Biography of Karen MulderKaren Mulder, born June 1, 1970 in Vlaardingen, Zuid-Holland, Netherlands (near Rotterdam) and raised in Den Haag and Voorburg, Holland, is a former Dutch supermodel.
When a group of girlfriends took the then 14-year-old Karen Mulder's picture and submitted it for a beauty contest, she was downright gawky. In 1985, when she was 14 her family went on a camping trip in the south of France. She saw an ad for Elite Model Management's 'Look of the Year' contest in a newspaper. A friend took some photographs she had of her previously and sent them in to the Elite contest without her knowledge. She tried out at the preliminary contest in Amsterdam and won, which sent her on to the finals of the 'Look of the Year' contest. She went on to second place in that contest and off to Paris for her first modeling shoot. She then left high school to travel to Italy with her mother for a formal photo shoot, and then to Paris for modeling school, where the Elite modeling agency took over her career.
By her second year on the runway, she was modeling for Valentino, Yves Saint Laurent, Lanvin, Versace, and Giorgio Armani. She appeared on the cover of Vogue and before long, landed a contract for Guess.
During the following three years, Karen climbed the steps to supermodel status, learning along the way. The first important steps in her career were a British Vogue cover shot by Tyen and a Nivea advertising campaign.
The list of her clients became quite impressive. Campaigns she appeared in included Guess? (as the face of Guess? in 1991 when she was 21 years old), Calvin Klein, Claude Montana, Ralph Lauren, Yves Saint-Laurent fashion and Rive Gauche fragrance, as well as Guerlain, Chloé, Valentino, Revlon, Jacques Fath, Gianfranco Ferrè, Gianni Versace, Chanel, Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, and Herve Leger. Karen has worked with some of the greatest fashion photographers, including Javier Vallhonrat, Peter Lindbergh, Patrick Demarchelier, Bruce Weber, Helmut Newton, Max Vadukul, Gilles Bensimon, Fabrizio Ferri, Steven Meisel, Irving Penn, Robert Erdmann, and Arthur Elgort.
One of the first issues of Top Model magazine was entirely devoted to her along with an entire issue of Italian Vogue.
Her two appearances in Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 1997 and 1998 and her attractive poses for the Victoria’s Secret catalogue made Mulder a household name.
In her glory days, called "The Blonde With Class" by Vogue editors, she went on to share catwalks with, and was considered the equal of, such top models such as Kate Moss, Cindy Crawford, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell. Together with a few other models, including her best friend Carla Bruni, these women were the fashion industry's elite. At one point in her career she was earning up to £10,000 a day.
She retired from modeling in 2000.
In 1988, at the age of 20, she married French photographer Rene Bosne. By 1993, her marriage had fallen apart and they divorced.
Mulder says her life changed in 1993 when she was shuttling from airport to airport with almost no time at home. She then met real-estate developer Jean-Yves Le Fur in the waiting area of a Paris airport, and it was love at first sight. Soon they became engaged.
Jean-Yves began to manage Mulder's off-the-runway career. In 1995, he collaborated with Hasbro on a Karen Mulder doll, which spurred development of an entire line of dolls modeled on the day’s supermodels. Jean-Yves and Mulder then did an infomercial and video. Mulder's favorite project she worked on was a beauty and fashion CD-ROM, in which she gave makeup, beauty, and exercise tips.
In 1997, Karen Mulder said she planned to "spend most of the year at home in Monaco with Yves" (and supermodel neighbors Helena Christensen, Carla Bruni, Claudia Schiffer and Eva Herzigová). But, soon after this, their engagement broke up.
In 1995, she bought a château in France and set up a scheme to provide holidays there for underprivileged children
In April 1998, she announced she was thinking of quitting modeling and revealed some of her true feelings. "From the beginning, I hated being photographed," she told reporters at the time. "For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, `Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day."
After leaving the modeling industry, she took singing lessons and tried acting but spent a lot of time traveling, often with her new boyfriend, a wealthy Colombian named Julio Mario Santo Domingo, whom she dated until February 2001. Although she had been happy to stop modeling, she later told the press that working had been a convenient way to avoid painful thoughts. "My job distracted me from my worries," she told a French magazine. "It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else. But when my energy was no longer directed toward this one goal to meet, the anguish caught up with me."
In 2001, she made a series of explosive claims while suffering from obvious stress. She alleged she and other girls were used as sex slaves by senior figures in the police and French government. She also filed a rape complaint in France against Prince Albert of Monaco.
On October 31, 2001, Karen claimed during a taping of the French channel France 2 show "Tout le Monde en Parle" (Everyone is Talking About It) hosted by Thierry Ardisson, and with a live audience in the studio, that various people, including top executives at her former agency, Elite, and Prince Albert of Monaco, had tried to rape her. Moreover, Mulder said that her own father had hypnotized her from the age of two and then raped her.
The producers of the show deemed her emotionally unstable and did not broadcast the interview. Not only was the show never aired, but the entire recording was erased.
Days later, she repeated her allegations, this time to a weekly magazine in an interview conducted in her Paris apartment. Within hours of the interview, her sister Saskia arrived and took her to Villa Montsouris, a psychiatric hospital specializing in such disorders as depression, anxiety, and delirium, where Karen stayed for more than three months. The stay reportedly was paid for by Elite models president Gerald Marie, an old friend of hers. Her father later publicly blamed her troubles on drugs.
In later interviews, she said that those close to her were refusing to acknowledge that she had been sexually abused by an old family friend, now dead, when she was 2 years old. Karen had repressed the incident for years but had pieced it back together in psychoanalysis after she quit modeling. She said it was the explanation for her teenage battle with anorexia, her excitable moods, and her constant flights between laughter and tears.
Yet no one believed her. Feeling increasingly isolated, she finally broke down. "It seemed everyone was against me," she later remembered about this period. "People told me I was fantasizing, that my psychoanalysis was wrong. So in order to be heard, I exaggerated. And I went overboard." Since then, she has recanted the rape allegations she made to the press and apologized to Prince Albert. But she continued to insist that she was sexually abused as a child.
On December 11, 2002, after suffering for years from chronic depression, Karen Mulder went into a coma after she overdosed on sleeping pills in an apparent attempt to take her own life. She had made no attempt to save herself and had seemed determined only to end a life haunted by mental breakdown, drug-taking, and alleged rape. She left no note. She was rushed to the American Hospital in Neuilly after neighbors found her passed out on the floor of the Paris apartment on exclusive Avenue Montaigne where she was staying with friends. Mulder's parents flew from the Netherlands to be by her side along with former fiancé Jean-Yves le Fur. Le Fur was reportedly one of the people who found Mulder unconscious after arriving at the apartment after Mulder had not answered several telephone calls of his.
She awoke from her coma the next day.
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