Sports Illustrated Makes Chrissy Teigen Their Latest Cover Girl Despite Her Long History Of Bullying And Creepy Tweets

To celebrate sixty years of Sports Illustrated, the brand announced a slew of new cover girls including Hunter McGrady, Kate Upton, Gayle King, and Chrissy Teigen. While this lineup is certainly a step up from the time they put a guy on the cover, many people are bewildered why Teigen made the cut, given her well-documented history of bullying, gaslighting, and sexual comments about children.

Here's how Sports Illustrated explains the choice: "Each woman serves as an inspiration in her own unique way, championing beliefs that SI Swimsuit has long upheld: the importance of representation and the polysemous nature of beauty."

For those unfamiliar with the term "polysemous," it means "to have multiple meanings or definitions," so I have to ask...what definition of beauty includes sexualizing children, telling a teenager to kill herself, and trying to ruin someone's career?

"This marks Teigen’s ninth year with SI Swimsuit, and her second cover girl moment," gushes Sports Illustrated, also calling Teigen a "supermodel" later in the article. "From the moment she became a rookie, it was clear Teigen was going to be a star, and bringing her back for a solo cover a decade later was an easy decision. The model has represented SI Swimsuit while simultaneously growing her own brand, forging a path to success as a best-selling author, businesswoman, and TV personality. The stunning collection of new photos tells the story of a woman, 10 years older, wiser; an entrepreneur, a modeling mogul, an incredible chef, a mom of four, and still, a vision in front of the camera."

Apparently, Sports Illustrated has memory-holed Teigen's very public downfall, but the internet hasn't.

The Alleged Epstein Connection

Teigen has a strange habit of writing sexual content about children, which made some speculate that she was connected to trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. In response, she deleted over 60,000 tweets and blocked over a million people. While her affiliation with Epstein was never proven, the fact that she had so many questionable tweets is at the very least bizarre.

Others pointed out another problematic connection to Charles Wade, a Black Lives Matter activist who was charged with sex trafficking in 2016. Teigen and her husband John Legend teamed up with Wade and his organization Operation Help or Hush to feed protesters in New York City in December 2014.

Vicious Bullying

Teigen also has a history of bullying minors. In a particularly deranged instance, she spoke disparagingly of an adorable nine-year-old girl and Oscar nominee named Qvenzhané Wallis. Teigen called the girl "cocky" because Wallis wanted her name pronounced correctly. Teigen also reshared a post from The Onion that called the child "a c*nt."

She also told model Courtney Stodden to kill herself when she was just sixteen years old. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Stodden claims that Chrissy Teigen would privately DM her on Twitter and encourage her to kill herself. “'She wouldn't just publicly tweet about wanting me to take ‘a dirt nap’ but would privately DM me and tell me to kill myself. Things like, ‘I can't wait for you to die.’”

A 'dirt nap' refers to a dead person's burial. Teigen tweeted to Stodden in 2011: “My friday fantasy: you. dirt nap. mmmmmm baby.”

Another tweet from Teigen to Stodden said “go. to sleep. forever.”

As these tweets picked up more publicity, Teigen eventually felt pressure to apologize. “I want you to know I’ve been sitting in a hole of deserved global punishment, the ultimate ‘sit here and think about what you’ve done’. Not a day, not a single moment has passed where I haven’t felt the crushing weight of regret for the things I’ve said in the past," she wrote on her Medium page. “As you know, a bunch of my old awful (awful, awful) tweets resurfaced. I’m truly ashamed of them. As I look at them and understand the hurt they caused, I have to stop and wonder: How could I have done that?”

Teigen claimed she has reached out to those she has bullied in the past to apologize: “I understand that they may not want to speak to me. I don’t think I’d like to speak to me. (The real truth in all of this is how much I actually cannot take confrontation.) But if they do, I am here and I will listen to what they have to say, while apologizing through sobs.

However, just hours after Chrissy Teigen published her apology, another victim of her bullying, fashion designer Michael Costello, came forward on Instagram with his experience.

Costello, a Project Runway star who has dressed celebs like Beyoncé and Celine Dion, shared his story of how he came to be blacklisted and bullied by Teigen, resulting in lost work, trauma, and suicidal thoughts.

Costello added that he has “suffered tremendously the past few years.” He wrote, “So many nights I stayed awake, wanting to kill myself. I didn’t see the point of living. There was no way I can ever escape from being the target of the powerful elites in Hollywood, who actually do have powers to close doors with a single text. Not only was I the target of cyber defamation, I was also getting blocklisted in real life. To this day, I am still not able to recover from the years of trauma I have experienced. I am not asking for sympathy from you. I am especially not asking for sympathy from Chrissy Teigen, Monica Rose, and those who believe the false narrative they heard about me. I simply want to set myself free.”

Teigen denied the allegations, but many believed Costello's story given her history of bullying.

Abortion Controversy

Another disturbing instance involved Teigen telling the world she had a miscarriage in 2020 when it was actually an abortion. On September 30, 2020, Teigen shared a series of photos of herself in the hospital, writing a long message about the loss she and John had just experienced. 

"We are shocked and in the kind of deep pain you only hear about, the kind of pain we’ve never felt before," she wrote in the caption. "We were never able to stop the bleeding and give our baby the fluids he needed, despite bags and bags of blood transfusions. It just wasn’t enough."

The post received millions of likes and thousands of messages of support. However, there were a few red flags. For starters, the pictures Teigen shared were professionally taken. Many people wondered why a photographer would be hired to document a tragedy to be publicly shared? Additionally, this happened at the height of the pandemic when many people weren't allowed to visit their dying family members in the hospital. Yet a professional photographer was allowed into the hospital, and neither Teigen nor her husband were required to wear masks. 

For an entire year, Chrissy maintained that she miscarried and the experience was out of her control. She wrote a blog post for Medium explaining that her doctors diagnosed her with partial placenta abruption and that she struggled with placenta issues in the past with her son Miles. She was clear that she experienced a devastating loss beyond her control...until her story changed.

During a summit called "A Day of Unreasonable Conversation" hosted by social impact agency Propper Daley, Chrissy revisited the story of her miscarriage while participating in a talk called "We Made That Choice."

“Two years ago, when I was pregnant with Jack, John and my third child, I had to make a lot of difficult and heartbreaking decisions. It became very clear around halfway through that he would not survive, and that I wouldn’t either without any medical intervention,” she said before completely redefining the experience. “Let’s just call it what it was: It was an abortion. An abortion to save my life for a baby that had absolutely no chance. And to be honest, I never, ever put that together until, actually, a few months ago.”

When her new account of her miscarriage made headline news, and she tweeted, "I told you all we had a miscarriage because I thought that was what it was. But it was an abortion, and we were heartbroken and grateful all at once. It just took me over a year to realize it."

Closing Thoughts

Teigen's unique brand of vulgarity, cruelty, and endless attention-seeking are what ultimately caused the sharp decline in her popularity. Apparently,Sports Illustrated thinks she represents beauty, but most of us couldn't disagree more.

Evie deserves to be heard. Support our cause and help women reclaim their femininity by subscribing today.