Paulina Porizkova isn’t holding back. In an excerpt from her new book, No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, the 57-year-old former supermodel went deep into a grief-stricken portion of her life, sharing details of how she dragged herself down a staircase to tell her eldest son about her husband Ric Ocasek‘s 2019 death at age 75. “Your dad is dead,” she told him as he was having coffee with his girlfriend.
Paulina remembered making coffee for Ric on that September 15 in New York, and although they were working through details of a divorce, they were still living together as he recovered from surgery. “I thought it would be nice to bring him his coffee in bed,” she wrote in part, noting that The Cars frontman strangely hadn’t woken up by 11:00 AM, despite waking up early in recent days. Then, she found his lifeless body. “I touched his face,” she wrote. “It was cold. My legs went numb and collapsed under me. I sat on the floor, gasping for breath.”
Paulina expounded on the horrifying experience, eventually finding herself crawling down the stairs, where she found her son Jonathan Ocasek, then 26. “Unable to get up, I crawled down three flights of stairs on my belly and elbows,” Paulina continued in the memoir. “There were sounds issuing from me that I was only dimly aware of. All I knew was that I had to get to my sons. My older son, Jonathan, and his girlfriend were having their morning coffee at the kitchen table. The narrator in my split-screen brain was clear and firm: I could not let my son see me on the ground like this. ‘You have to stand up now,’ she said. I grabbed the railing on the last step, pushing myself into an upright position with all the strength in my arms and shoulders, holding on to the banister for dear life. Jonathan saw me, his eyes widening.” It was then that Paulina recalled she delivered the news to him. “‘Your dad is dead.'”
Paulina and Rick were also parents to son Oliver Ocasek, born in 1999. Paulina, who has been posting gorgeous bikini shots to her social media accounts this past year, reportedly also dishes on sexual harassment she endured during her teen years as a model. Additionally, Paulina shares details about the end of her marriage to Ric, whom she claims in the book she had “not been touched by” for “years,” and alleges that he cut her out of his will, claiming she “abandoned” him.
Still, she took to Instagram on March 24 to pay tribute to him on what would have been his 78th birthday. “You’ll forever be missed,” she captioned a gorgeous family pic of the duo with their sons.