Teigen points to ‘manipulated’ messages

Team Chrissy Teigen is pushing back against the veracity of screen grabs that designer Michael Costello presented last week as proof that she had bullied him in 2014 and actively campaigned against him in the insular world of celebrity fashion. Teigen’s husband, musician John Legend, is pushing back as well.

A member of the model-author-entrepreneur’s team said that screen grabs purported to be messages between Teigen and Costello were fakes.

“Several visual identifiers in the images appear to come from various iterations of Instagram and Teigen’s profile throughout the years, which is oftentimes a signature of manipulated imagery,” the person said.

They then listed alleged “temporal inconsistencies,” including the colour scheme of the messages.

In other words, things shouldn’t have looked like this at the time they were alleged to have happened.

Costello, who didn’t respond to an inquiry, took himself out of the larger discussion Wednesday via another Instagram post. (As of Friday, his Instagram account has been made private.)