Shortly after model Chrissy Teigen took to Twitter on Monday to issue a public apology after some of her old and problematic tweets resurfaced, a fashion designer named Michael Costello has detailed his social media run-in with Teigen, which spurred suicidal thoughts.
Costello specified that the incident occurred in 2014 when Teigen accused him of being racist in an Instagram comment after an alleged photoshopped comment of him using the “N” word made rounds on the Internet. He also shared screenshots of an Instagram DM with Teigen in which he pleaded to talk with her to clear the air about the situation, but her responses indicated that she wasn’t interested at all in hearing his side of the story, only furthering her negative and derogatory stance against him.
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“When I reached out to Chrissy Teigen to communicate that I was a victim of a vindictive cyber slander, and that everything she thought I was is not who I am, she told me that my career was over and that all my doors will be shut from there on,” Costello said in his statement shared to Instagram.
This comes after Teigen had been quiet on social media for a few weeks because she had been publicly cruel on social media in the past to Courtney Stodden, a nonbinary model and musician who married a then 50-year-old actor in 2011. In her lengthy apology published to Medium, she deeply reflected on her past social media presence of edgy humor and directly attacking other celebrities and lays out the work she’s done to grow from it, emphasizing the amount of therapy she’s done.
“Now, confronted with some of the things that I said, I cringe to my core,” Teigen wrote in her Medium piece. “Words have consequences and there are real people behind the Twitter handles I went after. I wasn’t just attacking some random avatar, but hurting young women – some who were still girls – who had feelings.”
Check out Costello’s statement and DM exchange with Teigen below and let us know what you think.