From the outside, Presley Gerber’s life looked almost impossibly charmed.
The only son of supermodel Cindy Crawford and nightlife mogul Rande Gerber grew up surfing in Malibu and shared the spotlight and winning gene pool with younger sister Kaia.
At 15, he signed with IMG Models. By 16, he was striding down runways for Moschino and Dolce & Gabbana. Soon came Calvin Klein, Burberry and glossy fashion shoots. In 2018, he even appeared alongside his mother in Pepsi’s Super Bowl commercial, a passing-of-the-torch remake of Crawford’s iconic 1992 ad.
But, behind the gorgeous imagery and multimillion-dollar lifestyle, something was horribly wrong. On Sunday, Presley was found dead at a California rehab facility, not long after checking in. He was just 27.
Presley was battling what Kaia described in a recent interview with Vogue as a “decade-long struggle with drug addiction.” Over the years, he got a DUI, did various stints in rehab and suffered a fentanyl overdose that left him in a coma. His was a private unraveling that eventually became impossible to hide.
The Malibu golden boy
Presley was born in Los Angeles’s tony Brentwood neighborhood in 1999, the year after his parents married. His sister, Kaia, followed up in 2001.
He and Kaia were even honor-roll students at Malibu High School, with their proud father once posting both of their report cards.
Kaia remembered her older brother walking straight from the ocean to school in his wetsuit, barefoot and carrying his surfboard. “There was only so much trouble you could get into,” she told Vogue of their childhood.
The two grew up pretty and privileged on the shores of Malibu with famous friends and beach days, but there were also low-key elements to their childhood. They attended public school with many of the same kids from kindergarten. Presley counted fellow model scion Anwar Hadid among his buddies.
Then came fashion.
Tall, blond and bearing his mother’s famous beauty mark, Presley quickly became one of the industry’s most marketable celebrity offspring.
Kaia, whose star rose alongside her brother’s, has said she became acutely conscious of protecting the family name. “I never wanted to embarrass [my parents],” she told Vogue. “I never wanted to be that child coming in and ruining all the hard work they’ve done.”
The first unmistakable sign of trouble came for Presley came in 2019 when he was 19.
Early one morning in December 2018, Beverly Hills cops pulled the boy over for speeding in his Tesla and arrested him for driving under the influence.
He later pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of driving with a blood-alcohol level of .08% or higher and was sentenced to three years’ probation, a DUI program and two days of community service.
At the time, it looked like the kind of reckless mistake made by plenty of privileged teenagers. In retrospect, it was the first public crack in Presley’s golden-boy image.
Then came the tattoo.
In February 2019, Presley had the word “MISUNDERSTOOD” permanently inked across his right cheekbone — despite the fact that he was a professional model whose face was his livelihood.
Celebrity tattoo artist JonBoy posted the result with a cheeky message: “Sorry mom.”
The tattoo instantly became an internet spectacle — and Presley bristled at the response.
“You don’t know how I feel. You’re not in my head.… I don’t feel very understood, I guess,” he said in an Instagram Live video addressing the backlash. “It says ‘misunderstood,’ because that’s how I felt my entire life.”
Crawford and Rande Gerber reportedly saw something more troubling than youthful rebellion in the ink. A source told E! News at the time that his parents had been trying to get him help since the DUI, that Presley had previously undergone treatment and that they wanted something “more serious.”
Another family source described his increasingly erratic public behavior at the time as a possible “cry for attention or help.
“He doesn’t know where he fits in,” the source said.
The face tattoo eventually disappeared — Presley appeared to have it removed by 2021.
His troubles did not.
In 2024, Presley revealed that he had been struggling with a severe opioid addiction for years and had suffered a near-fatal fentanyl overdose that left him in a coma for several days.
“I’m dealing with a current, very high opioid addiction, and I’ve been on and off of them for years now,” he shared on his Instagram stories in August that year.
“I feel like everyone pretty much knows that and if you don’t, now you do.”
But the disclosure recast much of what had come before it: the DUI, the treatment, the face tattoo, the emotional exchanges online and the reports of parents desperately trying to get their son help.
Two children, two paths
Presley’s addiction not only shaped his life. It changed the dynamics of those close to him.
Kaia, two years younger, became one of the most successful models of her generation and moved into acting.
But, she recently revealed that her brother’s addiction caused her to become “the easy one” in their family.
“When something like that happens in a family, it kind of levels everyone,” she told Vogue last month.
She said she learned not to ask her parents for help because it felt like “too much to have two children who were needing.”
As Kaia’s career soared, Presley was increasingly fighting simply to get well — and being candid about his struggles.
By 2023, he was beginning to open up publicly about his issues. Speaking on the Studio 22 podcast, he was candid about his depression and other mental-health problems and acknowledged making “mistakes.”
Mental health, he said, had become “a 24/7 job.”
Kaia called him an “absolute teacher” and praised his openness.
“There’s only so much you can hide from the world,” she told Vogue.
“And trying to put a lid on something just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.”
‘I need some direction’
As the years went by, Presley’s disclosures became increasingly raw.
By 2024, he had a weekly Instagram series called “Mental Health Mondays” where he spoke about his depression, medication and recovery — a striking departure from the privacy that had long defined his famous family.
He also said he had stopped drinking alcohol months earlier and was pulling away from bad influences in his Hollywood social circle.
In a since-deleted 2025 Instagram video, Presley laid out a complicated history of his addiction, panic attacks, psychiatric care and prescription medication.
He said he had seen around 15 psychiatrists and was taking buprenorphine — a medication used to treat opioid-use disorder as well as pain — along with the benzodiazepines Xanax and Valium.
“I need some direction,” he said.
Earlier this year, he went searching for an alternative way to get well.
This past March, Presley traveled to Mexico and underwent an ibogaine “flood dose” — an intense psychedelic treatment sometimes sought by people battling addiction that is not approved for medical use in the US.
Afterward, Presley described confronting what he had spent years avoiding.
“Letting go of control didn’t come easy,” he wrote on Instagram. “Praying it’s the last time I have to come back.”
His family rallied around him publicly.
Kaia wrote on Instagram that she was “so damn proud.”
Crawford called her son a “warrior” in the same thread.
Six months later, on Sept. 19, according to TMZ and ABC News report, Presley checked himself into a Santa Monica treatment facility.
The following day, he died while at a rehabilitation facility, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner.
Per 911 recordings obtained by Page Six, a call was dispatched to Santa Monica, Calif. police on Sept. 20 for a cardiac arrest in the 1000 block of Berkeley St. at 9:35 a.m. with another dispatch revealing that first responders were responding to an overdose at the address.
His cause of death remains undetermined with autopsy results pending.
It’s heartbreaking. After his experience in Mexico, Presley appeared to believe he had finally turned a corner and was getting his life together.
“I faced what I had been running from, and somewhere in all of it, I started finding my way back to myself,” he wrote on Instagram.
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