It has been five years since supermodel Linda Evangelista entered a life of seclusion due to the unfortunate effects of the fat-freezing procedure gone wrong that left her”brutally disfigured,” “permanently deformed,” and emotionally scarred.
Back in September, the model sued Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc. for $50 million in damages, alleging that she’s been unable to work since seven sessions of an FDA-cleared procedure called CoolSculpting she had from August 2015 to February 2016.
“I loved being up on the catwalk. Now I dread running into someone I know,” Evangelista shared tearfully. “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.”
The places on her body she initially wanted to shrink with the procedure ended up growing much larger, hardening, and eventually going numb.
“I tried to fix it myself, thinking I was doing something wrong,” Evangelista explained. “I got to where I wasn’t eating at all. I thought I was losing my mind.”
When she ended up finally going to her doctor to show what had happened, he told her that it was Paradoxical adipose hyperplasia–a rare side-effect of the CoolSculpting procedure that affects 1 percent of patients–and that “no amount of dieting, and no amount of exercise was ever going to fix it.”
A representative for CoolSculpting has added to the conversation, saying that the procedure “has been well studied with more than 100 scientific publications and more than 11 million treatments performed worldwide” and added that known rare side effects like PAH “continue to be well-documented in the CoolSculpting information for patients and health care providers.”
“Why do we feel the need to do these things [to our bodies]?” Evangelista ended up questioning her own intentions. “I always knew I would age. And I know that there are things a body goes through. But I just didn’t think I would look like this. I don’t recognize myself physically, but I don’t recognize me as a person any longer either. She is sort of gone.”
But, Evangelista is rewriting her own narrative by telling her story and seeking accountability from the lawsuit: “I hope I can shed myself of some of the shame and help other people who are in the same situation as me. That’s my goal.”
