Olivia Newton-John’s 27-year-old daughter Chloe Lattanzi has just completely rehab treatment to deal with severe struggles with substance addiction and eating disorders, and she claims her issues are rooted in the pressures of fame.
Lattanzi told The Daily Mail:
“Fame totally messes you up. I don’t blame my mother for my problems, but I would never want to be famous or raise a child of my own around the cult of celebrity. It ruins lives. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it is that you can’t be fragile in this business, or else you end up like Lindsay Lohan. That’s not meant as an insult: I know she – and a lot of celebrities and celebrities’ kids – are struggling with demons and addictions, just like me, and not all of them are brave enough to address them. It’s disturbing that everyone wants to be famous these days. Our culture is sick.”
Chloe previously went to rehab nine years ago to deal with her eating disorder, but says that it It didn’t help at all. Putting people with eating disorders together is the worst thing you can do. It creates competition.” She did eventually get over her eating disorder, but soon replaced it with other addictions.
She landed a record deal early, but looking back she thinks she sabotaged that opportunity because she was too emotionally fragile to handle all the trappings of fame. ‘Looking back, I think now that I subconsciously sabotaged my record deal because I couldn’t cope with the price of fame.People who didn’t know me had opinions about me and that upset me. I was fragile emotionally. My eating disorder started when I was 15 and carried on until my early 20s. I had anxiety attacks and needed to find a way of feeling in control of something. Food was the one thing I could be in control of.”
In her twenties, she turned to drinking and doing cocaine because she “never developed any tools for coping with my emotions. The only way I knew how to deal with emotional stress was through self-harm.” Eventually she got into a routine where she would do cocaine immediately upon waking up, and drink a liter of vodka throughout the day. Soon she added Xanax to her drug repertoire. “I had blackouts. I would stay up on three-day-long binges without ever going to sleep. Days and weeks started to blend together,” she said of this period. Last September her alcohol and drug binges escalated to the point where she had a meltdown in a psychotic state at a hotel in Santa Monica.
After she finally confessed her troubles to her mother, she returned to rehab. “Now I can function. The reason I am talking about this is that depression is so isolating. You feel so alone. If I can help just one person by telling my story, it’s a good thing,” she says. “I feel empathy for other girls like Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie – who have had to publicly battle their addictions with drugs and alcohol in the spotlight. But, thankfully, like them, I’m finally addressing my issues and getting help.”
