Supermodel Cindy Crawford’s daughter has revealed her brother’s struggles in the weeks before he died.
Presley Gerber died at the age of 27 from an unspecified cause on Sunday in a California rehab facility, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner revealed in a filing.
In an interview with Vogue in August, his sister, Kaia Gerber, spoke about the lessons she had learned from her model brother and his 10-year struggle with drug addiction.
“When something like that happens in a family, it kind of levels everyone,” she said. “I think that’s also why I started to self-identify as the easy one and never wanted to ask for help. Because it felt like too much to have two children who were needing.”
“My parents for most of our lives were very, very private and didn’t share anything—and now we have this absolute teacher, my brother, who says, ‘I’m gonna be very human for everyone.’ There’s only so much you can hide from the world. And trying to put a lid on something just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.”
“The family is asking for privacy during this very difficult and painful time,” Allie Jenkins, a spokesperson for Crawford and her husband Rande Gerber, said in a statement to CBS.
Speaking on the Studio 22 podcast in 2023, Presley Gerber had opened up about his personal battle.
“Having struggled with mental health, depression and some other things that come along with that, I think that whether I help one person or a hundred people get out of that place that I was in at one point in my life, that’s all I need to do,” he said.
Elsewhere in the Vogue interview, Kaia gave a little more insight into her life growing up in California with Presley.
“Unfortunately, all the things that people assume are true,” she said. “I was in the ocean every day. My brother would go surfing and then walk up to school in his wetsuit with his surfboard, barefoot. You’re with the same kids from preschool to when you graduate. There were no Ubers there, so your parents were driving you to parties and then picking you up. There was only so much trouble you could get into.”
For his part, Presley previously opened up about his relationship with his sister.
“We’re a close family, especially me and my sister, so it’s definitely cool,” he told People in 2018. “We get to travel together half of the time, so it makes it a lot less lonely.”
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