Exclusive: Actress Kerry Washington shared her eating disorder story. Now she’s joining the startup Equip to help spread awareness

Good morning! Citi chief Jane Fraser gets a big pay bump, Kelly Loeffler is confirmed to lead the Small Business Administration, and the eating disorder startup Equip found the right celebrity partner.

- Who gets help. In late 2023, the actor Kerry Washington published her memoir Thicker Than Water. In her book, the Scandal star got very personal; one of the stories she shared was her experience with an eating disorder. By the time she reached college-age, Washington wrote, she cycled back and forth between binge eating and severe food restriction, sometimes not eating for days at a time or compulsively exercising.

"Food and exercise were at first ideal ways to indulge compulsive behaviors because I could hide them more easily than drugs or alcohol," Washington wrote. "And that constant manipulation of my own behavior allowed me the illusion of control...Though they eventually led to unfathomable levels of depression."

Washington now says that sharing that experience has connected her deeply with readers. "So much of what allows eating disorders to thrive is the shame and the secrecy," Washington tells Fortune. One of those readers was Kristina Saffran, the cofounder and CEO of Equip, an eating disorder treatment startup. The startup offers virtual eating disorder care, covered by insurance for as many as 120 million people in the U.S.; it first focused on treating minors but expanded to adults and illnesses including anorexia, binge eating disorder, bulimia, and ARFID in 2023. "I was on maternity leave when Kerry's book came out and I was reading it," Saffran remembers. "I texted [my cofounder] and a couple of our investors and said, 'We have to get in touch with her.'"

Saffran had been looking for a celebrity partner to work with her business and amplify its cause. But it's not easy to find the right celebrity to serve as a voice for eating disorder awareness. That person would have to be comfortable talking about their own experience—and Saffran didn't want to reinforce the stereotype that eating disorders mainly affect thin, white women. That cultural misconception causes real harm, Equip cofounder and chief clinical officer Erin Parks says, because doctors and therapists often don't receive much training specific to eating disorders. "The cultural stereotype becomes the medical stereotype," Parks says. Saffran herself fit the stereotype and says her pediatrician still didn't raise any red flags when she rapidly lost weight at age 10. "If I'm being missed, everyone's being missed," she says.

That mission resonated with Washington, too, who was well aware of the cultural narratives around eating disorders. "There have been so many stereotypes about who has eating disorders and I don't really fit the bill," she says.

So Washington is now joining Equip as an investor and adviser. Equip declined to disclose the size of Washington's investment, but the actor has a growing portfolio that includes the Black-owned social media platform Spill, the direct-to-consumer jewelry startup Aurate, and the women's health brand Winx. Equip has raised $110 million in total from investors including General Catalyst and Tiger Global Management as well as Plus Capital, which helps startups bring on celebrity investors; other angel investors include Katie Couric and soccer star Alex Morgan.

With Washington's support, Equip aims to increase awareness of all the different ways eating disorders can present and all the different people who can be affected by them; one initiative encourages pediatricians to run standard screenings for all patients, "not just thin white girls," Parks says. The startup is also working to increase insurance access, especially for patients using Medicaid.

Washington got treatment for her eating disorder, and she says she was excited by the opportunity to help more people access treatment. "It shouldn't be that because I've been so lucky financially that I've been able to heal," she says. She adds that she appreciated Equip's founders "who understood that eating disorders come in all different shapes and sizes and ages and ethnicities."

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com