The Lost Girl 2

Tatyana had visited every modeling agency in Almaty—how could she have missed her? It turned out Ruslana wasn’t a model, but a friend of a friend of the editor. They’d taken the photos for fun. Ruslana was 17, went to one of the best schools in Almaty, spoke fluent German, and dreamed of a place at a European university. She was called to a casting in London. Her mother, a manager at a cosmetics company, didn’t want to let her daughter go. Ruslana insisted: “London! I’ll finally see London!”
 At the offices of Ruslana’s first agency I find video of that trip to London. A teenager—no, child—in a hoodie on a blustery London day, snapping photos of Tower Bridge, grinning goofily, laughing widely, and trying to hide her braces as she does so. Then she takes the hoodie off, and down it tumbles: that heavy, golden, knee-length hair. They nicknamed her the Russian Rapunzel in modeling land. Before her trip to London, Ruslana had never washed her own hair before—her mother had always helped her. Now she was staying in packed model flats in Paris and Milan, her days a procession of castings. Her life reduced to measurements (32-23-33), rooms full of tense girls eyeing each other’s legs-hips-breasts, desperate to be the one who’s picked: every rejection a slap saying your body’s wrong, that you’re wrong. Friends remember that Ruslana would cry—she took rejection personally, missed home. Around her swirled a whirlpool of cocaine, champagne, debauchery. Many girls get sucked in. Ruslana was different. She would go to bed early and wrote poems to console herself, posting them on social-networking sites:

“Instead of moaning at the thorns/I’m happy that a rose among them grows.”

Then came the Nina Ricci ad. The magical tree. The pink apple. Stardom.

That ad took Ruslana from the world of wannabes to the best parties in New York, trips to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s private island, to Moscow where the Russian mega-rich were keen to meet the beauty from the ad, and where she fell blissfully, childishly in love with one of the handsomest tycoons in town.

In Moscow, I seek out Luba, Ruslana’s friend and colleague, who was close to her in Moscow around that time. Luba’s flat is stuffed with hundreds of cuddly toys. They’re nothing like their images on paper, these girls. They’re small, scared, brittle. When the camera zooms tight, you notice their wounded eyes, both searching for guidance and mistrustful. Luba remembers Ruslana’s lover well: “He’s gorgeous. Girls drop at his feet. He’s been with so many of my friends. All of them perfect.” Friends, more experienced girls like Luba, warned Ruslana not to fall in love. But she was certain this was the real thing. She wanted marriage, children, a steady home. “That was the thing about Ruslana—there was something childish about her. She believed.”

When the tycoon dumped Ruslana, she kept on texting him, hoping for an answer. She posted poems of unrequited love on her networking page:

“You left again, leaving in return/A castle of pink dreams and ruined walls … it feels as if someone tore out my heart and trod all over it.”

The Lost Girl

Why did a supermodel at the top of her game—hauntingly beautiful and only 20—kill herself in 2008? A filmmaker describes his three-year quest for clues, and answers.

 

“I heard a thump. I thought a car had hit a person. I turned around: a girl was lying in the road.”—The words of a witness

June 28, 2008, 2:30 p.m. Water Street, the corner of Wall Street, in Manhattan. A headache-making-hot, New York high summer. A Saturday, the bankers are away, the street is empty—apart from the dead girl in the middle of the road. Police report the deceased is a Russian supermodel. Ruslana Korshunova. “Her death is a suspected suicide by jumping from the building site next to her ninth-floor apartment. No signs of a struggle detected. No alcohol or drugs in her blood or urine. She left no note. She was 20. She landed 8.5 meters from the building.”

8.5 meters? That’s not a fall. That’s a leap. That’s almost flight. The supermodel didn’t stand on the ledge and take a step off. The supermodel took a run and soared.

There are models and there are models. There are the lanky androgynous clones, the perfect coat hangers for catwalk collections. And then there are the Ruslanas. The ones who stand out. Their proportions are not perfect, their catwalk work limited, but they become the faces that define a product. Ruslana was famous for being the face of a “magical, enchanting perfume” by Nina Ricci. You might remember the ad. It’s in the style of a fairy tale. Ruslana, in a pink ball gown with bouncing curls and wonder-filled eyes, enters a palace room. She gasps with teen excitement: in front of her a magical tree, at the top a glistening pink apple. She climbs the tree, reaches for the apple…

Ruslana seemed to have everything. Why this dismal end? The answer to that question would lead me on a three-year journey, as I researched material for a documentary, through New York, London, Milan, Kiev, and Moscow, into the life of that shiny, lonely tribe: the world’s top models. On the way I found more deaths among Ruslana’s friends, more attempted suicides, until ultimately I arrived at the most unlikely of destinations in the former evil empire.

Water Street is at the tip of the Financial District, where office blocks meet the East River. In the evenings it’s dead, just clerks in pall-bearer black suits hurrying home. Ruslana’s apartment is a rare residential building on the street. Few families live here, just the tired foot soldiers of globalization: a Central Asian wool trader, a Malaysian Ph.D. student. Jobbing models hand the place down to each other. Ruslana was the last. There are few personal belongings in Ruslana’s rented rooms. The Egyptian porter remembers that she traveled all the time, never had a proper home.

Ruslana’s journey ended here. Where had it begun?

Tatyana is a modeling scout. She sees thousands of girls a year; maybe three will make it to the top. The former Soviet Union is her territory. More than 50 percent of the world’s top models are from the region: many girls see it as their best chance for a decent life. In 2005 Tatyana was flying home from a beauty pageant in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She had seen no girls of note, a disappointing trip. She flicked through the in-flight magazine, browsed through a random article about Amazons. And then she stopped. A photo of a girl. Amazing. The photo itself was in dubious taste: a semiclad waif in tribal garb, posing like some cross between Lolita and Mowgli in a jungle of plastic trees. But the girl herself—she was amazing. Her blue gaze went on forever, so powerful and deep that everything, Tatyana, the plane, the clouds, seemed to be caught inside it: small toys suspended inside this young girl’s gaze. Wolflike, she stared out from her Siberian ancestry: the taiga, Baikal, snowy wastes.

Model's suicide shocks boyfriend

The distraught boyfriend of supermodel Ruslana Korshunova said Sunday he had no idea why the green-eyed stunner took her own life in a desperate plunge from her luxury Manhattan apartment.
"She was doing good. She was one of the top models. She was happy with this," said Mark Kaminsky, 32.
Carrying a bouquet of white roses and lilies, Kaminsky wept outside Korshunova's Water St. apartment as he recalled how he met the Kazakh beauty through a friend in March.
He wooed the 20-year-old model - known for her flowing locks and feline looks - with the words, "I'm in shock over you. You are so beautiful."

The pair moved into Kaminsky's Staten Island house just two days after they met, although Korshunova kept the downtown apartment she treasured.
"We decided right away, we were a good couple. I was in love," said Kaminsky, a luxury car exporter.
He last saw his girlfriend about noon on Saturday, about two hours before she leaped to her death. They had plans to go to her best friend's birthday party that night.
Korshunova seemed to have everything - a jet-set life, a new boyfriend and gorgeous looks that landed her the covers of top fashion magazines.
But everything may have been too much.
Korshunova was barely out of her teens, working near-constantly and - her online confessions reveal - feeling "lost" in a foreign land.
"She gave up on herself," said her ex-boyfriend Artem Perchenok, 24. "Everybody here can barely breathe."
Her death was ruled a suicide on Sunday and although there was no note, there were some signs that Korshunova was in plenty of pain.
"I'm so lost, will I ever find myself?" she wrote in March on her page on a Russian social networking site.
One close friend, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, said Korshunova, who broke onto the global modeling scene in 2005, hated her hectic life.
She had recently returned from Paris and was scheduled to be in Texas on Sunday.
"I guess, suddenly, she was no longer a new girl. She was depressed about that," the friend said. "She'd made her money and she wanted to get out of the modeling business badly."
Korshunova's online posts seemed to perk up after she met Kaminsky.
"I saw the spark in her eyes when she was with him. She was thrilled," said a friend.
But even with a new relationship, friends said Korshunova kept her emotions bottled up. Acquaintances said they had no clue about the black thoughts behind the beautiful smile.