Kaia Gerber has plenty to talk about right now. The 24-year-old model-turned-actress is promoting The Shards, FX/Hulu’s new drama about privileged prep-school students in 1980s Los Angeles, and this month she sat down with the Mitch Churi Chat Show to discuss the series. Then the conversation wandered somewhere far stranger.
Gerber said she was told she was “possessed” as a child and later underwent an exorcism, a story she said she had never shared publicly before. She also revealed that years later, when she joined American Horror Story: Double Feature, her mother, Cindy Crawford, took an unusual precaution before sending her onto the horror set.
These are Gerber’s personal recollections. No one has independently confirmed the childhood ritual, and Crawford has not publicly commented on the account.
Still, Gerber told the story with such casual ease that an already unusual celebrity press interview suddenly became something much more memorable.
“They Played a Didgeridoo All Over Me”
The specificity of Gerber’s account is largely why it made news.
“I was told I was possessed as a child,” Gerber said. Then came the detail no one could have reasonably predicted: “Do you know how they did the exorcism? They played a didgeridoo all over me, that’s how they did the exorcism.”
The didgeridoo is a wind instrument with deep roots in Indigenous Australian culture and a history stretching back thousands of years. Gerber did not identify who performed the ritual, when or where it happened, or what spiritual tradition those involved believed they were following.
She was emphatic, however, that the experience itself was part of her childhood. “That actually did happen,” she said. “I’ve never talked about it, but that actually did happen.”
Her final verdict was remarkably breezy: “I’m all healed.”
Gerber also offered a glimpse of how she thinks about supernatural experiences now. “I do feel as though I attract beings from another dimension in a very casual and chill way,” she said. Somehow, the calm delivery makes the sentence even more striking.
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The Road From Modeling to Ryan Murphy
Before the exorcism story, Gerber had already assembled a life that resisted easy summary.
She is the daughter of supermodel Cindy Crawford and businessman Rande Gerber, who married in 1998. Gerber entered modeling at 10, following a path where her famous surname was impossible to ignore, and she has not tried to pretend otherwise.
Acting eventually brought her into Ryan Murphy’s Orbit, and The Shards has added another unexpected family connection. Her co-star Homer Gere is the son of Richard Gere, Crawford’s former husband.
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Homer said the two addressed the history almost immediately. “Twenty minutes into knowing each other,” he recalled, “I was like, ‘Should we just acknowledge the fact that our parents were married?‘ She was like, ‘Yeah. Cool.’ And that was it.”
For two actors whose famous family trees overlap in a way Hollywood could hardly script better, apparently there was little else to discuss.
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Cindy Crawford and the Holy Water
The most striking part of Gerber’s new account isn’t just that an exorcism allegedly happened; it’s that her mother’s concern appeared to follow her onto the set of a major horror franchise.
Crawford and Rande Gerber watched Kaia’s Double Feature debut live over FaceTime. At the time, Kaia said, “They loved it.” Her new interview adds a detail that never surfaced during those 2021 promotional conversations.
“My mom gave me holy water to go to set,” Gerber said to Mitch Churi. “She was like, ‘I don’t want you to get possessed.'”
Crawford has not publicly addressed Gerber’s account. What was visible at the time was a familiar version of parental support: helping tape an audition, watching the finished episode and cheering her daughter on from afar.
The holy water belonged to a more private side of that story. And in light of what Gerber has now disclosed about her childhood, Crawford’s warning lands differently than it would have as a standalone joke about joining a horror show.
What The Shards Has to Do With Any of This
The Shards is not horror in the traditional sense, though it is not exactly comfortable viewing either.
Based on Bret Easton Ellis’ 2023 novel, the series follows wealthy prep-school students in 1980s Los Angeles as their protected world fractures. Identity, obsession, jealousy and danger run through the story, alongside a serial killer targeting teenagers.
Gerber stars with Graham Campbell, Homer Gere, Hayes Warner, Evan Rachel Wood and Wes Bentley. Gerber has framed part of the show’s appeal around the freedom of its pre-smartphone setting. “You watch The Shards, and it makes you long for a time when you weren’t on your phone and where you could get into a little bit of trouble without it being on the internet the next day.”
There is some irony in that sentiment. A press conversation about a series steeped in dangerous secrets ended up producing one of the more unexpected personal disclosures of Gerber’s career.
Her professional path has now taken her from a childhood obsession with American Horror Story to playing a murderous ghost and an alien abductee, and eventually to calmly discussing the supernatural episode she says happened years before any of it.
Whether Gerber sees some larger meaning in that overlap, she did not say. She seemed perfectly happy to leave the childhood chapter where she left it: “I’m all healed.”
Has a parent’s spiritual or supernatural belief ever shaped how you understood something from your childhood, and did your perspective on it change as you got older?
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