You’re probably familiar with the supermodel Natalia Vodianova, even if you’ve never heard her name.
She’s appeared on the cover of just about every major fashion magazine, and has been stalking runways for design houses like Saint Laurent Paris and Givenchy since the age of 17.
At the moment, however, the Russian beauty is making waves for a very different reason. The woman nicknamed ‘Supernova,’ is using her celebrity to call attention to the discrimination inflicted on her sister Oksana this past week.
Oksana, 27, lives with cerebral palsy and severe autism. She enjoys walking several hours a day around Nizhny-Novgorod, formerly Gorky, where both women and a third sister grew up.
She was walking with her caretaker (whom Vodianova refers to as her ‘nanny’) and needed a rest, so the two stopped in a cafe. From that point onward, a break in the routine turned into a truly discriminatory scene.
“The owner of the cafe came and started rudely asking my nanny to take Oksana out,” says Vodianova, “When she asked why, he said, ‘Well, I don’t like the way she looks and I think she scares away the customers.”
The situation only devolved from there, with the cafe owner ordering a guard to lift Oksana physically from the building. Now, Vodianova, who pulled her family out of abject poverty with her modeling career, is raising her voice for awareness of people with special needs like Oksana.
Please watch the video to hear Vodianova’s impassioned plea for a better understanding of people with special needs, and SHARE on Facebook to spread the word about this atrocity and others like it.
