The model also opened up about getting cut out of Ocasek's will before he died.
Paulina Porizkova is setting the record straight about the biggest misconception when it came to her longtime marriage to the late Cars frontman Ric Ocasek, and the rush of emotions she felt on that fateful day she found him dead.
The 57-year-old supermodel opened up about that and more during an in-depth conversation with ET's Rachel Smith. The emotional interview touched on a myriad of subjects as Porizkova's book, No Filter: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful, hit stores on Tuesday.
"The biggest misconception about my marriage to my husband was that it was a toxic marriage because it ended so poorly," she tells ET. "We had an amazing 25 years. Ric gave me the love that I so needed. I just wanted, my whole life, I wanted to be loved by one person who would love me best. I didn't have it from my parents, and I didn't have it in my childhood. And I was desperate for it, and Ric gave that to me. And I was very happy to pay whatever price was then required to have him love me this way."
Porizkova tied the knot with Ocasek in 1989 but they separated in 2017 prior to his death in 2019. Porizkova and Ocasek shared two kids together, sons Jonathan, 29, and Oliver, 24.
In retrospect, Porizkova says Ocasek's obsessive ways are not characteristics she would find endearing now. Nevertheless, she can't help but look back on their early days together as something she yearned for.
"I was always with him," she said. "And I would never choose that today. I'm grown up, but when I was 19 and I met this man who wanted me all to himself and adored me, it was the only time in my life I felt safe, and that I will be forever grateful for."
The day she found him dead on his bed is a memory forever ingrained in her memory, as Porizkova gets emotional recalling that day.
"Nothing in life really prepares you for something like that, you know?" she says. "He was doing really well, too, so it was completely and utterly unexpected."
That devastating memory, she says, left a traumatic imprint, a form of PTSD.
"Finding the man that you spent your whole life with dead, that's not something that will ever leave my brain," she said. "That image of him looking like he was still sleeping is going to, I can't say haunt me because it doesn't haunt me. He looked so peaceful, and he just looked like he had gone to sleep. So, there is a measure of comfort in knowing that he just left; that there was no pain. There was no pain for him. Of course, left quite a lot of pain for us."
Porizkova is referring to Ocasek cutting her out of his will, after she found an envelope with a note that read, "I make no provisions for my wife because she abandoned me." Then, one month after his death, Porizkova told CBS Sunday Morning in a March 2020 interview that she later found out the late singer had also removed two of his sons from a previous marriage from his will.
"I will never know, and I think I'm not gonna make assumptions for him," Porizkova tells ET. "I can only deal with it in how I choose to view it. I will never have an answer to this. And also, I would -- in the past -- I would have said I know my husband so well. I can imagine why he did it, because I know him so well, but that had me rethink my entire life with him like, no, I actually didn't know him at all."
The supermodel admits that, in a twisted way, Ocasek cut her out of the will out of love.
"I know it’s a strange way to look at it this, but this is what I'm choosing now," she explains. "This is the choice that I want to live with. I loved this man more than anything for 30 some years and then our relationship crashed. I mean, it didn't crash all of a sudden, it slowly petered out, but I still loved him."
Following their separation, the ex-couple still lived under the same roof raising their children. The separation was so amicable, they remained friends and still hit up parties together as single people who mingled and flirted with others, with no hard feelings to follow.
"I would be in the corner flirting with some guy and he would be talking to some ladies over there and I thought it was a perfect end to a beautiful long marriage," she says. "So obviously when I got this will with a claim I just thought everything I had ever learned was wrong. And so, in my grief of just missing him and not having this NorthStar to point me which way to go anymore -- and financial troubles -- I had made up a story that wasn't true: maybe my husband didn't love me as much as I thought he loved me."
Porizkova likens getting cut out of the will as Ocasek's "crime of passion."
"I am choosing to see it as a crime of passion because I do know that when love seizes, when love ends, you walk away with no second thoughts," she explains. "And, clearly, that was not my husband. He had to be vindictive, and he managed that. But the fact that he was vindictive, to me, says in his own little twisted way he cared. He cared. I don't know what it was that propelled him to make this choice. I do think he listened to some bad advice, and I think he was vulnerable in those late days before his death, but I choose to see it as the love of a man who couldn't express himself properly and just had to make himself be remembered somehow, even if it's in a negative way."
And, after all these years, Porizkova is at peace with it all, largely in part because she's forgiven him.
"Yeah, I have forgiven him because he died," she says. "Who knows what would have happened if he hadn't died. Maybe he would have fixed it. Maybe there would have been a conversation. Maybe, and this is what I choose to believe, that he would have not done that. I think it was a rash decision that obviously blew up a lot of lives. But I choose to believe that had he lived this would not have been his last will and testament."
She continues, "So yeah, I forgive him, and I forgive him for the sake of my children, to whom he was a wonderful parent, wonderful father. He was very physically affectionate, my husband; very big on the affirmations, and I feel like I learned a lot from him, too."
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