Linda Evangelista Battled Breast Cancer Twice in the Last 5 Years

Linda Evangelista used to be everywhere, as one of the original supermodels. She dominated the catwalks and covers of magazines before suddenly exiting the spotlight without explanation. In 2021, she emerged and revealed that CoolSculpting side effects gone awry had left her, in her words, “permanently disfigured,” leading her to hide herself away from the spotlight for a time. Not anymore: She’s at the center of the upcoming The Super Models docuseries and was on the September cover of Vogue. It wasn’t just the CoolSculpting that had her laying low: Now, she’s revealed in a new interview with WSJ. Magazine that she has fought breast cancer two times within the last five years.

“I’ve kept it quiet,” she said of her cancer diagnoses. “Only a handful of people knew. And I’m just not one of those people who has to share everything,” she said. “I thought to myself, I will share this one day but while I am going through it, absolutely not. I don’t want the Daily Mail waiting outside my door like they do every time something happens. ‘Linda seen for the first time since blah blah blah.’”

The first diagnosis came in December 2018 after a routine mammogram.

“The margins were not good,” she said of the diagnosis. “And due to other health factors, without hesitation, because I wanted to put everything behind me and not to have to deal with this, I opted for a bilateral mastectomy. Thinking I was good and set for life. Breast cancer was not going to kill me.”

And it hasn’t, though that remission didn’t last. Last July, after feeling a lump on her chest, an MRI found cancer in her pectoral muscle.

“Dig a hole in my chest,” she remembered telling surgeons. “I don’t want it to look pretty. I want you to excavate. I want to see a hole in my chest when you’re done. Do you understand me? I’m not dying from this.” She calls her course of action “just do what you’ve got to do and get through it. And that’s what I did.”

She’s been hiding in plain sight, she said, like when she wore an enormous opera cape walking for Fendi in September 2022.

“Like, ‘What’s she hiding under that dress?’” she recalled seeing online. “If they only knew—my [post-surgical] drainage tubes had just been pulled.”

She’s cancer-free once more, but knows that there’s no guarantee her cancer journey is over.

“I know I have one foot in the grave,” she said, “but I’m totally in celebration mode.”

The revelation also gives a little more context to last month’s Vogue interview, in which Evangelista gushed about Salma Hayek, who is now married to François-Henri Pinault, with whom Evanglista has a 16-year-old son. She described their blended family and said that she spends most holidays with them, with Hayek even flying to make Evangelista truffled potatoes at Thanksgiving when Evangelista was sick. To WSJ., she said of Hayek, “I love that woman. She’s a woman’s woman. Just like me, [she’s] so family-oriented, and so positive. She’s a blessing to us…. She was very, very generous and kind to me while I was going through my chemo.”