Supermodel Linda Evangelista has spent nearly five years in seclusion after she says she was disfigured by a popular cosmetic treatment.
But now she is coming forward to share the condition that has left her body “unrecognizable.”
In this week’s issue of PEOPLE, Evangelista, 56, opens up about the emotional and physical pain that has cast a shadow on her life in recent years, after she claims CoolSculpting — a popular, FDA-cleared “fat-freezing” procedure that’s been promoted as a noninvasive alternative to liposuction — left her “permanently deformed” and “brutally disfigured.”
Evangelista filed a lawsuit in September suing CoolSculpting’s parent company, Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., for $50 million in damages, alleging that she’s been unable to work since undergoing seven sessions of CoolSculpting in a dermatologist’s office from August 2015 to February 2016.
“I loved being up on the catwalk. Now I dread running into someone I know,” she tells PEOPLE through tears in this week’s cover story. “I can’t live like this anymore, in hiding and shame. I just couldn’t live in this pain any longer. I’m willing to finally speak.”
Within three months after Evangelista’s treatments, she started noticing bulges at her chin, thighs and bra area. The same areas she’d wanted to shrink were suddenly growing. And hardening. Then they turned numb.
“I tried to fix it myself, thinking I was doing something wrong,” says Evangelista, and she began dieting and exercising more. “I got to where I wasn’t eating at all. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Finally, in June 2016 she went to her doctor. “I dropped my robe for him,” she recalls. “I was bawling, and I said, ‘I haven’t eaten, I’m starving. What am I doing wrong?’ ”
When he diagnosed her with Paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH), she says, “I was like, ‘What the hell is that?’ And he told me no amount of dieting, and no amount of exercise was ever going to fix it.”
This is a vivid contrast to the popular Linda Evangelista the world first came to know 30 years ago.
With her Sophia Loren-like face and instinctive understanding of photography and style she racked up some 700 magazine covers over the course of her career and served as muse to industry icons like the late Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld and renowned photographer Steven Meisel.
Linda Evangelista is a Canadian fashion model and one of the top supermodels from the 1990s. She is regarded as one of the most accomplished and influential models of all time, and has been featured on over 700 magazine covers.
Supermodel Linda Evangelista has said she has been left “permanently deformed” due to an adverse reaction to a fat reduction procedure. The 56-year-old revealed she had experienced a rare cosmetic side effect of the treatment five years ago which actually increased her fat cells.