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Suicide model's tale of forbidden love emerges as mom tours tragic site
Supermodel Ruslana Korshunova was broke and depressed over a failed affair with a Moscow man when she leaped to her death from a Manhattan building, sources said Wednesday.
The 20-year-old stunner who conquered catwalks around the world and turned heads wherever she went confessed to a "life coach" that she was lonely and had tried to kill herself before.
"I saw her and heard her stories, stories that no one else has heard," Vladislav Novgorodtsev told the Daily News. "The most important thing about her and her internal world was that she was lonely. There was no one who was really dear to her, except for her mother."
Korshunova's mother, Valentina Kutenkova, who is in New York preparing to ship her daughter's body back to Almaty, Kazakhstan, for burial, conceded she had problems in the past.
"She told me she had problems at work about a year ago, that she wanted to leave the modeling business," she told the Moscow-based Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper. "But lately, everything was normal. If she had problems with work, she would have told me."
Kutenkova did not go into detail, but friends of the model said Korshunova visited the Roza Mira Training Center in Moscow in January and February, searching for peace of mind.
"She had problems for months," Novgorodtsev said. "She had a romance in Moscow, but nothing could happen because the young man was married."
Korshunova also said she was hard up for money, despite being a much-in-demand model who had graced the covers of top fashion magazines and lived in a luxury apartment on Water St.
"She was asking for money," Novgorodtsev said. "Ten-thousand rubles (about $400) would save her. That was 10 days before she committed suicide."
Novgorodtsev said Korshunova hinted strongly she was being taken advantage of, but didn't say by who.
"They barely paid her," he said without elaboration. "She wasn't rich and all the money she had, she sent to her mother."
A source close to Korshunova from Roza Mira said the model told them "she tried suicide five times in different ways."
"She's tried it since she was 15, 16 years old," the source said. "It was a loneliness that no one understood."
Korshunova did not leave a note when she jumped on Saturday.
Asked about the allegations that Korshunova was being shortchanged, Jim Gallagher, a spokesman for the elite IMG modeling agency, said, "I'm certainly not aware of something like that."
While police and the medical examiner have ruled the model's death a suicide, her mother and friends still insist she would never have taken her life.
Korshunova was just 15 when she was discovered and propelled into the jet-setting world of high fashion. She is not the first stressed-out supermodel to seek solace at Roza Mira, an outfit that bills itself as a "life coaching center" and that critics have likened to a cult.
"It's a popular thing to do," said Anna Barsukova, 20, a model who had been friends with Korshunova for three years. "One of my friends went there too, but responded with concern. They do training about developing your personality."
Roman Alexandrov, a journalist in Almaty who knew Korshunova, said she may have felt pressure to help her mother and brother. Her dad died when she was young.
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