In an Apple TV+ docuseries, 53-year-old supermodel, Naomi Campbell, opened up about her battle with a drug and alcohol addiction and how it almost ruined her life.
According to her, to deal with grief due to the shocking death of her close friend Gianni Versace and childhood abandonment trauma, she resorted to substance abuse.
The mother of two admitted that she was slowly ‘killing’ herself because of the amount of drugs she took in the early 90s.
‘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.’
Speaking about the special place Gianni Versace held in her heart, Naomi said, ‘[Late designer] 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.’
Speaking further, she said, ‘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**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.’
The British-born model famously collapsed at a 1999 photo shoot after five years of cocaine addiction. The scary moment prompted her to check into rehab that year.
‘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.’
‘For my mistakes, I’ve always owned up to them. I chose to go to rehab,”Naomi stated.
Naomi was born to Jamaican-born dancer Valerie Morris and has never met her father, who abandoned her mother when she was pregnant.
“There’s a lot of issues that I have had since childhood. Well, for instance, not knowing your father, not seeing your mother. That brings up a lot of … it manifests a lot of feelings.’
“One of those feeling absolutely anger. But I think that’s a really normal thing. I’ve not always displayed my anger at the appropriate time. It’s always been an inappropriate time. But it’s a manifestation of a deeper issue, anger.
‘And that, for me, I think is based on insecurity, self-esteem and loneliness, and being abandoned. That’s where my core issues were abandonment and rejection.
‘That puts me in a real vulnerable space, and everyone thinks, “Oh, Naomi’s a really tough girl and really strong”. But that’s what I want to appear to people to be like, because if I fear that I don’t, they’re gonna just walk all over me if they really knew.’ she added
