Christie Brinkley claps back at ageist online trolls

Bridgehampton supermodel Christie Brinkley is calling out online trolls who verbally abuse older female celebrities over their appearance.

“Whoa Nelly!” wrote the 69-year-old, who has continued to appear in magazine photo spreads, in an Instagram post. “The Wrinkle Brigade is out in full force in the comment thread! They are the people that scan celebrities pages, hoping to find some cellulite, wrinkles, or anything that they can point to … to critique. It must be [some] form of compensation for some thing they are lacking.”

Conversely, she wrote, “But when those people appear, there are others who pop up with messages so kind and valuable. Those are the comments that restore my faith and make my heart sing! Thank you sweet souls.”

Brinkley added comically of shadows caused by wrinkles in the post's accompanying selfie close-up, “PS I don’t have hair on my chest obviously (I thought!) I phone [sic] has a tendency to create weird things in [the] shadow. But so what if I did? [Have]  a great day My Friends!"

She had mused last year on growing older, posting on Instagram about a Buzzfeed.com article featuring female TV, film, music and fashion stars “Who Are Over 50 and Absolutely Prove That, Yes, Being Older Is Attractive."

"I saw this article this morning and my first thought was these women don't have anything to prove," the three-time Sports Illustrated Swimsuit cover model wrote of celebrities including Halle Berry, Debbie Harry, Rita Moreno, Vera Wang and herself, who ranged in age from 50s to 90s. "[T]hey're just living their best life … but then I thought again about ageism in America and some of the ways that we are constantly being categorized because of our age."

Brinkley, who told People magazine in 2017 she had the injectable Xeomin for frown lines, and Ultherapy skin-lifting for her neck and decolletage, decried "the subtle constant categorizing of women by age, making us feel like we are approaching some exponential expiration date gnaws away at one's confidence," adding, "Women of every age belong everywhere they feel like being, and we can do whatever we set our minds to. We may not always succeed or win, But we're old enough to learn from our mistakes and keep growing and evolving ….”

Over the weekend she posted video snippets of friends and family at two outdoor birthday dinners for daughter Sailor Lee Brinkley-Cook, the youngest of her three children, who turned 25 on Sunday.