At the beginning of her celebrity, Teigen was an almost sympathetic figure. The notoriously small-minded modeling world decided that the half-Asian American beauty was too “curvy” (read: hot) to join the androgynous, anorexic automatons on the most elite runways of Paris and Milan. So, what’s a model relegated to swimsuit magazines and commercials to do? Most would cash out, resign themselves to subsidizing the hubby’s record revenue with easy money from hawking fit tea or whatever the stars are taking to stay skinny on Instagram. Make sure to post enough sultry selfies to keep a consumer base to buy your branded shapewear or lip gloss, and boom, you remain a C-list millionaire with guaranteed seats at any award show and after-party you want.

Teigen had this one job — the 21st-century iteration of the trophy mother who stars on social media instead of in Studio 54.

And she failed, miserably.

Teigen didn’t just want to be an influencer. She wanted to be an influencer, someone not just hot and online, but someone hot and online and powerful, tweeting about bikini waxes and abortion and PMS and Obama and tossing back champagne at 9 a.m.

We know all the sordid details of Teigen’s DMs to Courtney Stodden, then a public victim of statutory rape. We know about the media, hellbent on sexualizing underage girls, telling her to kill herself, and campaigns like those against designer Michael Costello. He has the receipts to back his allegation that Teigen attempted to blackball him based on a disproven claim that he used a racial slur.

No social media user was too anonymous for her to target. Honest inquiries about her newborn daughter were turned into opportunities for Teigen to claim she was being “mommy-shamed.” Even the mildest criticisms of her ostentatious spending were leveraged as a chance for her to boast of her millions in the bank.

Yeah, she got some digs at Donald Trump, but have you seen how she absolutely roasted that soccer mom with 45 followers and a couple thousand in credit card debt?

Slay, queen!

The press ate it all up. The subtext of every interview next to some sexy pictorial of Teigen was the standard. She practically screamed, “I’m not like other girls,” and clearly, it worked. She managed to foray social media buzz into multiple New York Times bestselling cookbooks and a cookware line at Target. She never claimed to be an actress, but inexplicably, she became an unavoidable TV personality.

For more than half a decade, she’s hosted Lip Sync Battle, and during that interval, she’s made cameos on everything from The Simpsons to The Mindy Project. For years, this bully publicly fantasized about troubled young women killing themselves and wanting to put herself “in jail” while watching “little girls do the splits half-naked” on Toddlers & Tiaras.

Then came the pandemic.

Teigen tweeted more, and the rest of us decided to read more. While Teigen was cooped up in her mansion with her maids, Alison Roman, a chef who worked her way through New York City kitchens to the top of the New York Times bestsellers list, gave an interview that would have been relegated to the annals of the world wide web, had Yashar Ali, perhaps the most ardent agent of Teigen’s in the press, not picked up a single paragraph.

Roman, in an aside against the commercialism overtaking the culinary industry, snarked that Teigen’s cooking brand constituted a “content farm.” Rather than ignore a bitter broadside given to a magazine nobody reads, Teigen decided to signal-boost Roman’s remark into space, blasting Roman to her 13 million Twitter followers right as those pouncing on the interview decided to deem Roman, without evidence, as a racist. As a result, in the middle of a pandemic, Roman lost her job at the New York Times cooking section.

That was the beginning of the end. In a normal time, maybe Teigen could have gotten away with it. But while Teigen was bragging about accidentally ordering a $13,000 bottle of wine — that is, more than twice the amount of money the median American has in savings — the rest of the net, Left and Right, was struggling to survive lockdowns, school closures, and job losses. Teigen, a celebrity who thinks herself a part of the #Resistance against greedy Republicans, punched down hard. And evidently, she was no choir girl herself.

This benevolent liberal, social media sleuths deduced, had bragged about making her maids clean after dog poop. She hated on not just teenagers such as the underage Courtney Stodden, but the also then-9-year-old Quvenzhane Wallis. Teigen then deleted a boatload of tweets and claimed victimhood at the hands of QAnon conspiracy theorists. For a time, the fracas died down. Teigen bravely opened up about a devastating miscarriage she suffered, and it seemed that perhaps the troll had been tamed and forgiven. But that’s just not how Twitter works.

Stodden stood up, exposing to the world Teigen’s DMs beckoning her to kill herself. Soon, her sponsors dropped her brand and appearances. Even after her lengthy Monday apology on Medium, Costello revealed her campaign to ruin his career, driving him toward suicide as well. If I were a betting woman, I’d say this is the beginning, not the end, of all Teigen’s drama.

Princess Diana achieved the sort of cultural ubiquity that comes with succeeding at being “famous for being famous” thanks to her profound and preternatural empathy. Kim Kardashian did so through an understanding of the media. Teigen thought she could do it with a blend of some lefty politics, hot pics, and constant assertions that she’s still a cool girl who loves getting wine drunk and eating pizza, plus constant Twitter dunks.

She thought she could. She was so wrong. She aimed too high, and now she’s done.