Posted: Thursday, 03 July 2008 1:51PM
Christie Brinkley Testifies About Husband's Affair
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CENTRAL ISLIP, N.Y. (AP / WCBS 880) -- Christie Brinkley testified at her divorce trial Thursday that the day she learned her husband was having an affair with a teenager was the day ``my life as I knew it had vanished.''
The former Sports Illustrated model took the stand in state Supreme Court, a day after testimony by her architect husband, Peter Cook, and his former mistress.
Brian Platt, a police officer and the stepfather of the 18-year-old, informed Brinkley of the affair at a 2006 graduation at Southampton High School where the model was a speaker.
He tapped her on the shoulder, she tearfully recalled, and said, ``That husband of yours won't knock it off. He's having an affair with my teenage daughter.''
Brinkley said she looked at Cook, sitting in the front row of the graduation ceremony, and when he shook his head in denial, she thought: ``My God, it's true. He did do that.''
``That was also the day that my world was completely shattered,'' said Brinkley, dressed in a blue sweater and blouse and a blue skirt.
During his testimony Wednesday, Cook said he had given his mistress, Diana Bianchi, a $300,000 payoff, had extramarital trysts in his office and Brinkley's Hamptons homes, and spent thousands of dollars on online porn.
Brinkley said she told Cook to give her his computer passwords ``if you've got nothing to hide.'' She found e-mails there from Bianchi and the porn sites Cook visited.
``I know a lot of men look'' at pornographic sites, she said. But, in Cook's case, she said he was trying ``to connect with people'' in their neighborhood.
``It was not a voyeur site. It was a meeting site,'' she said. ``It was more than I could bear.''
Cook had testified that he and Brinkley used pornography ``to get the mood going.''
Before learning of the affair, Brinkley said the biggest problem she perceived in their marriage was Cook's relationship with Alexa Ray Joel, her daughter with ``Piano Man' Billy Joel.
Brinkley said Cook constantly picked on her 22-year-old daughter for the slightest things. ``It was truly the area that pained me in our marriage,'' she said.
It distressed her, too, that Cook didn't want Alexa Joel to play the piano, especially since ``I feel as though she's made my life a musical.''
``You married me and my children,'' she said she would tell Cook. ``You've got to find a way to love Alexa.''
Joel testifed on Wednesday that Cook treated her well before he married her mother. But she said he was constantly on her case afterward, chastising her ``if I chewed too loud'' and criticizing her piano playing.
Brinkley dissolved into tears as she talked about her marriage to Cook as it used to be.
``We used to sleep like spoons,'' she said. But at some point that stopped and she asked Cook, ``Why don't you snuggle me like that any more?''
His response, she said, was ``I don't know.''
Bianchi, who also testified on Wednesday, said Cook also hid cash for her under a rock and gave her $15,000 to help her buy a Nissan Maxima in 2005.
Cook met Bianchi while she was working at a Hamptons toy store in 2004. He testified that he soon hired her to work at his Hamptons architecture firm, paying her $20,000 to type magazine articles onto the company's Web site.
Before long, he seduced her while they were working together in the office, she testified.
Brinkley, 54, and Cook, 49, wed in 1996. She filed for divorce a decade later, amid the public scandal over the affair.
Brinkley fought a bid by the children's legal guardian to close the trial to the public. Cook's lawyer said that made the model partly to blame for an unseemly spectacle. |
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