At the continuation of her divorce trial Thursday, Christie Brinkley said that she was ‘shattered’ by her husband’s affair with a girl who was only eighteen.“My world was completely shattered,” the former supermodel said. “My life as I knew it had vanished.”
She took the stand a day after the trial opened with testimony from her husband, Peter Cook, and his former mistress, Diana Bianchi. Yesterday, Cook admitted the affair in court and testified that he gave Bianchi a $300,000 payoff to keep her quiet. It was also revealed that Cook spent $3,000 a month on porn.
Brinkley said she learned about the betrayal when Bianchi’s stepfather broke the news to her at a public event. The man told her: “That husband of yours won’t knock it off. He’s having an affair with my teenage daughter.”
Upon hearing the accusation, Brinkley said she looked at Cook but he shook his head in denial before she even asked him the question and that’s when she thought: “My God, it’s true. He did do that. I knew from his face. It explained the feelings I’d been trying not to feel. I was just in shock. I just started driving away from my perfect life. I thought I had the picket fence. We were happy.”
She then confronted Cook and told him to give his computer passwords to her “if you’ve got nothing to hide” and found several e-mails from Bianchi and plenty of other e-mails that detailed he was trying “to connect with people.”
“I found conversations of him trying to lure girls, saying he would take them shopping, saying he would pay them if he could see their face… I felt really stupid. Why didn’t I know? Why wasn’t I aware of this? I felt humiliated. I felt shattered. I just felt grief-stricken. It was more than I could bear.”
Cook and Brinkley married in 1996, and filed for divorce in 2006 after she got wind of the affair. There was a prenuptial agreement in place so the two are mainly arguing over custody of their children, ages 10 and 13.
