Linda Evangelista is done hiding her body after she underwent a cosmetic procedure that allegedly left her “brutally disfigured.”
“Do you see the angle of my arms? I can’t put them next to my body,” the model told People in an interview accompanying photos of her body.
“I loved being up on the catwalk. Now I dread running into someone I know,” she added of why she’s finally speaking out. “I can’t live like this anymore, in hiding and shame. I just couldn’t live in this pain any longer.”
The 56-year-old supermodel alleged that after undergoing seven sessions of CoolSculpting, a “fat-freezing” procedure, from August 2015 to February 2016, her fat cells “increased, not decreased,” causing the areas she wanted to shrink to get larger and harder.
Throughout the interview, Evangelista specifically pointed out bulges in her chin, thighs and chest area.
“I tried to fix it myself, thinking I was doing something wrong,” she admitted. “I got to where I wasn’t eating at all. I thought I was losing my mind.”
Four months after her final session, Evangelista was diagnosed with paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH). PAH is a rare side effect where the fatty tissue expands instead of contracts in response to CoolSculpting.
“He told me no amount of dieting, and no amount of exercise was ever going to fix it.”
Evangelista filed a lawsuit against CoolSculpting’s parent company, Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., in September 2021. The supermodel sued for $50 million in damages, claiming that it was a “risk” she was not made aware of prior to the treatments and that she hasn’t been able to get work because of it.
“Today I took a big step towards righting a wrong that I have suffered and have kept to myself for over five years. … I have been left, as the media has described, ‘unrecognizable,’” she wrote on Instagram at the time.
She continued, “PAH has not only destroyed my livelihood, it has sent me into a cycle of deep depression, profound sadness, and the lowest depths of self-loathing. In the process, I have become a recluse.”
Evangelista explained that she chose to show off her body and talk about her journey to try and help other women who have gone through similar things.
“I hope I can shed myself of some of the shame and help other people who are in the same situation as me,” she said. “That’s my goal. I’m not going to hide anymore.”
A spokesperson for CoolSculpting told the People that the treatment, “has been well studied with more than 100 scientific publications and more than 11 million treatments performed worldwide” and that side effects, including PAH “continue to be well-documented in the CoolSculpting information for patients and health care providers.”
