The body of top model Charlotte Dawson was found in her upscale Australian apartment over the weekend, an apparent suicide that is being linked to the trauma of an abortion she had 10 years ago and the breakup of her marriage to Olympic swimmer Scott Miller.

The Daily Mail is reporting that Dawson, 47, a former model and TV presenter was found dead in her Woolloomooloo home over the weekend. She was allegedly discovered by the real estate agent who was about to auction off the star’s two-bedroom apartment overlooking Sydney Harbor which Dawson was struggling to afford.

Friends have long known that Dawson was suffering from debilitating depression which she once said began with an abortion she had in 1999.

In an interview with the Australian Women’s Weekly in September, 2012, she said the abortion occurred shortly after her marriage to Miller. Although she was thrilled, her husband wasn’t nearly as excited.

“I could sense some hesitation in Scott,” she said. “My due date would clash with the 2000 Olympic Games and this was very concerning.”

She added: “Everything Scott had done was leading up to this moment and nothing could stand in his way, so it was decided that we would terminate the child and try again later. Who needed a developing fetus when a gold medal was on offer, eh?”

On the day of the abortion, she describes herself as being in a state of complete “turmoil”. Although Miller accompanied her to the hospital, he left at the last moment because he “couldn’t cope with the atmosphere.”

As a result, she was alone for the ordeal.

“I felt a shift,” she said. “Maybe it was hormonal, but I felt the early tinges of what I can now identify as my first experience with depression.”

What should have been the happiest time of her life was not to be and within two years, her marriage to Miller failed when he a video surfaced of him snorting drugs and having sex with a woman in a public restroom.

The split was devastating to her.

In a recent interview with Jo Casamento of the Sydney Morning Herald, she said the couple’s divorce “broke me to the core. It destroyed me to the point I had to go overseas for five years and rebuild my life from scratch. . .  It left me in a ball for many years. I’ve had to block it out as it is just way too painful for me to think about. My entire being was broken and that was the beginning of the end for me.”

Shortly before her death, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Miller in which he spoke about the couple’s tumultuous marriage. Dawson knew about the show and told Casamento that watching her ex-husband on TV was “not going to be good for me.”

Friends said she was so afraid of what he was going to say that she was “shaking” the night before the show aired.

It only added to the pressure she was under during the last months of her life.

Last year, her agency, Chic Model Management, dropped her and left her unable to pay the rent on her Woolloomooloo apartment.

In November, she was admitted to St. Vincents Hospital for two days of psychiatric observation.

In January of this year, she either left or was fired from her job as host of Australia’s Next Top Model, where she had been working for the past six years.

The same month, she returned from a “healing holiday” in Bali to find her apartment “completely trashed” by her house-sitter.

On February 16, Miller’s interview aired and even though she apparently tweeted that the interview wasn’t as bad as it could have been, friends say she was in “very bad shape emotionally, terrible shape” on February 21, the last day she was seen alive.

Even though she had long devoted herself to spreading the word about depression, she would succumb to it the following day when she was found hanging in her apartment by a security guard.

Although abortion was just one of the variables that contributed to Dawson’s death, studies have shown that women who have had abortions are six times more likely to commit suicide than women who carried their pregnancies to term.

Sadly, Dawson will be forevermore a part of those grim statistics.

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