The model and DUI survivor died Sunday at a Los Angeles treatment facility, with the county medical examiner confirming his death and a cause still pending autopsy.
Presley Gerber died on Sunday at a rehabilitation facility in Los Angeles. He was 27. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner confirmed the death to TMZ, and a representative for his family, Cindy Crawford and Rande Gerber, confirmed it separately.
"The family is asking for privacy during this very difficult and painful time," the rep said. No cause of death has been made public. An autopsy has not been completed yet.
Gerber was the elder of Crawford and Gerber's two children, three years ahead of his sister Kaia. He signed with IMG Models at 15 and walked his first runway for Moschino in 2016, later working campaigns with Dolce & Gabbana and Calvin Klein. He appeared alongside his mother in a Pepsi commercial in 2018, one of the rare projects that put the two of them on screen together.
His struggles were not hidden, not by the end. In January 2019 he was arrested on a DUI charge and given three years' probation, a mandated DUI program, and community service. In 2020 he tattooed the word MISUNDERSTOOD across his cheek, a tattoo he later appeared to have removed.
In December 2025, Gerber posted an Instagram video, since taken down, where he spoke about the medication he was on for panic attacks. "The benzos have been fluctuating up and down depending on what's been going on in my life," he said, listing buprenorphine, Xanax and Valium. "Unfortunately, I've had a lot of loss in many different forms recently, so that is not an excuse, but it's the reason why I am where I'm at now."
He was candid about how frightening the dependency felt. "The things that scare me are the things you need to take," he said. "If you don't take them, something not good happens." He said he'd been sober from alcohol for several months by then and was trying to distance himself from people in his life who weren't helping. "As I've grown up in Hollywood, there's a lot of people around me that I love to death, but right now I try not to be around them."
Vogue, in a recent cover story on Kaia Gerber, described her brother's addiction as a decade-long struggle. Kaia told the magazine she'd long positioned herself as "the easy one" in the family precisely because her brother's pain took up so much room. "My parents for most of our lives were very, very private and didn't share anything," she said, "and now we have this absolute teacher, my brother, who says, 'I'm gonna be very human for everyone.'" She said she was deeply proud of him for it.
No details on the circumstances at the facility have been released. The medical examiner's office is expected to determine cause of death once toxicology and autopsy results come back, a process that in Los Angeles County typically takes weeks.
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