designer Gianni Versace. He was murdered near his home in Miami Beach in 1997 when he was 50 years old. Campbell struggled with drug addiction.
“Addiction is such a curse; it really is. You think, ‘Oh, this will numb the pain.’ It doesn’t. It only makes the fear and the worry much greater. So, I really regret it,” the supermodel confessed.
Campbell, who was the first black woman to appear on the covers of Time and Vogue France, battled addiction for five years. In 1999, she disrupted a photo shoot due to her drug use.
Shocked by the incident, Campbell sought help at a rehabilitation center in the same year. She now considers this decision to be the best and only one she could have made for herself.
