Designer Michael Costello has opened up about his suicidal thoughts in the wake of Chrissy Teigen’s public apology for her past bullying of various celebrities.
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Teigen posted a lengthy apology to Medium on Monday, after weeks of silence following Courtney Stodden calling her out for telling them to kill themself when they were a teenager.
“I was a troll, full stop,” Teigen wrote, acknowledging how awful a number of her past tweets were. “And I am so sorry.”
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Her comments prompted Costello, who rose to fame after his 2010 appearance on Project Runway, to publicly discuss his own history with Teigen.
In 2014, a racist comment was attributed to Costello and circulated across social media, although he has always maintained it was photoshopped by a disgruntled former intern. Teigen publicly shunned him and refused to listen to his side of things, even telling him that “racist people like you deserve to suffer and die,” according to private messages Costello shared.
“You might as well be dead,” one reads. “Your career is over, just watch.”
Costello says Teigen and stylist Monica Rose took things even further, consistently threatening to stop working with people or brands who didn’t pull their support of him over the next several years.
“I would book jobs only to be pulled off last minute with no explanation,” he wrote, saying that mutual friends and colleagues warned him it was Teigen and Rose pulling the strings.
“So many nights I stayed awake, wanting to kill myself. I didn’t see the point of living,” Costello admitted. “There was no way I can ever escape from being the target of the powerful elites in Hollywood, who actually do have powers to close doors with a single text.”
He said that the whole experience has left him suicidal, even seven years later, as he fought to maintain both his career and his personal relationships all while “living in fear.”
“To this day, I still am not able to recover from the years of trauma I have experienced,” Costello wrote. “I am not asking for sympathy from you. I am especially not asking for sympathy from Chrissy Teigen, Monica Rose, and those who believed the false narratives they heard about me. I simply want to set myself free.”
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Teigen has not been active on social media since initially posting her apology, though she did mention at the time that there are a number of people besides Stodden who deserve apologies from her, and that she’s “in the process of privately reaching out to the people [she] insulted.”
*First Published: June 15, 2021, 7:44 am
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