Kaia Gerber may be as beautiful as her mother. But she’s just outed an ugly secret at the heart of America’s most photogenic family that insiders are now scrambling to explain away

Nepo babies of the rich and famous don’t have it all their own way. They might inherit their parents’ money and connections, but their looks are a different matter.

Many daughters of top actresses and models are consigned to celebrity obscurity for the unforgivable sin of looking like their father. But not Kaia Gerber, whose USP is that she looks so much like her mother, supermodel Cindy Crawford, that seeing a photo of her might make older readers think they’ve been thrown into a time warp back to the 1980s.

Now 24, the daughter of Crawford (60) and the handsome businessman Rande Gerber, has inevitably followed her mother into modelling, starting at ten when she posed for the Young Versace brand.

A 27-year-old brother, Presley, is also a model – neatly rounding off a family unit that must be a strong contender as America’s most photogenic family.

And yet all that glitters is not always gold. The opportunity to promote her budding acting career by giving an interview to Vogue magazine this week has allowed some light to fall on a family dynamic that even the fashion bible’s most gushing sycophants would have to admit is ‘complicated.’

Gerber, now one of the highest-paid models in the industry – she makes an estimated $5 million annually – opened up for the first time about her own eating disorders and her brother’s long struggle with depression and drug addiction, during which he was arrested for driving under the influence. He pleaded no contest to the charge in 2019 and was sentenced to three years probation. ‘When something like that happens in a family, it kind of levels everyone,’ she said.

Her brother’s problems – which famously led to him getting a face tattoo that read ‘misunderstood’ – made her determined to be the ‘easy’ child and not compound her parents’ difficulties, she said.

‘I started to self-identify as the easy one and never wanted to ask for help. Because it felt like too much to have two children who were needing,’ she said.

She said she was so determined not to be a burden on her parents that, when she moved into her own apartment in New York at the age of 17, she was too proud to phone her mother and ask her how to turn on the dishwasher.

‘I never wanted to embarrass them,’ she told Vogue. ‘I never wanted to be that child coming in and ruining all the hard work they’ve done. I wasn’t a partier in high school.’

A source who knows the family confirmed everything Kaia told the magazine, telling the Daily Mail this week that the Gerber siblings were ‘deeply bonded’ but had ‘metabolized the pressure’ of living in such a scrutinized and picture-perfect family in very different ways.

The insider went on: ‘He became like this wild child whose distress was allowed to be visible and disruptive. Kaia took an interesting approach by becoming extraordinarily self-contained, competent and a low needs person.

‘They will say that they have very different memories of their childhood. Presley needed help constantly – [that] was the vibe in the house. He gets permission to do that. So, what does she do? She becomes overly controlled, accommodating.’

Not, insisted the source, that Kaia resents her brother even though at one time his behavior placed ‘enormous strain’ on her. She told Vogue she is deeply proud of him.

Meanwhile, the parents, ‘the real deal when it comes to parenting’ – have long been concerned about the negative impact that Crawford’s fame and their wealth could have on their children.

That wealth rocketed after Casamigos, the tequila brand that Rande Gerber set up with George Clooney, was bought in 2017 by drinks giant Diageo for $700 million.

‘They’re extremely morals-based and family is paramount,’ said the source of Crawford and Gerber. ‘She was deeply concerned about [the children] being raised right.’

However, Presley’s failure to anything like match his sister’s stellar success in modelling cannot have helped any feelings of insecurity about living in a highly successful family.

By Kaia’s own admission, her revelations and those of her brother are a huge break with the policy of their parents to be ‘very, very private,’ but she said: ‘There’s only so much you can hide from the world. And trying to put a lid on something just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.’

Kaia, who has long wanted to act, has her first starring role in TV drama series The Shards. The glossy Ryan Murphy adaptation of a Bret Easton Ellis novel about a serial killer stalking a group of fast-living, rich LA kids has been hailed as a return to form for the veteran TV writer and producer.

His decision to cast Gerber and Homer Gere, son of Pretty Woman star Richard Gere, in leading roles was a stroke of marketing genius given that Cindy Crawford and Richard Gere were famously married between 1991 and 1995. (Homer, 26, is Gere’s son by his second wife, actress and ex-Bond Girl Carey Lowell).

Homer, who shares Vogue’s front cover with Gerber, told the magazine how, 20 minutes after meeting her for the first time in a bar just days before filming started, he decided to address the elephant in the room. ‘I was like, “Should we just acknowledge the fact that our parents were married?” She was like, “Yeah. Cool.” And that was it.’ 

The Gere-Crawford marriage was, however, anything but ‘cool.’ Some dismissed the union of one of the world’s top models and one of its most handsome screen stars, a spontaneous affair in Las Vegas in which Crawford had to wear a ring hastily made from aluminum foil, as a promotional stunt.

Others speculated it was to hide Gere’s rumored homosexuality (such whispers having been based on little more than the fact he had a lot of gay friends). The supermodel admitted years later that ‘it wasn’t the wedding I had dreamed of as a little girl.’

Gere went on to marry twice after their split; first to Homer’s mother, Carey Lowell, then to activist Alejandra Silva his wife since 2018. Instead, Crawford blamed their age gap and their careers keeping them apart for the marriage’s failure. Three years after they split up, she finally got a wedding worthy of the name when she married Rande Gerber in the Bahamas and their union remains one of the most enduring in the entertainment world.

And yet, as their daughter has made clear, the couple have had their challenges. Kaia says she struggled with issues of body image as being endlessly compared to her mother eventually affected her mental health.

‘We’re clearly in one of those cycles right now where people are very, very, very thin,’ she told Vogue. ‘As someone who’s been thin most of my life, I’ve always been compared against my mom – like, ‘What’s wrong with Kaia’?’

She said she felt ‘so jealous’ of her mother’s figure. ‘I would have loved to be born with boobs and a butt. People have always commented on my body, which is hard because I’m not always ready to comment on my own body, you know?’

She said she has had ‘disordered eating in my life’, adding: ‘People are like, “You look terrible,” and it doesn’t exactly make you go, “Oh, good. Let me get over this mental illness then!” Negativity has never saved someone’s life.’ 

Gerber even opened up to Vogue about her love life, her current boyfriend is actor and musician Lewis Pullman and son of film star Bill Pullman, and admitted she found the scrutiny of her boyfriends in her teenage years ‘challenging.’ Previous romances have included comedian Pete Davidson and actors Austin Butler and Jacob Elordi. 

She added: ‘I think I’ve been labeled in ways that are quite misogynistic: serial dater, slut, greedy. My mom is always like, “Just don’t make the same mistake twice.” And I’m pretty good at not.’ 

Gerber also appears to be ‘pretty good’ at coping with being dismissed as a nepo baby, simply owning the fact that she is one. ‘I’ve only ever been a nepo baby, and I’ve only ever benefited in my career from it,’ she told Vogue.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Kaia’s representatives for comment.

Her brother is a different matter. Presley Gerber is hardly the first offspring of a Hollywood star to struggle to cope with a parent’s fame.

Aged 15, he shocked his parents when he came home with his first tattoo, the word ‘Grateful’ written in a large font on his forearm, after trying to hide it by wearing a large hoodie in the sweltering heat. ‘That was a night to remember for sure!’ he recalled years later.

He would have many more tattoos, some of them one word ‘reminders’ to him of how he should feel. They included ‘Misunderstood’ – which he had tattooed on a cheekbone, just below his eye and first revealed in 2020 but later removed. He insisted he’d been misunderstood his entire life.

‘Presley is obviously going through a super rebellious phase right now,’ a source told Us Weekly at the time. ‘He is trying to get out of the shadow of his family and find his own way and create his own identity.’

He first publicly discussed his mental health issues in an appearance as a guest on the Studio 22 podcast in 2023, saying he wanted to share his own stories in the hope that they would help others in a similar position.

‘Having struggled with mental health, depression, and some other things that come along with that, I think that whether I help one person or a hundred people get out of that place that I was in at one point in my life, that’s all I need to do,’ he said.

‘I’ve grown up in Hollywood and there’s a lot of people around here that I love to death,’ he said in an Instagram video last December. ‘But right now, I try not to be around them.’

In the same candid online missive to his 138,000 followers as part of a series of posts he calls ‘Mental Health Mondays’, he also addressed the prescription drugs he was taking. They included buprenorphine (which can be used to help control craving and block the ‘high’ of other drugs), Xanax and Valium for panic attacks. He said he’d been sober from alcohol for five months. 

He described developing a dependency on prescription medication after seeing more than 15 psychiatrists who, he said, intensely medicated him without setting out a structured recovery plan.

Presley, who claimed he was being so candid because ‘I feel like honesty is the best rule’, also revealed he had received ibogaine therapy, which is primarily used to tackle severe substance abuse disorders such as opioid or cocaine addiction by reducing drug cravings and withdrawal symptoms.

The Daily Mail has reached out to Presley’s representatives for comment.

Cindy Crawford posted a comment on her son’s video, saying: ‘Presley, we love you and you’re not alone.’

Living with this turmoil, her daughter, who was modelling on the catwalk for Calvin Klein just days after turning 16, had to grow up fast.

Should she now become as successful an actress as she already is a model, one wonders how that will go down with a brother apparently struggling to keep up with his family’s stellar fame and fortune.