Cara Delevingne Addresses Concerning Airport Paparazzi Pics and Seeking Treatment

Cara Delevingne is addressing those concerning airport paparazzi pics that were taken last fall.

In Vogue’s April cover story, the actress and model says she was embarrassed by the photos and that they served as a “reality check” in terms of her alcohol and substance abuse.

The September pics show a disheveled Cara at the Van Nuys Airport as she smokes a cigarette and walks around in her socks.

Delevingne told Vogue she had just returned from Burning Man when the photos were snapped. “I hadn’t slept. I was not okay. It’s heartbreaking because I thought I was having fun, but at some point it was like, ‘Okay, I don’t look well.’ You know, sometimes you need a reality check, so in a way those pictures were something to be grateful for.”

Thankfully her friends rallied around her and helped her through that rough time.

“I have so many friends. They ride for me and I love my friends so much, but it felt like a lot of the time, they were shallow relationships only because I wasn’t able to be honest about the things I was going through,” she said. “I didn’t want to burden anyone. It was also like, ‘What if people leave?’ If you ask any of my friends, they would say they’d never seen me cry. From September, I just needed support. I needed to start reaching out. And my old friends I’ve known since I was 13, they all came over and we started crying. They looked at me and said, ‘You deserve a chance to have joy.’ ”

The star said she was in a “bad place” and hadn’t seen a therapist in three years. She sought rehab and a 12-step program.

Looking back, Delevingne said, “I’ve had interventions of a sort, but I wasn’t ready. That’s the problem. If you’re not face-first on the floor and ready to get up again, you won’t.”

Cara explained, “I always thought that the work needs to be done when the times are bad, but actually the work needs to be done when they’re good. The work needs to be done consistently. It’s never going to be fixed or fully healed but I’m okay with that, and that’s the difference.”

While she had tried quick fixes for healing like weeklong retreats, she said those avenues never get into the “deeper stuff.” This time around, she said, “I realized that 12-step treatment was the best thing, and it was about not being ashamed of that. The community made a huge difference. The opposite of addiction is connection, and I really found that in 12-step.”

Cara added, “This process obviously has its ups and downs, but I’ve started realizing so much. People want my story to be this after-school special where I just say, ‘Oh, look, I was an addict, and now I’m sober and that’s it.’ And it’s not as simple as that. It doesn’t happen overnight… Of course I want things to be instant — I think this generation especially, we want things to happen quickly — but I’ve had to dig deeper.”

The Brit turned 30 in August and threw an Alice in Wonderland-themed party.

She shared, “I always kind of knew that things were going to have to be different in my 30s, because the way that I was living was not sustainable. I told myself, I should be having such a good time. I’ve got all my friends here. I need to be enjoying this. The house I was staying in had a tower and I would just kind of lock myself in it instead. I barely left the room. There was this need for change, but I was fighting it so much. I was welcoming in this new time but I was also grieving. It was like a funeral for my previous life, a goodbye to an era. And so I decided I was going to party as hard as I could because this was the end.”

Looking to the future, she hopes to be a mom one day.

Delevingne told Vogue, “I’ve wanted a kid since I was 16. I want babies so bad. Back then I would not have been ready, of course — I just wanted to replace the need to look after my mom with a kid of my own.”