Paulina Porizkova is engaged! Model, 60, accepts proposal from boyfriend Jeff Greenstein, 61, after claiming late husband Ric Ocasek was 'obsessed with her and controlled her life'

Daily Mail​

6 days ago

Paulina Porizkova has revealed she has got engaged to her boyfriend Jeff Greenstein after over two years of dating.
The model, 60, took to Instagram on Wednesday and shared a heartwarming clip of herself and the Will & Grace writer, 61, after he proposed.
The couple could be seen in a car with Paulina grabbing Jeff's hand and holding it up to her face, with her new engagement ring visible.
Paulina's engagement comes after the death of her husband Ric Ocasek in 2019, who she claimed was 'obsessed' with her and 'controlled' her life.
Paulina and Jeff, who met on celebrity dating app Raya, both beamed at the camera with the former America's Next Top Model judge writing in the caption: 'He asked'.
Paulina was inundated with well wishes from her followers including Real Housewives of Beverly Hills star Kyle Richards who wrote: 'Congratulations!! ❤️❤️'
Others wrote: 'His smile says it all ❤️'... 'Oh FANTASTIC! Well done folks! So much love to you both'... 'Congrats again. So great that you found each other and are such a perfect match!'
Jeff is a TV writer, producer and director. He previously served as showrunner on Will & Grace and the 1990s sitcom Dream On.
Back in November, Paulina shared a gushing tribute to Jeff, saying she appreciates how long it took for her to find the love she'd been searching for her whole life.
'It took me nearly sixty years to find him. It took taking stock of who I am and what my priorities are,' she wrote.
It took looking inward and understanding my patterns and bad habits, working on changing them. It took understanding my worth. And then - it took rearranging my picker.'
But it wasn't only the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue model who had work to do, so did her beau.
She continued: 'He also had some heavy lifting to do before qualifying as my dream partner. And then we met at exactly the right time.'
The supermodel went on to explain that despite meeting so late in life, she believes the work they did on themselves before meeting is what drew them together.
Back in November, Paulina shared a gushing tribute to Jeff, saying she appreciates how long it took for her to find the love she'd been searching for her whole life
'I believe the rest of our learning is as a team, as a couple, as two people who navigated their way ever so slowly across the world - to eventually find one another.'
Paulina debuted her relationship in May 2023, three months into their courtship and about two years after she and writer Aaron Sorkin, 63, ended their relationship.
The beauty was also formerly married to the late Cars lead singer Ric Ocasek from 1989 to 2019. They shared sons Jonathan, 31, and Oliver, 27.
Ric was found dead by Paulina on September 15, 2019, with the Chief Medical Examiner office reporting that he died of natural causes.
Paulina previously opened up about Ric's 'obsession' with her, saying he controlled her life during their marriage by telling her what to wear and do.
Speaking on The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet podcast, recalling how she fell in love with The Cars frontman at the height of his fame.
'I construed his interest as love, but for him, I think it was more of an obsession,' she told De Cadenet. 'He was obsessed with me, and because he was obsessed with me, it felt like the ultimate love.
'Like he didn't want me to do anything. He didn't want me to go anywhere. He wanted me to be within his circle at all times. I was his soul emotional provider for everything, and I confused that with love.
'I thought that that's what love was,' she explained, 'to be sort of this treasured object that you won't let out of your sight.'
Paulina compared Ocasek to the Greek mythological character Pygmalion, a sculptor who fell in love with a statue he had carved.
'He took me under his wing, he told me what to wear, he told me what to do,' she recalled. 'I conformed to his wishes because not doing so would risk losing his love and his love was more important to me than any career or any friends or anything I wanted to read or do.
'Of course, he was the most important man in my life, so I did everything as he desired for many, many years. And when I no longer did, that's when things started going not so well.'
Paulina previously opened up about Ric's 'obsession' with her, saying he controlled her life during their marriage by telling her what to wear and do (pictured in 2018)
Paulina pointed out that she was bound to grow up and try to find her own way considering she was only 19 when they met, but it was a 'turn off' for her husband.
'I didn't realize for a very long time that when you are a treasured possession, opposed to as a person who is loved, you don't get change, you don't get to grow, you don't get to get older,' she said. 'You are very limited in your usefulness. You have to be the person that they're obsessed with.'
The model, who was born in Czechoslovakia, explained that the controlling aspects of her relationship didn't match her upbringing in Sweden, where there was no question that women were equal to men.
'It was a collective thing that just stuck with me forever, and I still feel that way, which, of course, is remarkable then that me, self-proclaimed feminist, goes and marries a guy who tells her how to dress,' she said.
When asked how she reconciled her decision to stay in that type of marriage, she admitted it 'was not that hard to make peace with' because it was what she wanted at the time.
'I feel like I wanted that so desperately. I wanted that kind of attention. I wanted that kind of love. I wanted everything that he gave me, and he gave me a lot for many, many years,' she explained.
'There was a part of my life where, OK, so I didn't get to do the movies I wanted to do and I didn't get to have the career I wanted to have, but I had what I had what I thought was the most important thing in the world, which was love.'
Porizkova noted that Ocasek was also a good father to their sons, Jonathan, 28, and Oliver, 23, in a way that he wasn't with his other children from his previous two marriages.
'By the time we had children, he had already had four, and he didn't, perhaps, do the world's best job parenting those four,' she said. 'And I think when we had our children he felt like they were an extension of him and an extension of me, and therefore those were the kids he was going to get it right on. And he did.'
Porizkova stressed that she 'put everything' into her marriage and wouldn't have given up on it if he would have communicated with her more.
'I was willing to stay with my husband forever, even with things not being great and with him wanting to sleep in separate bedrooms and with him not paying much attention to me,' she insisted.
'I just needed him to talk to me. I just needed him to communicate and go, "You know, I still love you." I would ask him, "Is it health related? Why don't you want me anymore?"'
The Sports Illustrated alum said Ocasek would respond by telling her she was 'too miserable,' asking: 'Why can't you just be happy.'
'That's not communicating. That's not talking. That's not understanding each other,' she noted. 'He just wanted me to smile and kind of leave him to his own devices.'
Porizkova said she never stopped loving Ocasek and 'couldn't conceive of a life without him,' even when they quietly separated in 2017 after nearly 30 years of marriage.
'I kept saying, "Look, you know, I want to be close to you. I want to be able to help you out when you need help. Let's get apartments next to each other so that the kids don't have to choose. Let's still do family vacations, family Christmas, family Easter. Let's just keep sharing everything,"' she recalled.
Porizkova explained that she only separated from Ocasek because she couldn't 'deal with feeling so lonely and undesirable as a woman,' saying it was making her 'too sad.'
'I thought he was on board. I actually thought he was on board. That's where I am a little naïve because I thought that he wanted the same thing.'
They were separated and going through a divorce when she found him dead in their $10 million Manhattan townhouse in September 2019 at age 75.
The next day, she learned he had cut her out of his will just weeks before, claiming she had 'abandoned' him. He left her without any money to live off of, including her own earnings.
Paulina learned Ocasek had cut her out of his will. She settled with his estate last month and was granted one-third of his assets
The rocker's oldest sons from his first marriage to Constance Campbell, Chris and Adam Otcask, were also left out of his will.
'I thought he was a really good man, complicated, but a good man. I thought more than anything that he loved me too,' she told De Cadenet. 'Despite the fact that he didn't necessarily want to be a husband anymore, I still thought he loved me the way I loved him. And I think that's where I might have been wrong.'
Porizkova pointed out that they were going through a divorce at the time, and while she didn't expect him to leave her everything, she thought she would have at least gotten half of his estate.
'The fact that he wanted me to get nothing, that was shocking [and] heartbreaking,' she said, adding: 'It just completely blew up my world and everything I knew.
'It's a betrayal. It's a betrayal of my trust and my love and everything I put into him for years and years and years. And I have no way of knowing what possessed him to do this.'
Ocasek changed his will three weeks before he died, and Porizkova believes his lawyers were the ones who influenced him to do so. She likes to think 'he would have fixed it if he had lived.'
Paulina revealed she had reached a settlement with her late husband's estate, saying she would be receiving what was owed to her per New York state law, which was one-third of Ocasek's assets.