Paulina Porizkova is baring all.
On Thursday, the model sat down for StyleLikeU’s “Defying Ageism” video series where she tearfully discussed the dissolution of her marriage to Ric Ocasek while stripping down to her lingerie.
The Cars frontman passed away in 2019 from heart disease worsened by emphysema. They shared two sons.
Porizkova announced the couple’s separation the previous year.
PAULINA PORIZKOVA TEARS UP ON INSTAGRAM WHILE REMEMBERING RIC OCASEK TWO YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH
Paulina Porizkova is a celebrated model who married Ric Ocasek in 1989.
(Photo by John Parra/Getty Images for Sports Illustrated)
“We had been together for my entire life since I was 19, and suddenly he seemed not to find me attractive anymore,” the 56-year-old told the outlet. “I started feeling like I was a coffee table, something you put s–t on and bump into the middle of the night but pay no more attention to other than that.”
“It made me feel worthless as a woman,” the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit star admitted. “I thought I was going to stay with this man for the rest of my life.”
Porizkova shared that she wasn’t being heard by the rocker.
“I realized that I wanted my partner, my husband, to listen to me, so that he could see that I’m no longer just the hot model that he married,” she explained. “There were other things about me that I thought were valuable – pretty much everything but my looks. I had thought I was boring for 30 years because my husband made me feel boring. Because whenever I would speak, he would just yawn and look around and completely dismiss me. I sort of went with that for a while until I could no longer take it.”
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Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova shared two sons.
(Getty Images)
“I started changing the rules on what our marriage was supposed to be, and then he started changing his rules, too,” she recalled. “‘Oh, well, if you’re gonna be demanding and a b—h, then, well, I’m not gonna touch you.'”
While Porizkova still loved her husband and wanted to make their relationship work, she gave the singer an “ultimatum,” thinking it “might snap him out of it.”
“I said, ‘You know, I’m really unhappy, and you don’t seem to want to work on anything, and so I think maybe we should be heading towards separation, maybe divorce,” she said. “He just looked at me really coldly and said, ‘Well, it seems like your mind’s made up, so whatever.’ And that was it. I really, really couldn’t believe it… That was all the fight he was going to put up for me.”
At that moment, Porizkova realized there was nothing she could do to save her marriage. It was then when she ran off and broke down.
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The Cars chart-topping hits in the late 1970s and 1980s included ‘Just What I Needed,’ ‘Shake It Up’ and ‘Drive.’
(Ebet Roberts/Getty Images)
“I loved my husband for 35 years,” she said. “The last three of which we were separated. We were there for each other in those kinds of physical ways that we had become habituated to. It was just no longer marriage.”
It was Porizkova who found Ocasek dead in their shared Manhattan townhouse. As she was overcome with grief, Porizkova learned the following day that he had cut her out of his will.
Porizkova said she struggled with depression, anxiety and anger, spending most of her days crying while going through menopause.
“To me, my menopause is tied into the grief over my husband,” she said. “… I felt like somebody just peeled my skin off. Like this process of grieving and heartbreak and betrayal, it stripped me of my Paulina skin, the one that I used to know, the one that used to protect me. I don’t have anything that protects me anymore.”
PAULINA PORIZKOVA SHARES ‘UNRETOUCHED’ PICTURE OF HERSELF POSING NUDE FOR MAGAZINE SHOOT
Ric Ocasek and Paulina Porizkova announced their separation in 2018.
(Getty)
Porizkova described how one day, as she was crying in bed, she began to film herself. She shared that video on Instagram, hoping it would help someone else grieving not feel so alone.
“Well, I’m either an idiot or very brave for posting the crying video to Instagram,” she remarked.
According to Porizkova, she was dining out with friends when a young woman stopped her on the way to the bathroom. She recognized the star as “the crying lady on Instagram” and thanked her for “being real.” Porizkova said she has “never been heard as well as in that moment.”
Today, Porizkova said she is still a work in progress but is hopeful about what the future holds for her.
Paulina Porizkova said she is hopeful about her future.
(Photo by Santiago Felipe/Getty Images)
“As much as I embrace this body, and as much as I’m proud of who I am, I’m also broken,” she said. “And I’m assembling myself. So it’s not the greatest place to be yet. It will be, though. It will be pretty freaking awesome.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
