Carré Otis: Recovering From Anorexia Is Harder Than Kicking Heroin
Latest’90s supermodel, Sports Illustrated: Swimsuit Edition star, and former face of Calvin Klein Carré Otis — who had a hell of a time with cocaine and heroin addiction, an abusive marriage to Mickey Rourke, and decades of anorexia during the time she was posing for all of those pretty pictures — says that normalizing her view of food and eating is the hardest thing she’s ever done. Harder than stopping taking cocaine. Harder than kicking heroin.
Otis spoke to the addiction and recovery site the Fix about, well, addiction and recovery. She admits it’s been “unbelievably frustrating” that the news outlets that have covered her new memoir, Beauty Disrupted (which she co-wrote with Jezebel contributor Hugo Schwyzer) have shown such tremendous interest in the passages that relate her relationship with Mickey Rourke — to the exclusion of anything else she writes about, such as her experiences modeling, battle with anorexia, and the fact that in the book Otis chose to at last name the man she says raped her repeatedly when she was 17, former Elite Models boss Gerald Marie. “I went to New York for press and it was three days of nothing but questions about the marriage,” says the former supermodel. “But there were some things I just couldn’t leave out. The marriage was part of the journey and shaped who I am today.” She hopes that the book-buying public, if not reporters, will at least “read the whole fucking book!”
She says she’s honestly not sure if drugs are still as prevalent in the modeling industry now as they were when she was starting out, in the late 1980s.