Paulina Porizkova Recalls Finding Ex Ric Ocasek Dead

Paulina Porizkova is sharing her memory of the devastating moment she found her ex-husband Ric Ocasek dead. The supermodel opened up to Jada Pinkett Smith, her daughter, Willow, and her mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris, on Wednesday’s episode of Red Table Talk, recalling the moment on Sept. 15, 2019, that she found The Cars frontman dead of natural causes at their New York City home. Ocasek was 75.

“He had surgery because they’d found stage 0 lung cancer,” she remembered. “And he was recovering really well. Two weeks [later], he was walking around, he was starting to feel much better, he was sleeping better. And this night, he said, you know what, I’m feeling kinda tired.” The next morning, Porizkova, 57, thought the musician was sleeping late but noted that it wasn’t unusual due to his “rockstar hours.”

“By 11, I was like, he’s sleeping in a little bit too long, so I’m going to make him a cup of coffee and I’m going to bring it up to him,” she continued. But when she got to his bedroom, she quickly realized Ocasek was not asleep after all. “I brought him a cup of coffee and he just looked like he was sleeping,” Porizkova remembered. “I set the coffee down next to him and that’s when I saw his face. I saw his eyes. And they didn’t look like eyes anymore.”

The year before Ocasek’s death, he and Porizkova announced they had split after 28 years of marriage. The former couple, who share sons Jonathan and Oliver, had been separated for years prior to his death, but were not legally divorced and still lived together. Now getting back into the dating world at 57, Porizkova admits the whole experience “sucks,” in part because there aren’t many people out there who haven’t already had sex with her friends. 

“It turns out that on the dating apps, men my age that are willing to sleep with women our age, have slept with all my girlfriends already,” Porizkova admitted to the hosts, prompting laughter. “There’s like these five guys we keep passing around and they’re like ‘So did you sleep with him yet? Yeah don’t bother. Okay, cool thanks.’” Porizkova’s episode of Red Table Talk is available to stream on Facebook Watch.