The story behind this striking photo of a supermodel and a 'nobody from Ohio' [View all]

Paulina Porizkova and Mistie Savage-McGuire met online after the bottom had fallen out from each of their lives. They formed a needle-in-a-haystack friendship.



The two couples were on a Jamaican holiday. They had been having so much fun — snorkeling, dancing, sipping cocktails and talking late into the evening — that they had forgotten to take photos. But on the fourth day, as the two women walked into the water and embraced, one of their partners finally grabbed an iPhone to capture the moment.

The women — one a supermodel known by her first name and the other a self-described “nobody from Ohio” — met online after the bottom had fallen out from each of their lives. They formed a needle-in-a-haystack friendship.

In the summer of 2021, Paulina Porizkova — a.k.a. Paulina — had reached a low point. She was not only mourning the death of her husband, Cars front man Ric Ocasek, she was also struggling with the fact that he had left her out of his will. (The couple had separated but were living in the same New York townhouse when she found him dead of cardiac arrest in September 2019.)

“I thought I knew him to his bones. I didn’t,” she wrote in her memoir, “No Filter.” After a brief relationship with writer Aaron Sorkin ended, Porizkova began posting so many tearful selfies on social media that she earned the moniker “the crying lady of Instagram.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2025/02/01/paulina-porizkova-mistie-mcguire-instagram-photo-hug/