How Olympian Casey Legler Overcame Her Troubled Past
At just 19 years old, Casey Legler was at the peak of her career. As an Olympic swimmer striving for the gold, she seemed to be living the dream as an icon for her country, and aspiring young athletes around the world. But, beneath the surface, Casey was living a life of troubled waters - hiding years of addiction, sexual abuse, and depression that almost ended it all. In this interview, Casey reveals the truth about her troubled past, and long road to recovery, which she writes about in her brand new memoir, “Godspeed.” Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Nothing would have indicated that this person who had to own a gun, who led a very violent life, who used every day and dealt drugs, there is nothing in that particular moment that explains why I didn't use that day.
I still don't understand it.
Hi, I'm Dr. Oz, and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
At just 19 years old, Casey Legler was at the peak of her career.
As an Olympic swimmer striving for the gold, she seemed to be living the dream as an icon for her country and aspiring young athletes around the world.
But beneath the surface, Casey was living a life of troubled waters, hiding years of addiction, sexual abuse, and depression that almost ended it all.
Today, Casey is here revealing the truth about her troubled past and the long road to recovery in her brand new memoir, Godspeed.
Thank you for being here.
Thanks for having me.
I just want to point out for folks who can't see you, you're a tall woman.
I'm about 6'1", at least I was.
I've maybe shrunken-ish.
But I guess swimmers are longer in general anyway, but you're really long.
Height definitely helps.
Yeah, 6'2".
6'2".
Yeah.
And I want to talk about how a 6'2 person who's changing the world of modeling decided first to come forward and talk about the truth in her life, what was really going on.
You were in the public life, but we didn't know much of this.
That's true.
Well, when I was modeling, I got booked at Ford as the first woman to exclusively model men's clothes.
And it very quickly became evident that there was a larger cultural context within which this was playing and that the language that I got to use around it was in some spaces the first time that people were talking about gender or sexuality or even the word masculinity, masculine presenting, and words that were very normal to me.
I mean, no one in my life who was close to me was surprised that I—or, you know, they've always known me wearing men's clothes.
And so what was very normal to me was very exceptional in some other circles.
What would be more kind of exceptional or unusual is if I turned up in a big ball gown somewhere, right?
Yeah.
I think you could pull that off too, by the way.
I could.
Well, you know, I do like to think that I got my looks and my handsome swagger from my dad.
He was quite the strapping, you know, athlete.
But, you know, so it became very quickly evident that this language was so new that any sort of personal experience outside of what I was living would detract from something that was actually helping young kids identify, feel safer in the so it became very quickly evident that this language was so And whether they were non-gender conforming or gender conforming, it just was making, to me, unexpected space.
And so while I had been writing this book, you know, writing is what I do, it became very quickly evident and I...
You know, in the book itself, Godspeed, I'm actually not out.
I didn't come out until after I got sober.
So there was no point really in publicly kind of talking about the other projects I was working on.
So it is a real delight now to be able to present this book to the world, Godspeed, to be able to talk about the challenges that I experienced as a young girl, kind of careening myself into As a young girl who was on the spectrum, as a young addict, and as a young athlete, and what that looked like.
And as you said in your introduction, on the outside, there were all of these accolades.
I got straight A's in school.
I was on my way to the Olympics.
And the idea that there would be any sort of...
This emptiness on the inside of my body, I think, you know, this is now 20 years.
This is, you know, I write this book, this sentence that we picked, you know, I write it when I'm 12 or 13. This is, I'm 41 now.
And that landscape around autism, around addiction, was totally different.
This is You know, the early 90s that we're talking about.
So let's unwrap this.
Let's go back to 1996. Yep.
It's the Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
That's right.
You're competing.
I am.
What happens?
So, you know, I'm, let's see, how old was I in 1996?
I would have been just turned 18. And at this point, I've been drinking, you know, in the same way that my teammates are drinking.
I started drinking when I was 12. And I do feel like it's important to say that, you know, I've been sober since I was 21. That feels necessary.
Good for you.
Yeah, I mean, it's really a miracle when I say that I've had a second chance at life.
That's something that I experience every day when I wake up because I really should not be Alive, sitting here in this studio with you guys.
So 1996, I'm 18, and I've been training for the Olympics, you know, since I was 12. And the thing that happened for me as an athlete is we, you know, would train hard and party hard.
So the drinking was just an integral part of my swimming, which seems like an unusual thing to say, but that was the truth.
And the coaches were okay with that?
I don't know that the coaches, you know, I don't know that the coaches were necessarily fully aware or wanted to have any sort of acceptance.
You know, at the time, and I talk about it in Godspeed, the thing I... I couldn't reconcile was that it seemed so evident that there were all of these young people around me experiencing varying levels of distress, as I was, from eating disorders to rape to abuse to drug addiction.
It was normal.
And I suppose one of the reasons for this book is to bring what was normalized out of the darkness and into the light and say that it shouldn't have been happening.
But what happened at age 12 that got you drinking?
Was just you were first exposed at that age?
Was there any...
No, so 12 in France, there is no drinking age, so I don't think it's that uncommon for young people to start drinking.
12 is extraordinarily young, though, even unusual in France.
So at 12, I've been living 12 years in a...
In a young autistic girl's mind, so assaulted every day by light and sound.
The symptoms of being on the spectrum are much more acute when you're younger.
You don't have as many coping strategies.
And this is, again, I was born in 1977. So this is, I've lived 12 years through the 80s and there was very little language around young girls on the spectrum.
Most of us still go undiagnosed because we organize ourselves differently.
So what it means for me to be on the spectrum is I recognize patterns.
I am, you know, really good with languages, but I am, you know, very sensitive to light.
I'm very sensitive to sound in a way that is just has to do with my brain.
I have broader highways than what is called a neurotypical, meaning that your highways hold a normal six-lane highway where light and sound kind of travels back and forth.
Mine is like...
Miles wide, just like daily assault of light and sound.
So the irony is that when I had my first drink, it was the thing that saved my life because it made everything go away.
Like swimming, I guess, being underwater.
That's right, yeah.
And I do think that as much as I hated swimming, I'm so grateful for it because it, too, saved my life.
I don't think that I would have...
I mean, unlike drugs and alcohol, which ultimately started taking my life and swimming, while it was so violent to my body to get into the water...
In the way that I did, the coldness of the water really tightening up my body as I'm thinking about it.
It seemed like every single cell on the skin of my body was electrified.
When I drank...
I am not surprised now as an adult, you know, sober, 20 years, with a lot of help and love and the capacity to love with me and behind me, to be able to look back at this young 12, 13, 14, and at the Olympics 17-year-old and understand that, you know, this solved her problem.
Swimming solved her problem and drugs and alcohol.
So you've covered it up pretty effectively.
You're at the Olympics.
I am.
So, you know, they didn't just cover it up.
You were thriving, maybe because alcohol was numbing you enough that your superhighway was being narrowed a bit and you could deal with the sounds and the lights and the pursuing itself, you know, beneficial in its own ways, traumatic as it is in others.
And yet you're still on the spectrum, although you're evolving, your brain's maturing.
And then something happens, as you described, excuse me, in Godspeed, that shifts that a little bit.
And I'd like the listeners to hear in your words what went down at the Olympics and what that did to you.
Mm-hmm.
So, the day before I was meant to train, so this would have been, so opening, the big opening ceremony, and the next day is the 50 meter freestyle.
So I didn't go to the opening ceremony, which is a choice often made by athletes who have to perform the next day.
And I guess the other thing I want to tell your listeners is that, you know, I've been training up to this point for six years to have the Olympics be a very normal experience.
That's what you're trained to do.
You, every day, you know, by the time you start understanding that you are going to go to big international meets, Doing a lot of visualization.
Your training gets more and more specific.
In my case, it became more and more isolated.
It was just me and my coach.
And so you arrive at the Olympics.
You're basically a thoroughbred that has been trained to within the limits of what the body is capable of.
And I hold such admiration for athletes now today.
And it requires an intensity of the mind and focus that is unbelievable.
You know, again, kind of as an adult, I look at that and the idea that a young 16-year-old would be able to kind of harness all of that energy and become so laser-like.
Focused in the mind feels extraordinary.
And so what normal protocol is the day before your race, you do a practice run of your race.
So you are...
At your best.
You know, you are pure, you know, your body's ready to rock and roll.
Gold.
And, you know, I get in, shake off my arms, which I always did, kneel down, put the water up onto my body, and...
And they have a lay-in that's set aside during this practice session where you do these practice runs.
So I was a very noticeable athlete.
I'd shaved my head.
I'm also, as you said, I'm 6'2".
I weighed like 220 pounds.
My body is just a machine, a gorgeous, beautiful, strong machine.
And I get up on the starting block and...
And I do my race and I break the world record.
The whole pool deck stops.
All of the coaches, because, you know, all the other coaches are watching to see what the other swimmers are doing.
And my coach is so pleased.
And the only thing I can do is just sink down to the bottom of the pool and watch the water create more and more distance between me and the sound and the shimmers of the light.
And I blow some bubbles up, and my backbone hits the bottom of the pool on the tile.
And I know I'm not going to be able to do it when I actually have to race the next day.
Why?
I never knew what was going to happen.
But I knew in that moment that the...
cohesion that had occurred in that particular moment because I didn't even understand how it had happened that I wouldn't know how to recreate it.
I was extraordinarily talented.
I have a genetic mutation that's called Erlos-Danlos.
What this means is that we have super long arms that make it so that we can...
My wingspan is 6'6", I'm 6'2", so my feet are really big, my hands are really big, so I'm made for swimming in a way.
So I think my body just kind of did what it wanted and my mind was so distraught that the ability to, at this point, control anything that was happening once I got on the pool deck was impossible.
If you unpack it now, because you didn't replicate it the next day.
I didn't.
I bombed.
I placed 23rd and I... Out of how many?
Well, I mean, I guess so.
That's a great question.
I don't know, right?
Out of the world, I suppose.
Yes, this is true.
And it took a mentor, and I've said this before, it took a mentor much later on because I didn't talk about my swimming for years.
Probably like, I don't know, like eight, until I was like 28. Did you stop swimming after that day?
No, no, no.
So I kept swimming.
I kept swimming and eventually, you know, my life became darker and darker.
I became more and more involved with drugs, peripherally involved with gangs in Tucson, Arizona.
And left Tucson within 24 hours.
And I do remember, you know, so I'm 20 at this point.
And, you know, the last thing that I had, I had lost, which was a small single bed in a rehab center in Utah.
So I'd gone from being this phenomenon to...
Being around people whose outsides matched my insides, I suppose.
Their darkness, the violence around me matched up with the distressing, violent experience I was having internally.
There's lots more when we come back.
If you look back, your subconscious created that moment of failure, right?
Because I think you must have felt that there was something incongruous in the success when your internal life was so chaotic.
I think incongruent is a great word and even one that It wasn't even just an experience that I had as a swimmer, but I had it as a young person walking around in the world.
Swimming was the biggest, I suppose, illustrator of the contrast between the focus that the adults around me had on this swimming career and yet...
There seemed, in my mind, to be so many more important things happening in the world.
And I acutely remember in 1992, it was the first time I went to the European Junior Olympics, and my coaches were so focused and so excited about the swimming process.
And eight hours away there was the war in Sarajevo happening.
So in my mind that we would have such a focus on this thing that to me seemed quite meaningless while there were all of these tragedies happening in the world.
Which, you know, is not unusual for someone who's on the spectrum, really.
You left me in the air on what happened with you.
You said years later, a mentor taught you how to...
So a mentor actually just said to me, because, you know, I didn't talk about the Olympics for a really long time, and I didn't talk about the fact that I was a swimmer and a mentor.
And if I did, I would say I had been an accidental athlete.
And eventually she became so tired.
This is the same mentor who helped me go back to school because I dropped out of college.
And I ended up finishing university at Smith College and graduated cum laude.
I feel so grateful for that.
Sure, it's a good school.
Yeah, it's a great school.
And they were really wonderful.
And I was an Ada Comstock scholar and I didn't have to swim at all.
I just got to study, which was lovely.
And anyway, the same mentor who helped me get back to school also said to me, she's finally just so exhausted by me, you know, saying I'd been an accidental athlete.
And she's like, you know, listen, Casey, I don't know how to tell you this, but there's nothing accidental about going to the Olympics.
And she was the one who helped me understand the kind of really beautiful traits that I had gotten out of my swimming career, which are the ability to focus, the ability to be kind, because I think that that was something that I really struggled with in my swimming, was just understanding how my other teammates were working, which is, you know, pretty basic for someone who's on the spectrum.
But to grow up and have the ability to connect with other people and be gentle and kind and extend and reach across and offer them ramps to reaching back across to me so that relationships can happen in that way.
But she was the one who said, you know, you show up on time now.
You know, you have the ability to, if you put your mind to it, do phenomenal things.
You hated swimming and you went to the Olympics.
And so imagine, and this is a gem that she gave me and something that I hope this book holds for those who read it is this idea that, you know, when we're able to do something that makes our heart sing,
then the universe will And so, to have the ability now to spend so much time writing, to be able to work in the restaurant that I love, to be married and be able to create Stories that are helpful to others feels like such a privilege.
How'd you get here?
So I took the L train and then I took the A. Short walk from the corner.
Short walk from...
You mentioned you got sober at age 21. I did, yeah.
Three days before I turned 21 was the last day.
Actually, I could read.
It's a very short passage in there.
It's the last little bit.
I'm just opening it up.
I guess for the audience to understand the epiphany that it led you to change what was a destructive cycle.
It doesn't happen all the time.
It doesn't.
And I hope that, you know, the folks who are listening, so I get, the first thing I'll say is, so I dedicate this book to the young ones struck with lightning for their friends and for the families.
And my hope is that it offers some insight for parents who have young ones who are on the spectrum or young ones who are struggling with addiction because There's not much that you can do.
There's not much that you can do.
You can put your oxygen mask on first and then put kind of like bumpers along the way.
But it's a miracle, like I said, that I'm alive.
And this particular moment, I'll read it, still seems quite inexplicable to me, but...
I've just been kicked out of rehab, and I have, like I said, lost the last thing that I have, which is this small bed in this rehab center in Utah.
My roommate at the time, just to give your listeners an idea of the folks I ended up with, my roommate at the time was in there on 10 counts of attempted murder.
Oh my goodness.
Yeah, so I ended up leading a very violent life at the end.
I wasn't in college.
I dealt drugs and did a lot of them.
And in my mind, that was fine.
I had arrived to a place where I didn't care.
I didn't care that I didn't care and if anyone around me had issue, then that was their problem, not mine.
So I had turned into this I'm a person that was, you know, selfish, self-centered to the extreme.
And so I have left Tucson and I've now gotten, you know, kicked out of rehab.
And there's someone who has driven me halfway to meet my uncle in the desert.
And this was the end of the world, with red dust watching us, and it took us another 30 minutes to get to my uncle.
The sky opened above me, and I leaned in toward the dashboard as we got closer, and I watched it through the windshield.
We pulled up and got out.
There wasn't anything or anyone else for miles.
Somewhere in between Utah and Nevada, the sky and the road stretched out, and Uncle Bruce and the dude shook hands and hugged without a word.
I got in Uncle Bruce's car and looked straight ahead at nothing, clicking the door closed behind me.
The seat burned the back of my thighs while I waited for my uncle, and the sky screamed white midday desert sun on me through the windshield like it used to in Tucson, and I felt nothing and heard nothing, and I bowed my head alone in there, and I heard a faraway rumble, and the sound of the Spirit of God slowly moved out from the void.
And the darkness of the deep shifted out from the waters of the Atlantic and across the oceans, over the plains and this desert.
It rose until the wide hand of God said, Let there be light now on this creature.
Let there be light.
And I did not lift my head.
And there was.
This book is so dark.
So intense.
I got quite emotional as I was reading it.
And the reason that the book ends here is that there is nothing in the world around me or the people around me at the time that would have indicated that this person who had become someone who had to own a gun,
who led a very violent life, who used every day and dealt drugs, would on this day, Not.
There are a lot of things that I did afterwards, you know?
Like I got a lot of help.
I got a lot of professional help.
I got a lot of help from people who loved me.
There are a lot of other resources out there for anyone who is struggling that range from 12-step programs to therapy to professional help in other matters to hospitalizations in some cases.
I don't hold the corner on how it went down for me because what worked for me might not work for the person next to me.
But there is nothing in that particular moment that explains why I didn't use that day.
I still don't understand it.
And I bow in gratitude for it.
And some people call that, you know, in this particular moment, some people call it the universe, some people call it energy, some people call it God.
I don't really know what I call it.
That was how I chose to write it.
But the point is that there's no human power who could have intervened.
And it took that moment.
We've got some more questions after the break.
In tribute to you, you kept your legs moving.
I did.
You kept moving, which is what athletes actually are taught to do, right?
You're taught to fail and get back up again.
That's right.
And there was an openness that allowed you to appreciate that there was a light coming across the Atlantic through the plains to shine on you and just you.
And I suspect much of your life, although it did take a lot of work, is reflective of that attitude.
I mean, the reason you're probably best known now is that you're the first female professional model exclusively doing male shows.
That's right.
And those are not dots you would normally connect.
Addicted, homeless person with violence who's flamed out.
Who'd been to the Olympics.
Who had been to the Olympics.
And is 6'2".
So how does that work?
How do you end up in modeling?
And why be a female in male shows?
Sure.
So to your listeners who are not here present with us, I'm very handsome.
Yes.
I'll say it for her.
You are.
She's very handsome.
And I'm 6'2".
And real thin.
You're using a coat rack.
You could model women's clothes as easily.
I know, but how uncomfortable would that be for me?
I mean, it would be extraordinary.
It would be, you know, there was a time when that was quite fun for me.
And I do have, you know, my sisters and brothers in arms who love wearing women's clothes, and I celebrate that.
And, you know, you are beautiful, and you are so handsome.
You're talking to me when you said that.
I was.
You called me beautiful.
Beautiful.
And again, you know, that I spent Yeah, so I, you know, the book ends in 1996. I went back to school in 2004. And from 2004 to 2007, when I graduated, I led a very quiet life of Putting the pieces back together.
And during this time, I wrote a lot.
I've learned how to have a job.
I learned how to go back to school.
I worked in bookstores.
And I have my writing practice, which has been something that's been with me since I was eight.
And so it feels like such a joy, you know, when I did get to start writing in a more public way.
So as a model, I wrote a couple of articles for The Guardian, and that was really exciting to be able to have social commentary and bring vocabulary and language to something that seemed so, you know, kind of so foreign or unusual or scary in some instances to some folks.
And to be able to, not necessarily normalize it, but celebrate it.
So you were pushing for this.
It wasn't that the agencies, again, I don't understand the business well enough to have articulated it well.
Neither do I. But it wasn't like someone said, oh my goodness, you'd be a fantastic male model, let's make this happen.
You were saying, I feel like I could model, but I want to do the modeling the way my body and I feel we should do it.
Oh, yeah.
No, no.
It actually happened the way that you think it happened, which is like, I think you could do this.
Because prior to that, you know, I had my own art practice.
I used my body.
When was the first time someone just knock, knock, knock?
I saw you walking down the street.
No, yeah.
No, so I had a friend who was a photographer, and they said, I'm doing this story for Muse Magazine.
Muse Magazine is, you know, kind of a high-end fashion magazine.
And, you know, she's a very successful photographer, and she said, I'm doing this story with Candice Swanpool, who is this lovely, also very successful model, and we're doing it about, you know, about her and a boy gang, but I don't want to use guys.
Casey, are you available?
And I was like, I had decided that week to say yes to everything, because I, again, you know, am most comfortable in a very quiet, Life in quiet space.
Boy gang.
It's so interesting that she picked up for a boy gang.
But the thing is, is that, you know, she wanted to offer an opportunity to celebrate female masculinity, you know?
She wanted the opportunity to make space in the own way that she could around handsome women, you know?
Kind of next to Candace Swanpool, who is...
To Victoria's Secret model, sure.
She's a Victoria secret model.
She is, you know, the epitome in some ways of just, you know, a gorgeous femininity.
And she wanted to hold the, what's the word?
She wanted to be able to hold kind of the power of fierce femininity and the kind of the strength of masculinity while only using women.
And start this conversation around, you know, that Handsomeness is not to the exclusion of fierce femininity in some ways.
So this story came out, and after it came out, she said, you know, I actually think you can do this.
And I was doing a lot of work around the body.
I was talking a lot about, you know, can you undermine the male gaze?
Is there a way to appropriate female objectification of the body?
And I think this is an extension of my swimming.
You know, I was very curious around...
what the limits of agency could be after having been an athlete with basically no agency except for the fact that I was a teenager and I basically stuck my finger up, you know, my middle finger up to everybody around me.
That was the only kind of way I could create any sort of space or limits to what was not only a light and sound assault on my body, but in some instances, actual humans assaulting my body.
And so to be able to, as an adult, kind of really engage with those questions around how do we look at women and What do we think of women?
Is there a way to create space around that where there are kind of greater representations of what women look like?
Be they masculine?
Be they larger bodied?
Be they, you know...
What is that conversation?
In my case, I was mostly curious about just the body.
Like, what does it mean to be a woman?
What does it mean to be a girl?
What does it mean to be looked at?
And this was all happening in my own art practice.
I had a solo show at Osmos Gallery here in New York, all based on that stuff that was called Bodies on the Line.
But then suddenly I was invited into fashion, which is the place where we talk about bodies.
It's the place where bodies get looked at, where bodies get examined, where they get celebrated or not.
And there I was in my suit, you know, just being myself.
And my friend said, I think that you can do this.
And I said yes, and I did for a year.
And I've gotten to work with some extraordinary photographers and do some amazing campaigns.
And this is now six years ago.
This happened, or I guess five years ago.
How do the male models react to photography?
They were fine.
They were just like, wow, that human is so good looking.
I wish I looked like them.
I believe it or not, I've done charity modeling events.
I believe it.
You are very handsome.
Chiseled jawline, gorgeous smile, crinkly eyes.
So we all get changed quickly in the back, you know, sloppily.
So just go back there and fix it up.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, when one thinks about their home, you know, for example, or when I go visit my friends who are, you know, men or who are women, we all go into the same bathroom.
We all go and sometimes change in the same rooms because we're It's a home.
And I think that sometimes when we step out of the home, we get suddenly a little anxious about how that goes down.
But I was an athlete, and I've changed clothes on a pool deck.
I actually still know how to do it.
And we all did.
You know what I mean?
And so this was, for me, no different.
I definitely understand how it would be unusual for other people.
But for me, after years of having changed on a pool deck next to chicks and dudes, this was...
Nothing.
I want to commend you.
For someone who's just been through a lot of stuff, you pulled together very artfully, very beautifully.
