Naomi Campbell has admitted she was “killing” herself with drugs and alcohol.
The 53-year-old supermodel has candidly spoken of her substance abuse issues, admitting she used them as a way to cope with grief from her child abandonment issues, as well as the death of her close friend Gianni Versace, who was shot dead in 1997.
Speaking on new Apple TV+ docuseries ‘The Supermodels’, she said: “Grief has been a very strange thing in my life because it doesn’t always [show]. 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.”
Of Gianni’s death, she added: “Azzedine Alaïa was my papa. With him, I learnt about chosen families. The same for Gianni Versace.
“He was very sensitive to feeling me, like, he pushed me. How 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.
“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 b******* 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…
“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.’
Naomi went to rehab in 1999 after collapsing on a photoshoot and she admitted it was “scary” to confront her problems.
She said: “For my mistakes, I’ve always owned up to them. I chose to go to rehab.
“It was one of the best and only things I could have done for myself at that time. It is scary to pick up the mirror and look into the mirror. It is scary, and it’s taken me many years to work on and deal with.”
Naomi has been convicted of assault on four occasions, for lashing out at employees, police officers and a paparazzo and while her issues with anger – which she has previously also attributed to her troubled childhood, having never met her biological father – still “come up” sometimes, she thinks she can deal with them better now.
She said: “It does still come up sometimes. But I just now have the tools how to deal with it now when it comes up.
“I have to think of something outside of myself. Something greater than myself.”
And the mother-of-two would happily help anyone else suffering similar problems.
She said: “If I have people in my life that I love and I see that they need help, of course I’m going to offer my help. I’m there, I’m very loyal to the people that I love.”
