Popular ex-supermodel Naomi Campbell has recounted her early years battle with drugs and alcohol and how it almost ruined her life.

She said she engaged in such acts with the hopes of covering up childhood trauma and grief.

Naomi, 53, disclosed this in the new documentary, The Super Models, claiming she started to abuse substances as a way to deal with the grief of being abandoned by her father as a child as well as the shocking death of her close friend and designer, Gianni Versace.

The runway icon admitted that during the height of her fame she was slowly ‘killing’ herself early in her career due to the amount of drugs she took in the early 90s.

‘Grief has been a very strange thing in my life because it doesn’t always show.

”I go into a shock and freak out when it actually happens, and then later is when I break. But I kept the sadness inside, I just dealt with it.”, she said.

Speaking about the special place Giovanni Maria aka Gianni Versace held in her heart, Naomi explained: ‘Late designer Azzedine Alaïa was my papa. With him, I learnt about chosen families. The same for Gianni Versace.

”He was very sensitive to feeling me, like, he pushed me. How would push me to step outside and go further when I didn’t think I had it within myself to do it. So, when he died, my grief became very bad.’

‘When I started using, that was one of the things I tried to cover up, was grief. Addiction is such a it’s just a bulls**t thing, it really is.

”You think, “Oh it’s gonna heal that wound”. It doesn’t. It can cause such huge fear and anxiety. So I got really angry.”

The British-born model famously collapsed at a 1999 photo shoot after five years of cocaine addiction which prompted her to check into rehab in 1999.

‘When you try to cover something up, your feelings… You spoke about abandonment. I tried to cover that with something. You can’t cover it. I was killing myself. It was very hurtful.’ she said

Naomi was born to Jamaican-born dancer Valerie Morris and has never met her father, who abandoned her mother when she was pregnant.

“There’s a lot of issues that I have had since childhood. Well, for instance, not knowing your father, not seeing your mother. That brings up a lot of … it manifests a lot of feelings.’’ she said

“One of those feeling absolutely anger. But I think that’s a really normal thing. I’ve not always displayed my anger at the appropriate time. It’s always been an inappropriate time. But it’s a manifestation of a deeper issue, anger.’

‘And that, for me, I think is based on insecurity, self-esteem and loneliness, and being abandonment. That’s where my core issues were abandonment and rejection.

‘That puts me in a real vulnerable space, and everyone thinks, “Oh, Naomi’s a really tough girl and really strong”. But that’s what I want to appear to people to be like, because if I fear that I don’t, they’re gonna just walk all over me if they really knew.’ she added. (The Nation)

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