Presley Gerber died at 27 in a California rehab facility just one day after checking in.
The model and only son of Cindy Crawford, 59, and Rande Gerber, 63, was found dead on Sept. 20 at a Santa Monica treatment center, according to the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner. A 911 dispatch obtained by outlets recorded a cardiac arrest call at 9:35 a.m. On the 1000 block of Berkeley St., with a second dispatch revealing first responders were answering an overdose at the same address. His cause of death remains undetermined pending autopsy results.
The death came barely six months after Presley traveled to Mexico for an unorthodox attempt at recovery. In March, he underwent an ibogaine “flood dose,” an intense psychedelic treatment not approved for medical use in the United States that is sometimes sought by people battling addiction. The experience, he wrote afterward on Instagram, forced him to confront years of avoidance. “Letting go of control didn’t come easy,” he posted. “Praying it’s the last time I have to come back.”
His sister Kaia Gerber, 23, celebrated the effort on the same thread. “So damn proud,” she wrote. Their mother called him a “warrior.”
That hope unraveled with devastating speed. Presley checked himself into the Santa Monica facility on Sept. 19 and reports said. He was dead the next morning.
The tragedy capped what Kaia described in a recent Vogue interview as a “decade-long struggle with drug addiction.” Presley himself had been increasingly raw about that fight in his final years. In August 2024, he told his Instagram followers he was dealing with a “current, very high opioid addiction” that had dragged on for years. “I feel like everyone pretty much knows that and if you don’t, now you do,” he said in the Instagram Stories post.
By then, the warning signs had stacked up publicly for years. In December 2018, Beverly Hills police pulled Presley over for speeding in his Tesla and arrested him for driving under the influence. He was 19. He later pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor count of driving with a blood-alcohol level of.08% or higher and drew three years’ probation, a DUI program and two days of community service.
Two months later, he made the decision that would become a permanent symbol of his turmoil. In February 2019, celebrity tattoo artist JonBoy inked “MISUNDERSTOOD” across Presley’s right cheekbone — a defiant move for a working model whose face was his livelihood. JonBoy posted the result with a pointed caption: “Sorry mom.”
Presley bristled at the online mockery that followed. In an Instagram Live video, he pushed back directly at critics. “You don’t know how I feel. You’re not in my head.… I don’t feel very understood, I guess,” he said. “It says ‘misunderstood,’ because that’s how I felt my entire life.”
Behind the scenes, his parents had been scrambling to intervene since the DUI. A family source said at the time that Crawford and Rande Gerber had already put him through treatment and were now seeking something “more serious.” Another source described his erratic behavior as a possible “cry for attention or help,” adding, “He doesn’t know where he fits in.” The tattoo had vanished by 2021, apparently removed.
The full scope of his addiction emerged only later. In 2024, Presley revealed he had suffered a near-fatal fentanyl overdose that left him in a coma for several days. By early 2025, he was posting since-deleted videos detailing a complicated regimen: roughly 15 psychiatrists, the opioid-treatment medication buprenorphine, and the benzodiazepines Xanax and Valium. He had also stopped drinking and was distancing himself from Hollywood acquaintances he considered bad influences.
His weekly Instagram series “Mental Health Mondays” became a striking departure from the family’s long-held privacy, with Presley discussing his depression, medication and recovery in unvarnished terms. Mental health, he told the Studio 22 podcast in 2023, had become “a 24/7 job.” He acknowledged making “mistakes” and spoke candidly about his depression.
Kaia, who became one of her generation’s most successful models before moving into acting, said her brother’s openness made him an “absolute teacher.” In her Vogue interview last month, she explained how his addiction had reshaped family dynamics, casting her as “the easy one.” She learned not to ask her parents for help because it felt like “too much to have two children who were needing.”
“There’s only so much you can hide from the world,” she told the magazine. “And trying to put a lid on something just makes the person feel like you’re ashamed of them.”
Presley was born in 1999 in Los Angeles’s Brentwood neighborhood, a year after Crawford and Rande Gerber married. Kaia arrived in 2001. The siblings attended Malibu High School, where both made the honor roll — their father once proudly posted both report cards — and Presley was known for walking straight from the ocean to class in his wetsuit, barefoot with surfboard in hand. “There was only so much trouble you could get into,” Kaia recalled to Vogue of their childhood. Fellow model scion Anwar Hadid counted among his friends.
Presley signed with IMG Models at 15 and was walking runways for Moschino and Dolce & Gabbana by 16. Calvin Klein, Burberry and major editorial campaigns followed. In 2018, he appeared alongside his mother in a Pepsi Super Bowl commercial that remade her iconic 1992 ad.
After his Mexico treatment, Presley wrote on Instagram that he believed he had finally found traction. “I faced what I had been running from, and somewhere in all of it, I started finding my way back to myself,” he posted.
Autopsy results for Presley Gerber are still pending.