The Woman Whose Whole Life Was Ruined By One Ad

Heidi Yeh is a successful Taiwanese model and actress. She is a very talented and beautiful lady and what’s more, a natural beauty. She has never had any plastic surgery done.

In 2012 she scored a job modelling in an ad for a cosmetic surgery clinic. The contract stated that the ad would only appear in magazines and brochures for that one clinic. She did the photo, was paid and moved on. It would only be when the photo began to circulate on the internet that the past would come to haunt Heidi and, in fact, ruin her whole career.

This is the ad she did for the clinic:

The caption reads “The only thing you’ll ever have to worry about is how to tell the kids.” The point of the ad is that plastic surgery can make a woman beautiful but won’t change her actual genetics, meaning her kids will still look ugly if she was ugly. While this sort of advertising may seem blunt or offensive to a Western audience, these sorts of ads are common and considered harmless in Asia. It should also be noted that the kids in the picture were Photoshopped to look ugly and, in fact, did not look like that at all.

What Heidi didn’t know was that her picture, once used by one clinic, was then used by a few more clinics and even ended up being published on the internet, in clear breach of her contract. The ad, sometimes with the caption Photoshopped out, went viral online.

It was then that a Heilongjiang tabloid newspaper published a story using the picture and alleged that the man in the picture was Yeh’s real husband and the children were also her own. The story claimed that Yeh had undergone extensive cosmetic procedures and then seduced the wealthy man into marrying her. According to the tabloid, the man was divorcing Yeh and suing her for deception. Almost overnight, the story went viral and was extensively reported online and in other newspapers as fact. Now that everyone believed her looks were fake, Heidi no longer received any work as a model and all previous deals and contracts she had were cancelled. Her career was destroyed, even though the news was fake. Even worse, she gained a bad reputation as the woman who tricked a man into marrying her. According to Heidi, her own family asked her if the story was true.

Heidi sued JWT Talent Agency for $155,000 USD for the work she lost due to the advertisement. The company counter-sued Yeh for damaging the company’s image and also claimed they had been given full rights to distribute the image as they desired.

I have not been able to find any further information on the trial or whether or not Heidi won the lawsuit, but God, what a horrible thing to happen to the poor woman! She did one relatively small modelling job and it seems to have ended her whole career, as I haven’t seen her in any new work since about 3 years ago. The saddest part is that she was getting quite successful in her career when this tragedy happened to her. Her story can be seen as a cautionary tale for aspiring models to be careful of what jobs they choose.

You can read more about the story here: This Fake Plastic Surgery Photo Ruined a Model’s Life, Now She’s Suing for $155,000

I just hope she is doing okay now.

I also want to mention the time Orson Welles narrated a story about an alien invasion on the radio and it caused nation-wide panic in America. Due to the way Welles narrated the story as if it were real news, people actually believed it was real. He made a public apology but genuinely didn’t expect people to take a story about aliens seriously.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_War_of_the_Worlds_(radio_drama)