Linda Evangelista
Model shows up after “nightmare surgery”
Linda Evangelista in 2015.
© imago/ZUMA Press
In 2015, Linda Evangelista underwent a procedure that still affects her life to this day. Now she shows her ordeal.
In September 2021, former top model Linda Evangelista (56) first revealed that she was “forever deformed” due to a rare side effect of a cosmetic procedure. Even more: the “disfigurement” made her “depressed” and finally a “hermit”, Evangelista wrote on Instagram at the time.
The 56-year-old now describes her physical and psychological suffering in detail as the title star of “People” magazine and wants to fight her way back to life: “I can no longer live like this, in secret and in shame. I can no longer deal with this pain live. I’m ready to finally talk about it.”
And now she shows her body in pictures for the first time, the “People” published in its latest issue. Three months after her treatment, she noticed the swelling on her chin, hips and chest. So the very areas that she “wanted to shrink suddenly grew and hardened. Then they went numb.”
Rare side effect
“I tried to fix it myself,” Evangelista recalls in 2015. “I thought I did something wrong. I got to a point where I didn’t eat at all. I thought I was losing my mind.” It was only in 2016 that she dared to see her doctor, who finally diagnosed her with paradoxical adipose hyperplasia (PAH).
This is a side effect that can occur in well under one percent of cases with the non-invasive fat freezing procedure that Evangelista also underwent. The volume of tissue increases in the treated area instead of decreasing. “He told me that no diet, no matter how strict, and no amount of training, no matter how hard, could ever make up for it,” said Evangelista’s doctor.
Since then, she has also undergone conventional liposuction, she reveals. But even after a second intervention in 2017, the problem did not go away, on the contrary. She is still unable to move around without compression clothing because the affected areas would otherwise become sore.
“I don’t look in the mirror anymore”
According to the report, she sued the parent company of the company where she had the surgery for $50 million. Also because she has not been able to do her modeling job since then and afterwards she did not feel sufficiently informed about potential side effects. The other side contradicts this allegation.
In tears, Evangelista revealed to “People”: “I loved being on the catwalk. Now I dread meeting people who know me.” She herself no longer looks in the mirror – “it doesn’t look like me anymore.” Nevertheless, with her now public story, she wants to “help other people who are in the same situation as me. That’s my goal.”