Travails of an Ex-Super Model
While the Rich Get Richer
The family fortune of Mars, the company that brings you those cute, happy face M&Ms and many more sugary, delightfully non-nutritious treats, has skyrocketed to the sweet tune of 3,517 percent since 1983 while wealth of the 27 richest American sporogenous families have exploded by a combined 1,007 percent since 1983. Since last March, the median growth in the net worth of the top 10 families was 25 percent, according to the Institute for Policy Studies.
Compare that to the typical family whose wealth has gone up a paltry 93 percent over roughly the same period. There is a move afoot in Congress to revise or repeal the so-called, “stepped up basis,” which is a tax loophole the size of Montana but is known only to those very special, obscenely rich families. It’s sinful.
But not only the “stepped up basis” is in the news but also the FBI’s annual and sobering report shows that during the final year of trump’s sideshow, otherwise known as the presidency, the murder rate across the country rose by almost 30 percent and since President Biden, arrived, the murder rate is still rising but at a slower pace.
It’s all pretty terrible but it pales before the horrid fate of a former 1990s-era supermodel whose body was deformed after an allegedly failed, fat-freezing procedure, which was evidently done to try to defy the former supermodel’s 56-year-old body. That would be Canadian Linda Evangelista, one of the highest paid models in the history of highest paid modeling, who was once quoted as saying she and her photographer, “don’t wake up for less than $10,000 a day.”
Evangelista hasn’t been heard or seen publicly in more than five years and she outlined her tragic fall from grace in an Instagram to her 912,000 followers in which she also mentioned in passing that she is seeking $50 million in damages in a suit against Zeltiq Aesthetics Inc., owner of the Zeltiq’s CoolSculpting procedure. Oh the humanity, which by the way is a phrase coined by a news reporter in 1937 who was reporting on the Hindenburg, a zeppelin that was the largest aircraft ever built at the time, that caught fire and ignited in a huge fireball, killing more than 30 people and that was truly a tragedy that barely compares with the horrors that Evangelista has surely endured.
In her Instagram message, the former superduper model said she has been “brutally disfigured by Zeltiq’s CoolSculpting procedure which did the opposite of what it promised. It increased, not decreased my fat cells and left me permanently deformed even after undergoing two painful, unsuccessful, corrective surgeries.” I don’t understand why Evangelista just didn’t do what the rest of do to rid ourselves of unsightly fat, go on a diet.
The nightmarish experience left Evangelista “unrecognizable” and she has developed Paradoxical Adipose Hyperplasia or PAH, which “has not only destroyed my livelihood, it has sent me into a cycle of deep depression, profound sadness and the lowest depths of self-loathing. In the process I have become a recluse. With this lawsuit, I am moving forward to rid myself of my shame and going public with my story.”
Excuse me while I wipe the tears from eyes. By the way, did I mention that in 1991, it was rumored that Evangelista was paid $20,000 to walk in the haute couture show for the fashion house Lanvin and that she was paid more than $5 million for an endorsement deal with Clairol and that she signed a $7.75 million contract to hype Yardley of London. She retired from modeling in 1998 and settled on the French Riviera, also known as the Côte d’Azur, an area where the rain and the Mistral or south French cold wind, are stopped by the Alps, making the sky as blue as the sea and the surface waters wonderfully cool in the summer, but not for you and me.
You have to feel badly for Evangelista as her life has been marked by sadness, which hopefully has been made more bearable by the many millions she made by modeling. She married Gerald Marie in 1987 but they divorced six years later. A year before the divorce, she met actor Kyle MacLachlan and they became engaged in 1995 but sadly, broke up three years later. Then she dated French football player Fabien Barthez, became pregnant but miscarried, and the couple broke up in 2000, reunited in 2001, and then called it quits for good in 2002.
I hope you can all join me in wishing Evangelista success in her $50 million lawsuit so that she can return to the type of lifestyle to which she was accustomed.
It may pale in comparative importance but I feel duty bound to speak about the more prosaic subjects I brought up earlier, including the “stepped up basis,” an obscure yet incredibly valuable tax gyration that neither you nor I will ever be able to use. According to a column in the N.Y. Times by Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein, “stepped up basis” is “used by billionaires to pass vast sums of wealth down to their heirs” by avoiding capital gains taxes. I would explain what it is but I don’t understand it so why bother.
Kaiser-Schatzlein goes on to explain that the incredible expansion of wealth “isn’t just the natural product of the free market. It’s the result of fastidious lobbying that creates powerful dynasties with the cash to create a skewed debate.”
She notes that the descendants of the uber rich, and the children of today’s American royalty, like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, “stand to inherit unthinkable sums of money, further concentrating wealth and political power away from the rest of society, including small businesses and farmers. Stepped up basis could shield billions of dollars in inherited wealth.”
There is some movement in Congress to repeal or at least pare down stepped up basis but knowing the power of the powerful, I wouldn’t wager that it will ever happen.
As for the murder rate, the FBI Uniform Crime Report shows that the nation in 2020 experienced an increase in the murder rate of around 29 percent, the biggest rise since the start of national record-keeping in 1960. The good news is that the national rate of murders per 100,000 is about one-third below the rate in the early 1990s. Good may not be the right word, maybe relatively better.
The N.Y. Times reported many possible contributing factors, including pandemic stresses; increased distrust between the police and the public after the murder of George Floyd, including a pullback by the police in response to criticism; and increased firearm carrying.
So murder is on the rise and the rich keep getting richer but at least most of us don’t have to suffer the agony of fat reduction gone south.