Linda Evangelista
Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images
After Linda Evangelista settled her lawsuit against CoolSculpting, which allegedly left her “brutally disfigured” and undergoing extensive therapy, she no longer blames herself for the ordeal that left her “unrecognizable” and depressed as a developed paradoxical fatty hyperplasia (PAH), which is reportedly a rare but serious side effect of CoolSculpting’s fat freezing process.
“I don’t blame myself anymore. “I’m not hard on myself anymore,” Evangelista tells British publication The Times. “And how people think of me still bothers me a little bit, but it used to bother me a lot. I now know that I didn’t do anything wrong. For a long time I thought I did. I’m not completely free of it, but I’m working hard to get rid of the guilt and shame. And I won’t let it ruin my life. I wouldn’t have stayed locked up if I knew how many people cared.”
She still doesn’t look in the mirror, she says.
“My son sometimes says to me, ‘You might want to know that you have a pimple on your chin.’ And I think, what? But life is better without a mirror,” she tells the Times.
Evangelista opened up about her experience with CoolSculpting in September 2021 and addressed the reasons why she didn’t work.
“The reason for this is that I was brutally disfigured by Zeltiq’s CoolSculpting procedure, which did the opposite of what it promised,” she wrote on Instagram, saying that the possible fat reduction process enlarged fat cells and “me “Even after two painful treatments, he was left permanently deformed.” , unsuccessful corrective surgeries. I was left, as the media described, ‘unrecognizable.’
After Evangelista claimed she had developed PAH, her attorney shared the following statement: “Notably, Zeltiq’s marketing materials and the CoolSculpting website did not mention the risk of PAH until after Ms. Evangelista underwent the procedures.”
In 2022, she announced that she had settled the legal dispute with CoolSculpting, although the terms of the dispute were not disclosed.
Since the lawsuit, Evangelista has returned to modeling and fronted a campaign for Fendi to celebrate the fashion brand’s 25th Baguette anniversary. And she appeared in the Apple TV+ series “The Super Models,” where she chronicled the rise to power of Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington. In the docuseries, Evangelista also made headlines when she revealed that she was in an “abusive relationship” while reflecting on her time with her former husband Gérald Marie, the CEO of Elite Model Management.