The supermodel who was a symbol of anti-communism as a child and became a voice for natural aging

Paulina Porizkova's face fascinated both when she was a four-year-old girl and later in her life.

In the 1980s, she was one of the highest-paid supermodels in the world.

Adored by the cameras, she was on the cover of magazines like Vogue, the face of global brands and the star of one of the most lucrative advertising contracts of the 1980s.

All this while walking the catwalks of the epicenters of the fashion world.

However, her life is not a fairy tale.

Behind her impeccable image lies a story of abandonment, exclusion, abuse, and, ultimately, redemption.

After years of being seen but perhaps not heard, she began writing and speaking openly about misogyny in the fashion world and the aesthetic pressure on older women.

No parents, but with photographers

Paulina was born in Czechoslovakia in 1965, in the midst of a Europe divided by the Cold War.

Her life took a drastic turn at the age of three, when her parents fled the country during the 1968 Soviet invasion, leaving her behind with her grandparents.

They promised to come back for her, but the borders closed.

In Sweden, her parents began a desperate campaign to rescue her, including a hunger strike in front of the Czechoslovak embassy in Stockholm.

The Swedish press took an interest in the case, and they began regularly sending photographers to her grandmother's house in Prostějov.

Soviet tanks surrounded by a crowd in front of the National Museum on Wenceslas Square in Prague, August 1968. Image source: Getty Images

Image caption: The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, also known as Operation Danube, was an undeclared war involving troops from five socialist countries that took place on the night of August 20–21, 1968.

"They made me pose with a teddy bear and a sad face, without me understanding why. I just thought: if I do this quickly, I can play again. It was like being a model, years later."

"I never thought it was weird until one day my best friend asked me if I wanted to play on Sunday afternoon, and I told her it was the day the photographers came."

"She said, 'What are you talking about?' I was completely baffled, and that's when I realized it was just me."

Unbeknownst to her, she had become a media symbol of childhood suffering under communism, something she wasn't old enough to understand.

Reunion and loss

Paulina lived with her grandparents, whom she loved, and at the age of seven, her mother managed to return, pregnant with her younger brother.

She tried to smuggle Paulina out of the country, but was arrested and placed under house arrest.

The reunion was not what the girl imagined.

"I had idealized my parents. I remembered my mother as a beautiful woman, but the pregnant woman who showed up wasn't what I expected. She didn't smell like home. She wasn't like my grandmother."

"She was supposed to fit in with the family, but I didn't know her and it was awkward and strange."

"I felt a little torn between hating myself for not loving her right away and hating her for her meddling."

Finally, in 1973, her mother was given permission to leave Czechoslovakia with her children.

Paulina was eight years old and didn't know she would leave her grandmother behind.

"I was told we were going to Sweden to see my dad, and I was super excited, but I thought I might come back for the holidays."

She vividly remembers arriving at the border in a borrowed car and walking "a long way."

The road to Austria was guarded and lined with minefields.

"My mother told me not to be afraid, but to walk right behind her."

"I was full of hope. I didn't know that this was the moment I would leave my childhood, my self-esteem, and my world behind. Only now do I see it clearly."

They crossed the border and finally the family was all reunited.

But soon something unexpected happened, one night in Vienna.

"We were in a hotel room; my brother and I were lying on cots on the edge of our parents' bed. They thought we were asleep, but I wasn't."

I listened to my father patiently and calmly explain to my mother that he had met someone else while she was imprisoned in Czechoslovakia and that he no longer wanted to be married.

"I remember my mother crying softly and saying, 'How are you telling me this now? Why didn't you say anything before? What should I do?'

"And I remember my dad saying he wasn't really ready to have kids yet, and I remember that specifically because I thought, 'Isn't it too late?'"

'The Communist Girl'

Shortly after, the family moved to Sweden.

After years of being reported in the press as an absent child, her arrival became headline news and her face was plastered all over the press.

But, far from it, the reception was not warm.

In her new country, Paulina was known as "that girl from the newspapers." At school, the nickname "stinky communist" marked the beginning of years of exclusion and mistreatment.

"At first it was just comments, but then they hit me, pushed me and mistreated me."

Paulina believed that the key to being accepted and avoiding harassment and violence was to change her appearance. To do this, she needed money.

She worked at whatever she could: babysitting, selling newspapers, and even condoms at a tobacconist's—all to buy what she needed to look like just one of the crowd.

On the first day of school after that vacation, she says she dressed in her trendy jeans and a yellow T-shirt with cherries on it; she had a new haircut; and she wore lip gloss and bright blue eyeshadow.

"It was amazing to work so hard and get exactly what I wanted. It was magical."

"I walked into the classroom hoping to finally fit in. But no one looked at me."

Everything was as it was before, she felt: she didn't exist unless she was being mistreated.

"But then the three girls who had been physically abusing me for the past two years found me in a bathroom, and one of them said, 'Nice clothes!'"

"I thought, 'It worked!' and for a moment I felt a rush of joy, but then they grabbed me, put my head in a toilet bowl and flushed it."

"It's a physically horrible feeling. Water runs down your nose and you feel like you're going to drown. But by far the worst part was that it broke my heart."

"I realized there was nothing I could do to be a part of what I wanted so badly."

The photo that changed everything

Paulina felt out of place at school, at home, and in Sweden.

However, another photo was about to change everything.

One of her friends dreamed of being a makeup artist.

When they played together, she would ask if she could do her makeup and pose for the camera. The photos were creative. And they had fun.

"She was a really great makeup artist. She sent some pictures to a modeling agent in town, saying, 'I'd love to be a makeup artist or maybe a fashion photographer. How do I do that?'"

"But the answer was different: 'Who is the girl? How tall is she? And how old is she?'"

The talent scout took Paulina to meet an agent, the now-discredited John Casablancas, founder of the huge Elite Model Management agency and creator of the supermodel concept.

Paulina, however, had no idea who he was.

"I met John for about 10 minutes. He looked at me quickly and said I had beautiful skin and asked, 'Would you like to go to Paris?'"

"I was 14 and a half and I went from having my head in the toilet to 'Do you want to go to Paris to be a model?'"

She wanted it. Paris would be her big chance. But not everything was rosy.

The price of beauty

After a series of quick encounters, Paulina moved alone to the city in the fashion center.

Since leaving Czechoslovakia, far from her grandmother's loving arms, she felt lost and struggled to regain her sense of belonging.

Paris was a whole new world, a new opportunity, promising glamorous work and luxury travel.

Though she soon became a supermodel, the camera that once documented her pain now silenced her.

What she found was deeply ingrained misogyny, and she confronted it head-on from a very early age.

"On my fourth job, a photographer came up behind me and put something on my shoulder. I was putting on makeup in front of the mirror and couldn't see what it was, but everyone was laughing, so I laughed too."

"I didn't understand what it was until he pulled away and zipped up his fly, and I realized it was his penis."

"I was 15, so I took it in, just like I've taken in everything in my life, thinking, 'So this is part of my job.'"

"And I wasn't wrong. It was a very important part of my job."

Paulina suffered numerous episodes of sexual harassment and violence, normalized in a male-dominated industry.

"We took it as a compliment. If a famous photographer didn't touch you, you felt ugly."

It wasn't until one day, while watching a program about workplace harassment, that she realized it wasn't part of the job, but rather abuse.

"But then, I was already about 46 years old."

One love, one loss

The work meetings kept coming and, even as a teenager, Paulina earned more money than her parents combined.

In 1983, she moved to New York, and in 1984, she appeared on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue.

This photo attracted worldwide attention.

One night that same year, Paulina was at home watching MTV and was mesmerized by the blue-green eyes of a dashing singer who appeared on the screen.

A few months later, she was cast in a music video for an American rock band called The Cars.

When she went to a dinner to meet them, the blue-eyed singer she had fallen in love with showed up: Ric Ocasek, the band's lead singer.

They soon began dating. "He was everything I was looking for."

"I finally met someone who seemed to adore me completely, who didn't want to share me with anyone, who was a little obsessed with me."

"He was incredibly jealous, but very talented. And so handsome and so sexy! It was a super passionate romance at first."

But Ric was married.

"I remember thinking it was obviously not a happy marriage, so he was going to leave his wife."

"I didn't think much about it until months later he told me he had kids too. It was a cold shower. But until then, it was a whirlwind, like a movie romance."

Even though he was very domineering, for Paulina he was her refuge, her home.

"He was a lot like my father: talented, tall, and very focused on what he loved. He was also a lot like my grandmother: he loved with a passionate, possessive, and obsessive quality."

"It was like I'd won the lottery: I had everything I knew about security in one man."

A man much older than her, to whom she surrendered herself in every way. He dictated everything, from the clothes she wore to the friends she saw and the jobs she took.

"He was 41 and I was 19, so I thought he knew everything and that to have a great relationship I had to do what he said."

"It didn't feel controlling or toxic. I had to give up certain things, but it didn't feel like that at all. Until I grew up."

In 1988, Paulina landed her biggest modeling contract to date: as the face of Estée Lauder, she would earn $6 million a year.

"Ric was thrilled because it took me out of the modeling game: I was just going to be the sophisticated Estée Lauder ice queen, which he approved of. And it was wonderful for me too, because I wanted to do movies and stuff."

In 1989, Ric and Paulina married and had two children. But as the decades passed, their relationship changed, just as she had.

"Things started to go downhill after about 25 years of relationship."

"I took care of a house, my children, my stepchildren, his parents. I acted in films, wrote a novel and a children's book."

"I was already a woman, not the girl I was when we met, admiring him with a sparkle in my eyes, and he as the great protector and my prince. And he felt diminished."

"The dynamic changed, and he didn't know how to deal with it other than ignoring me."

After nearly 30 years of marriage, Paulina and Ric separated and began divorce proceedings. But they remained in the same house.

Ric was diagnosed with lung cancer and she cared for him until his death in 2019.

She would soon discover that the one who had been her life partner (and who managed her money) had excluded her from his will.

An unexpected voice

Before Ric's death, when the relationship was deteriorating and he was shutting her out, Paulina decided to go back to modeling.

"I wanted to get some of my life back."

But she encountered a different kind of rejection: ageism.

"I had a meeting with my modeling agent and I started saying, 'It's not like I want to revive my modeling career...' and she laughed and said, 'It's not like you can revive your modeling career!'"

The reason was not surprising: "Older women are not seen as socially attractive," she notes.

"As you get older, you start to feel ashamed that you don't look the same as you used to."

Instead of feeling intimidated, Paulina began to speak out.

She denounced ageism, the invisibility of older women, and the hypocrisy of the industry that glorified and then discarded her.

She used social media to show wrinkles, tears, scars, thoughts and emotions, sharing not only her face but also her story.

In 2022, she published Unfiltered, a series of essays in which she unmasked the facade of her glamorous marriage.

"I was the lucky wife in an exceptionally happy celebrity marriage that had weathered all the adversities, when the truth was that by the time I turned 50, my husband hadn't touched me in many years," she revealed.

She also explores the complexities of being a woman.

"The ideal woman is not a woman. She is a child."

And she returned to the public eye, to magazines and catwalks, but this time on her own terms: true to who she is and who she wants to be.

"It turns out that what doesn't kill you doesn't necessarily make you stronger. That's a fallacy. But what doesn't kill you makes you understand your strength," she observes.

A force that did not go unnoticed by the company that catapulted her to supermodel status: Estée Lauder invited her to work with them again.

According to the brand's global president, Justin Boxford, Paulina was hired "not as a spokesperson, but as a role model."

"She's changing the conversation about aging, and we want to be the loudspeaker to help spread her message."

Meanwhile, Paulina continues to impress on Instagram by posting photos of herself, such as one in a bikini on her 60th birthday, which went viral and appears in countless reports.

"They say you have two options: be ashamed of your age or hide it with surgery. I propose a third: lose the shame."