Brinkley's Sex-Starved Husband Bares AllChristie Brinkley's Divorce Trial Opens with Barrage of Sordid DetailsBy MARCUS BARAM
July 3, 2008—
Talk about too much information.
If there are any secrets left to uncover in the fairy tale marriage and nightmare divorce of Christie Brinkley and Peter Cook, it's hard to imagine they could be any more titillating or embarrassing than the tidbits unveiled in court Wednesday.
Both sides -- the spurned supermodel and the admitted adulterer husband -- came to this drab Long Island, N.Y., courtroom armed for battle, determined to fire off the most damaging charges and allegations about their behavior behind closed doors.
An all-star lineup of witnesses -- Cook, his alleged teenage mistress and Brinkley's daughter with Billy Joel -- all unloaded a torrent of torrid tales, including Cook's tearful admission that
he enjoyed oral sex with his 18-year-old girlfriend (whose silence he allegedly bought with a $300,000 confidentiality agreement) and his fondness for masturbating via webcam for an Internet audience.Alexa Ray Joel, Brinkley's daughter from her marriage to Bill Joel, testified that Cook once pulled her out of the shower and shoved her head into a bucket. There were charges that Brinkley had ransacked Cook's office and copied his hard drive; that she'd scratched out his face in family photographs in front of the children; and allegations that the supermodel had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on private detectives to dig up dirt on Cook.
And there's plenty more to come. Brinkley will take the stand today. On the way into the courtroom this morning, Brinkley was overheard telling a companion she "could not sleep" she was so worried about taking the stand.
Brinkley lawyers plan to call 44 witnesses, including another of Cook's purported girlfriends, in Brinkley's effort to get full custody of their two children. And Cook plans to call on 20 of his own in his attempt to share custody of Jack, his stepson, and Sailor, his daughter with Brinkley.
To ramp up the pressure on Cook, Brinkley took the unusual step of pushing to open the divorce trial to the public, so that all the couple's dirty laundry could be aired.
Cook's lawyer, Norman Sheresky, could not hide his scorn, saying,
"It's as good as having the children in the front row to listen to all of this. ... That's not good parenting."Brinkley's lawyer, Robert Stephan Cohen, portrayed his client as a hardworking full-time mom whose "knight in shining armor" turned into a debauched devil by cheating on her with a teenager and spending up to $3,000 a month on Internet porn.
Cohen cited Brinkley's National Mother of the Year award in 2000 and claimed that
Cook charged the cost of the flowers he gave her for Mother's Day to her account.Sheresky painted Brinkley as a wife blinded with rage at her husband's cheating (comparing him to famed adulterers Eliot Spitzer, Jim McGreevey and Bill Clinton) and a lazy mother who slept late while Cook woke their children and got them dressed for school.
The players in the divorce drama seem straight out of central casting: Brinkley, in a white blouse, tan skirt and perfectly coiffed blond hair, strode into court with the grace of a longtime runway model.
Cook, the architect, with his dark suit, powder-blue tie and tan cheeks, seemed like a Ken doll caught with his pants down, clasping his hands in front of him.
And it seemed an ideal cinematic twist of fate that the too-good-looking perfect blond couple's 10-year marriage would be undone by Cook's affair with Brinkley's physical opposite, Diana Bianchi, a petite 18-year-old Italian brunette, who was still a teen when she met Cook.
Bianchi, who hid behind stylish sunglasses, donned 5-inch pink high heels but still seemed tiny. When she walked into the courtroom, Brinkley turned her face a half-turn as her icy gaze came to rest on the young woman.
Last but not least, Bianchi's father, Brian Platt, presented himself as the defender of his daughter's dignity and the symbol of small-town integrity facing off against an egomaniacal elitist. Platt, with his thick neck and mustache, forcefully walked into court and vented his feelings, ignoring lawyer's instructions to stick to yes and no answers.
This made-for-Hollywood drama's climactic moment came June 25, 2006. That was the day Brinkley's "entire world began to unravel," according to her lawyer. And the day Cook had feared for weeks, just after he'd had two memorable confrontations with Bianchi's dad, who had learned about the affair and demanded that Cook "stay away from my daughter."
On that day, the supermodel was delivering the commencement address at Long Island's Southampton High School, the first woman ever to be given that honor.
After her speech, she stepped off the dais and shook hands with people while Cook and son Jack stood in the front row and led the applause.
And then came the moment made for a film editor's mis-en-scene: Platt, who was attending the ceremony with his youngest daughter, cut into line and whispered into Brinkley's ear the fateful words that will forever haunt the couple, according to Cook's lawyer, Brinkley's lawyer and Platt:
"That bastard husband of yours is having an affair with my stepdaughter. He won't knock it off. She's only 19 years old. This is no joke."Brinkley felt sick to her stomach and Cook's face was slowly drained of color as he witnessed the encounter, according to her lawyer. (Platt's memory: "She was obviously shaken to get news like that. He looked like he'd urinated his pants.")
Brinkley walked up to Cook and said, "How could you? How could you?" and he responded by shaking his head back and forth and saying, "Are you going to believe him or me?" according to Cohen. The lawyer added that
in that moment Brinkley realized Cook had just confessed to the affair since she hadn't yet told him about her conversation with Platt.Of course, Cook has a slightly different recollection, telling the court that Brinkley simply said, "Get me out of here," and he drove her home.
Brinkley's lawyer claimed that she was overcome with sadness and was on her knees sobbing by the side of a busy road later that day. After unsuccessfully searching for Platt, she drove home and found Cook had left the house.
Cohen claimed that Cook kept denying the affair, but the truth was slowly unwrapped as his story changed from "I gave her a job" to "She took off her clothes."
Cook claimed that within 24 hours he'd provided Brinkley with user names and passwords to his computer, explaining, "If she's going to divorce me, she needs to know everything, and she was accusing me of things that go so much further."
The move backfired, with Brinkley becoming more enraged as she learned that he was spending $2,000 to $3,000 a month on Internet porn, posting messages like "Hey there, I'm a horny guy. Spare me the philosophy and f**k me."Brinkley's legal team made much of Cook's pornographic habits, claiming that Christie once witnessed son Jack inadvertently open a slideshow containing pornographic images of young girls.
Later, Cook, sobbing on the stand, recalled Jack telling him, "Mom was looking at naked pictures of your girlfriends on the computer."
Cook emphasized that he never looked at porn while the children were around, though he did troll the Web, sometimes in Christie's office at their lavish home. And he said that the couple used pornography as a "precursor to intimacy between Christie and me in the last half of the marriage."
And Cook said that Brinkley once suggested he had a sexual addiction problem and should
check out the Meadows, the elite Arizona rehab center, saying that Michael Douglas had treated his addiction there.Brinkley's lawyer also emphasized the discrepancy in age between Cook, 49, and Bianchi, now 21, repeatedly focusing on Bianchi's teenage status when they had their affair.
Recollections on all sides differed, with Cook claiming that he used to shop at a toy store where Bianchi worked in 2004 and didn't really meet her until 2005.
During her testimony, Bianchi claimed that she'd met Cook in the summer of 2003 and once sang him a song over the phone when she was still 17.
He eventually gave her a job in his architectural office, paying her $20,000, and admitting that the potential for sex was an "inducement to hiring her."
They ended up having sex in his office and at two houses owned by Brinkley between 10 and 12 times, according to their testimony, and he showered Bianchi with gifts, buying her a Nissan Maxima in 2005, a $2,000 watch, Victoria's Secret lingerie and leaving $500 for her under a rock and behind a small painting titled "Zeus" in his office.
The car proved to be his undoing, since Platt became upset that Cook had given such a gift to his daughter, whose driving privileges had been recently rescinded by her parents.
The burly police officer testified that he'd run into Cook at Schmitt Brothers Produce in Southampton, N.Y., in the summer of 2005, told him to step outside to the parking lot to talk and berated him, telling him to stay away from Bianchi.
Later, in the spring of 2006, Platt said he was sitting on a bench outside Village Cheese Shop in the town when Cook walked down the sidewalk past him.
"You're still not staying away from my daughter. I hear you've been leaving love notes for her," Platt testified that he told Cook.
"And he [Cook] told me I had no class and was a disgrace to the uniform."
Around that time a desperate Cook reached out to Bianchi and coached her to lie. "It would be nice if we got our stories straight but since nothing happened physically, who cares? Got it?" Cook testified.
Later, after the second confrontation with Platt, Cook e-mailed Bianchi: "Your stepdad is out of control. I am serious," and left notes for her at her new apartment in Brooklyn, according to his testimony.
Brinkley's daughter, Alexa Ray Joel, testified that Cook could be cruel to her, criticizing her for chewing her food too loudly or for the way she played the piano. And she said he once forced her naked out of the shower and made her clean up a water leak in the kitchen and shoved her head into a bucket.
By the end of the day, both parties were worn down and beaten. Cook, in tears, said, "These are not fond memories I keep close to my heart."
As she left the courthouse, Brinkley declined to comment to reporters, explaining, "It's been a really long day. I heard a lot of things I didn't know."
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