In response to the article in our January/February 2008 issue, which you can also find here, Fabio penned this note (click on the image to enlarge). Yes, the letterhead is embossed in gold with his signature.

He might star in the fantasies of middle-aged women, but Fabio is not to be messed with.

-By Karl Taro Greenfeld
-Photograph by Danielle Levitt

Tell us what you think about his resurrection from has-been hell in the comment section below.

Image credit: Photograph by Danielle Levitt

Fabio is standing next to a white-tiled island in his kitchen (contents of the Sub Zero refrigerator: supplements, water, and cranberry juice), checking his messages. He's wearing cowboy boots, jeans, and a leather shirt unbuttoned to his navel. The hair is stringier than it looks on the covers of romance novels. The eyebrows are bushy, the green-blue eyes sparkly, and the teeth inside the thin-lipped mouth capped [click here to see Fabio's response]. His chest is waxed and his pectoral muscles are bulging. He looks like a muscular, anthropomorphic ostrich wearing a Jennifer Aniston wig. The reality-show producers, Fabio laments, call regularly. Dancing With the Stars, The Surreal Life, MTV Cribs. He has turned them all down. Fabio knows full well that even in his prime, he was a joke—a hot-flush fantasy for romance-reading housewives who could pump a bodice ripper's sales into six figures. But the whole time, he says, he was thinking, Laugh, mock me, I don't care.