After Chrissy Teigen shared an apology note on Monday for her past hurtful social media posts, designer Michael Costello cried foul and said the model and host had driven him to suicidal thoughts due to her “bullying” of him online. Now, singer Leona Lewis is recalling her own painful experience with Costello in the hopes to inspire a little more compassion for everyone involved.
In a seven-part post on Lewis’ Instagram Stories, the U.K. X Factor winner recalled an incident in 2014 when the Project Runway designer was set to dress her for a charity fashion show. According to her version of events, when she showed up to the fitting, the sample size didn’t work on her and Costello’s team was unwilling to alter it to fit her. “At the next fitting, the night before the show, with no explanation at all, Michael refused to turn up,” Lewis writes. “He no longer wanted to dress me and he abandoned his commitments to me and the show which made me well aware that I wasn’t the body type required.”
Lewis says she still attended the event but sat in the crowd and had to make up excuses for why she wasn’t walking in the show as planned. “I was so embarrassed and deeply hurt,” she wrote. “Because I didn’t look like a model size, I was not permitted to walk in the show.”
After Costello claimed that Teigen bullied him and tried to blacklist him from working with certain clients due to what he claims were fabricated racist messages attributed to him, Lewis felt compelled to share her story. “We all make mistakes, I know I have, but at this time I feel that when people apologize (Chrissy) and show sincere remorse and rehabilitation for their actions, we should embrace them and not try and kick them when they’re down.”
Costello’s accusation came Monday after Teigen shared a Medium post she penned to say she was reaching out to all the people she’d hurt on social media to try to make amends.
Read all of Lewis’ posts below:
