Do we like Gisele Bündchen?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Over 15 years of public environmental work and no harmful words of her own turned up, with one contested comment from 2021.
Gisele Bündchen was born in 1980 in Horizontina, a small town in Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil's south. She moved to modelling in the mid-1990s, walked for Alexander McQueen in 1997 and signed with Victoria's Secret in 2000, where she stayed until 2007. She went on to build her own sandal and lingerie lines, and to become a public environmental campaigner.
The environment is the thread that matters here. In 2009 she was named a UN Environment Programme goodwill ambassador, and in New York she told reporters that President Lula should propose stronger laws against Amazon deforestation. Lula responded the same day, pointing to his own plan to limit sugarcane in sensitive areas. Not many models pick a public argument with a head of state in their first week on the job.
The stoush got bigger in 2019. Brazil's Agriculture Minister Tereza Cristina Dias called her a “bad Brazilian” on the radio for criticising deforestation and, in the minister's view, harming Brazil's image. Bündchen answered on Twitter in Portuguese, citing a 13 per cent rise in deforestation and her 12 years of activism. She said the real bad Brazilians were the people behind illegal land grabs.
The legal side is thin. She and Tom Brady were named in an investors' suit over promoting the crypto exchange FTX, in which investors alleged misleading promotion. In 2025 a federal judge dismissed most of the claims, writing that the celebrities were “uninformed, negligent, or even reckless” but had no prior knowledge of the alleged scheme. Some claims and the chance to amend remained open, and we found no later ruling. Separately, she has called rumours about her private life “a lie” and said she doesn't want her life made into a tabloid.
The good stuff is the sort you can check. She joined the Rainforest Alliance board in 2014, saying its mission “aligns with my own long-standing commitment to environmental stewardship.” She has been a UN Environment Programme goodwill ambassador since 2009 and was still being described that way in 2019. Her activism has cost her a public fight with a cabinet minister.
As for now, she popped up on screen at the Victoria's Secret show in October, kicking off the night from a couch and signing off with a promise of “more of me real soon.” Her recent work has been brand deals and a comeback tease, with nothing that trips the harm alarm. That's about the whole list.