Jessica White has strutted her stuff on the Paris runways, appeared in music videos and even landed two major cosmetic campaigns. But it took strength, courage and spirituality to help her discover her own inner beauty.
The tattoos on Jessica White’s body read like self-affirmation mantras. “Heaven” is inked in Japanese on her left wrist. “Powerful” is written in Chinese characters on her right. Angel wings gracefully spread across her neck. The word “loyalty,” in Japanese, covers a birthmark on her slender left side. An Indian flower spreads across her lower back. “Beautiful” is scrawled in Arabic on her right foot. Her choice of virtues is telling – after all, the shapely beauty’s innocence was betrayed at a young age. The successful model has suffered through her own emotional hell, but now she’s spreading her wings, blossoming into a self-assured woman and creating her own reality.
At 23, White is already a decade deep in the modeling game. She landed her first gig posing in Vogueat age 14. A Cover Girl contract followed at 16. Then she began walking the high-profile catwalks of Ralph Lauren, Oscar de la Renta, Marc Jacobs and Victoria’s Secret – not to mention appearing in ad campaigns for Chloe and Gap.
This past December, White was named the new face of Maybelline. This historical appointment makes her the first African-American model ever to nab two major cosmetic contracts.
But the cutthroat world of high fashion is about the moment, and 10 years is almost a lifetime. So it’s no surprise on a breezy afternoon in April, while dining on a plate of spaghetti al pomodoro at Manhattan’s Novita restaurant, White is actually contemplating retirement. “I don’t know exactly when my time will be up, but it’s drawing near,” she says. “And that’s a good thing.”
This Buffalo, New York, native never really bought into the fashion world’s hype. As a teen, she struggled to cope with the melodramatic and often frenetic energy of New York and Paris runway shows. “It was a huge culture shock,” White says. Aside from the backstage catfights and temper tantrums, she had to adjust to operating within an industry that caters to Caucasian women.
“Black girls walk into the room and they can’t even say hello. I’m like, ‘Girl, get over it!’ I know we’re competing for the same job, but I don’t have to hate you,” White explains. “We don’t have to stab each other in the back for a business that would drop us like that as soon as the next beautiful thing comes along.”
Then again, White never had the time to sweat the small stuff. More pressing issues-real and traumatizing memories-weighed on her. When she was eight years old, her father, a preacher, died of complications due to lupus. Throughout the next several years, her grades dropped as her body began to develop. During her freshman year at Kensington High School, Jessica enrolled in Personal Best modeling school, though she quickly realized “you can’t be taught to be a model; you either have it or you don’t.” She had it. So she gravitated toward the glitz and glamour of the fashion world. But it’s taken nearly 10 years for the wounded woman behind the picture-perfect face to recognize that she was worthy of that “beauty” tattoo on her right foot.
Pioneering model, agent and activist Bethann Hardison recalls meeting White in 2001. “When I first laid eyes on her, I thought, ‘OK, here we go! We could take a nice, long, beautiful ride,’” says Hardison, who’s groomed stars such as Tyson Beckford. “But we didn’t. That girl, she could have been a contender.”
Why didn’t her career follow in the footsteps of such runway goddesses as Iman and Beverly Johnson? “She was young. She got distracted by a lot of boys and a few dollars,” Hardison speculates.
White, who was featured in Jay-Z’s “Change Clothes” video and has been linked to celebrities, including John Legend and Vin Diesel, admits to losing her way and indulging in self-destructive behavior. But it wasn’t due to her naiveté. Haunted by a childhood trauma, White sought to suppress her pain instead of tackling it head-on.
“I was sexually molested as a child, so I felt like being pretty was my curse,” she confesses. “I remember putting on big sweatshirts and sweatpants and trying to make myself ugly so this pedophile wouldn’t touch me.” Although she won’t reveal the specifics, she says a person close to her was the perpetrator and that the abuse started when she was 14 and continued for three years. White reveals, “I went through really dark phases where I was just a dead woman walking.”
She began experimenting with cocaine and developed an addiction. “I hit rock bottom, became manic depressive and started to lose my mind,” White recalls. During a particularly rough period in 2006, her behavior often worried her family. “They were completely afraid at that time,” she says. “They didn’t know what was going on in my mind. I’m really good at covering things up, and they couldn’t sense what was going on over the phone.”
A few months later, White realized she needed to cope with her emotional problems. “I woke up one morning and said, ‘I don’t want to be mad anymore; enough is enough,’” she remembers.
Resolved to change her life, White showed up at her older sister’s doorstep in Buffalo. She spent a year attending Mount Olive Baptist Church in hopes of connecting with her spiritual self. “Church was my rehab: the altar and my tears and praying to God for help.” Her prayers were answered when she reconnected with Jim Jergensen, a preacher she’d met when she was 16. “He gave me the spiritual wisdom that changed everything,” White says. “He became my spiritual father. I call him ‘Papa.’”
Another key part in the process was voicing her pain. “Every time I talked about it,” she says, “I was healing because I was learning to forgive myself.”
Once her spiritual rehab was complete, White readied her comeback. In December, Maybelline announced that White would be its new spokeswoman. “The clouds lifted away, and I was able to laugh at everybody who said it couldn’t happen again,” she says, smiling.
Now, White is preparing for the next chapter in her life. She says she’s planning to move back to Buffalo, where she’s busy building the house she hopes to share someday with her future husband and children. She has aspirations of becoming a film producer. She’s also developing the Angel Wings Foundation, a safe haven for abuse victims that will house 30 women. “For the rest of my life, I’m going to dedicate my time to teaching young women that you can emerge empowered after any bad situation,” she says, her eyes brimming with proud defiance. “You don’t have to let this destroy you.” Like the tattoo on her right wrist, she’s finally feeling “powerful.”
-LAURA CHECKOWAY
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