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From her childhood with a hard-to-please mother to her youthful modeling days, Paulina Porizkova said she felt trained to do as she was told — even when that meant taking her top off.
“When I began modeling at 15, it was just the same story all over again,” the former supermodel said after talking about feeling like she had to put on a show to please her single mom who paid little attention to her as a child.
“The quickest way to get out of a situation was do as you’re told,” she said on the “Twenty Good Summers” podcast with her fiancé Jeff Greenstein. “And if that meant taking my top off and if that meant doing x,y, and z, well, then I just did that because that was the easiest way to get through it and also to please people.”
Porizkova explained that “being loved for who you are” is something that escaped her until she was 58.
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Paulina Porizkova said she felt like she always had to be on her best behavior and do as she was told as a young model. (Darren Gerrish/WireImage)
She said as a child her parents “didn’t actually like me unless I performed,” remembering when she was watching a community theater show at about three years old and her father prodded her to get on stage.
“I remember the lights being so incredibly bright that I couldn’t see my parents, and I couldn’t see anything beyond the stage itself. And I was f—ing terrified,” the 60-year-old said. “I was so scared. And I thought, well, the quickest way to get this over and done with is to sing a song. If I sing the song, then they will just sweep me back off.”
She said the audience liked her, and she got a taste of validation.
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“My parents seemed to like me better when I could do things like that,” she admitted. “Otherwise, they didn’t seem to pay a whole lot of attention to me.”
She said she learned early “that nobody really cared about what I wanted or how I felt. That it was all about putting on a show. This is the only way people are going to like you,” adding that she felt she always had to be on her “best behavior.”
Paulina Porizkova modeling in 1989. (Arthur Elgort/Conde Nast)
Like most people, she said she spent her 20s trying to figure out who she was and “how to please people.” And “so this is the beauty of getting older is that you kind of figure out who you are, what you’re good at, what you’re bad at. And then past 50 for us women who start being invisible anyway, we go, well, you know what? F— other people’s assumptions and expectations. I’m just going to be who I am. Like, I’m just going to try out to actually be the person that I’ve always known that I was.”
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Earlier this year, Porizkova detailed some of the sexual harassment she experienced in the fashion industry at just 15 years old.
“Sometimes the people I was seeing were well-dressed and in offices, and sometimes they were middle-aged guys in messy apartments who just wanted to take a few casual photos of me — you know, preferably topless,” she said in a social media post. “I’ve lost count of the amount of men in open bathrobes who greeted me in their hotel rooms or apartments where I have been sent by an agency or clients.”
Paulina Porizkova modeling for Vogue in 1985. (Arthur Elgort/Conde Nast)
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Porizkova, who made history in 1984 as the first Central European woman to land a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover, noted that the advances were not limited to messy apartments.
She recalled well-dressed older men frequently inviting her to parties, yachts and tropical villas.
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Paulina Porizkova modeling for Vogue in 1987. (Arthur Elgort/Conde Nast via Getty Images)
For years, the supermodel believed these encounters were simply part of the paycheck.
“I took it all for granted,” Porizkova admitted, “that my job was to take my clothes off, put my clothes back on and then learn how to creatively fend off horny men so that you don’t offend them and lose a job.”
Fox News’ Stephanie Giang-Paunon contributed to this report.