Former supermodel Paulina Porizkova opened up about finding her former husband, Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, dead three years ago.
He had been healing well from lung cancer surgery, she told Jada Pinkett Smith in an episode of “Red Table Talk” that’s set to air on Wednesday.
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“He had surgery because they’d found stage 0 lung cancer,” she recalled in the advance clip obtained by People. “And he was recovering really well. Two weeks [later], he was walking around, he was starting to feel much better, he was sleeping better. And this night, he said, ‘You know what, I’m feeling kinda tired.’”
The Czech-born beauty, who was the first Central European woman to appear in Sports Illustrated’s famous Swimsuit Issue, is releasing a new book, “No Filter: The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful,” this month.
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Paulina Porizkova and Ric Ocasek attend Children’s Defense Fund’s Beat the Odds Gala at the Pierre Hotel on February 29, 2016, in New York City. (Monica Schipper)
The supermodel noted the next morning that he seemed to be sleeping late, but it didn’t seem terribly out of the ordinary. But when he had not emerged by about 11 a.m., she decided to go wake him up.
“I brought him a cup of coffee, and he just looked like he was sleeping,” said Porizkova, 57. “I set the coffee down next to him, and that’s when I saw his face. I saw his eyes. And they didn’t look like eyes anymore.”
Ocasek died in his New York City home on Sept. 15, 2019, of natural causes including heart failure, according to the medical examiner’s office. Though the pair were in the process of divorcing after nearly 30 years of marriage, she had been staying with him post-surgery.
Without a prenuptial agreement, she was left penniless by his death, she said later. It came out after Ocasek’s death that he had cut his estranged wife out of his will, something she said she learned of the next day.
He reportedly did so for “abandonment” during the divorce. For her part, Porizkova felt betrayed by the omission. She later settled with his estate.
Paulina Porizkova recounts finding husband Ric Ocasek dead
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