After settling her lawsuit against CoolSculpting, which she alleged left her “brutally disfigured, and undergoing a great deal of therapy,” Linda Evangelista says she no longer blames herself for the ordeal that left her “unrecognizable” and depressed as she developed paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH), what’s said to be a rare but serious side effect of CoolSculpting’s fat-freezing process.
“I don’t blame myself any more. I’m not hard on myself any longer,” Evangelista tells U.K. publication The Times. “And how people feel about me still bothers me a little bit, but it used to bother me a lot. I know now that I didn’t do anything wrong. For the longest time I thought I did. I’m not completely rid of it, but I work hard at getting rid of the guilt and the shame. And I’m not letting it ruin my life. I wouldn’t have stayed locked up if I’d known how many people cared.”
Still, she’s not looking in the mirror, she says.
“My son will say to me sometimes, ‘You might want to know that you have a pimple on your chin.’ And I’m like, what? But life is better without mirrors,” she tells The Times.
Evangelista went public about her experience with CoolSculpting in September 2021, addressing why she hadn’t been working.
“The reason 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 increased fat cells and “left me permanently deformed even after undergoing two painful, unsuccessful, corrective surgeries. I have been left, as the media has described, ‘unrecognizable.’”
After Evangelista claimed she developed PAH, her attorney shared the following statement: “Remarkably, Zeltiq’s marketing material and the CoolSculpting website failed to mention the risk of PAH until after Ms. Evangelista underwent the procedures,”
In 2022, she announced that she’d settled the lawsuit with CoolSculpting, the terms of which were undisclosed.
Since the lawsuit, Evangelista returned to modeling, fronting a campaign for Fendi to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the fashion brand’s baguette. And she appeared in Apple TV+’s The Super Models, chronicling the rise to power of Evangelista, Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford and Christy Turlington. In the docuseries, Evangelista also made headlines when she revealed she was in an “abusive relationship” as she reflected on her time with former husband Elite Model Management executive Gérald Marie.
