Source: Albert L. Ortega / Getty
If you’ve been keeping up with the headlines you’d recall that within recent weeks Chrissy Tiegen lost some of her brand deals due to resurfaced conversations about her online trolling and bullying. Despite her making a public apology yesterday, fashion designer Michael Costello decided to share his experience feeling attacked by Tiegen back in 2014 — and now others are coming out with their own accounts claiming Costello is a bully too.
Around a day ago, Costello shared an Instagram post wherein he said that after “a public comment” Chrissy Teigen made in 2014 where she accused him of “being a racist,” he faced tons of hate and criticisms despite him claiming that her accusation was false, and him pleading with her to take it down.
Noting how he didn’t want to add to Teigen’s current and public drama, he said that he was choosing to tell his story now because he needed to “heal.” Costello wrote, “I didn’t want to do this but I can not be happy until I speak my mind. I need to heal and in order for me to do that I must reveal what I’ve been going through. I wanted to kill myself and I still am traumatized, depressed, and have thoughts of suicide.”
In the post, the fashion designer included screengrabs of his DMs with Teigen at the time of the incident. In them, you can see him asking her to remove the comment. At one point, Teigen had written him, “racist people like you deserve to suffer and die. You might as well be dead. Your career is over, just watch.”
With that in mind, earlier today Maxie J — a black female designer — exposed a terrible encounter she’d had with Costello in which she claimed he called her a “ni–er b*tch.” If you’ll recall, we posted about that story back in 2014 — read it here.
Maxie J posted today, “Michael Costello got the nerve to be playing [the] victim of being bullied, but called his self bullying 7 years ago, and called me a ‘Black Ni–ger B*tch’ in a fabric store downtown 🤔 . He had the wrong one tho cus I most certainly whooped hi a*s, almost went to jail too. Thank GOD for his mercy cause I certainly LOST IT 🤯 . I never experienced racism before 🤷ðŸ¾â™€ï¸. All I knew to do was FIGHT 🤷ðŸ¾â™€ï¸ .”
What’s worse is that several hours ago singer Leona Lewis revealed that she had her own traumatizing interaction with Costello — one that she says left her feeling insecure for years.
According to her account, she’d been assigned Costello as her designer for a charity event that she was supposed to attend but he and his team refused to alter the garment she was supposed to wear — all before Costello abandoned his commitment to dressing her altogether. Allegedly, he and the team made her “well aware” she wasn’t “the required body type.”
“I was so embarrassed and deeply hurt. Because I didn’t look like a model size, I was not permitted to walk in his dress,” Lewis noted.
“…as an effect of those actions I suffered both personally and professionally,” she added. “I was left with deep insecurities after this and I’ve had to work hard over the years to love my body.”
Since Lewis spoke out, @hollywoodunlocked reported that Costello said that he was “confused” about what the singer said since he’d thought their 2014 encounter had gone over more smoothly. Down below, see the receipts he provided from his work with Lewis.
