In April 1998, Mulder announced she was thinking of quitting modeling and revealed some of her true feelings. "From the beginning, I hated being photographed," she told reporters at the time. "For me, it was just an assumed role, and in the end, I didn't know who I really was as a person. Everybody was saying to me, `Hi, you're fantastic.' But inside, I felt worse from day to day."[citation needed]

After leaving the modeling industry, Mulder took singing lessons and tried acting but spent a lot of time traveling, often with her new boyfriend, a wealthy Colombian named Julio Mario Santo Domingo, whom she dated until February 2001. Although she had been happy to stop modeling, she later told the press that working had been a convenient way to avoid her problems. "My job distracted me from my worries," she told a French magazine. "It enabled me not to be myself, to pretend I was someone else. But when my energy was no longer directed toward this one goal to meet, the anguish caug