PinkYotto clothing, hair by Blo Blow Dry Bar

When you’re in the public eye, your life immediately becomes exposed. Anyone I’m dating, anything I’m eating, anything I’m writing…it’s frequently chronicled online. You guys know everything about my eating issues when I was modeling, and about my experiences when I was severely bullied in public school. There’s one thing you guys probably don’t know: when I was 7, my father was wrongfully convicted of a terrible crime and imprisoned for many years of my childhood.

It’s taken me 18 years to finally feel confident enough to expose this part of my life, mainly because there’s so so much pain and trauma that come with what occurred to my family and me.

I’m not exposing this because I want people to feel bad for me. What happened should never ever happen, yet everyday, people are wrongly convicted of crimes. It just happened to happen to my incredible dad.

Ultimately, I’d like to create a charity or foundation for kids whose parents have been incarcerated, innocent or not, because when it happened to me, I had no one to turn to.

Now, it’s my time to give back. And more importantly, I want to bring attention to wrongful convictions and show you guys that people CAN become successful regardless of what they’ve overcome in their life. We all have a story…

Read the article here. See my YouTube video with more information here.

AND, read more about the Innocent Project here: http://www.innocenceproject.org/