Linda Evangelista, 59, reveals how she really felt when she first showed friends her mastectomy scars

Linda Evangelista has revealed how she really felt the first time she showed anyone besides her family her mastectomy scars.

The 59-year-old, who was one of the Supermodels of the 1990s, was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018 and secretly underwent a double mastectomy.

However, until this past year, she had shied away from letting anybody see the result of the procedure other than her closest intimates.

Her mindset changed when photographer Cass Bird snapped her for Germany’s Zeit magazine in 2024 and persuaded her to appear topless under a denim jacket.

Linda told the story this week during an onstage panel discussion that included Cass’ fiancée Jenna Lyons, who had also been present at the Zeit shoot. 

When she bared her scars for her friends at Zeit, she was told they were ‘so beautiful’ – which she said she had ‘needed to hear’ from others, via People. 

Linda Evangelista has revealed how she really felt the first time she showed anyone besides her family her mastectomy scars; pictured in November 2023 in New York 

‘Jenna was there that day,’ Linda recalled onstage at Shiseido’s Potential Has No Age Summit, while looking back on the Zeit magazine shoot.

‘We brought her into the pictures, but when I was changing, they asked me: “Can we see your….” I don’t know what you said, if it was my chest or my whatever. I have had a double mastectomy and I had never shown anyone besides my family.’

When she eventually did expose her scars, she was initially dubious of how they looked, but she felt differently after the people around her encouraged her.

‘I’m beautiful, but I needed to hear it from someone else. So I just really think it’s important that as women, we support each other and uplift each other. I think we’re all in this together,’ Linda argued.

Although she was diagnosed with breast cancer near the end of 2018, she did not discuss the ordeal in public until late 2023.

‘The margins were not good, 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,’ she explained to WSJ Magazine. ‘Thinking I was good and set for life. Breast cancer was not going to kill me.’

However, in 2022, she discovered that the cancer had returned to one of her pectoral muscles and she underwent chemotherapy to treat the illness.

At that stage, she instructed her doctor: ‘Dig a hole in my chest. 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.’

Linda, pictured on her Instagram page last year, shied away from letting anybody see the result of the procedure other than her closest intimates

The 59-year-old, who was one of the reigning Supermodels of the 1990s, is pictured in her heyday walking a Chanel show in Paris in 1992 

Linda revealed that her tests had come back with a ‘a horrible oncotype score,’ which is a number that predicts how likely the cancer is to recur. 

‘I know I have one foot in the grave, but I’m totally in celebration mode,’ she said in 2023, shortly after unveiling her cancer battle for the first time.

Linda frankly discussed her other health issues in 2020, when she denounced the CoolSculpting weight loss procedure she had undergone five years earlier.

She claimed the surgery had been botched, leaving her ‘brutally disfigured’ and turning her into a ‘recluse’ with ‘depression.’ 

In 2022 she filed a lawsuit against Zeltiq, the company behind CoolSculpting, but the legal battle was later resolved with a settlement.

When she announced the suit, she claimed CoolSculpting had cost her her ‘livelihood’ as it would ‘be difficult to find jobs with things protruding from me; without retouching, or squeezing into things, or taping things or compressing or tricking.’ 

Linda ultimately had liposuction twice in order to sort out the physical problems that she accused CoolSculpting of inflicting on her.