The New York Post today reports that supermodel Paulina Porizkova was so cash poor after her estranged husband Ric Ocasek died, she was forced to rely on friends to buy groceries.

She revealed this during a two-part conversation with Paula Polito, vice chairwoman of UBS Global Wealth Management. 

“I got two mortgaged houses and the pension, but no way to pay for anything,” she explained. “So obviously things had to be sold, but until they got sold, I had nothing to live on. I literally went through a year of asking my friends to buy us groceries. It was not a good position to be in.”

Paulina found herself in the precarious financial situation, after Ocasek died suddenly in September 2019 and Porizkova was stunned to learn that he had cut her out of his will, claiming she had “abandoned” him (despite the fact that they still lived in the same home together).

Then there’s the teeny tiny little fact that she never signed a prenup with the Cars frontman.

via Page Six:

Ocasek had told her that it would be a “bad omen” if they signed a prenup, she said. 

“I had this sort of idea that he knew everything about the world and his word was the word of God and I should just sort of listen to what he said because, obviously, he had the wisdom of living that I hadn’t had,” she said. “And he reminded of that every of often, that he knows better because he’s older.”

Despite Porizkova pulling in about $6 million a year at the height of her fame as a model, she was never considered the breadwinner.

“From the very beginning, it always seemed like it didn’t matter how much money I made. It was ‘hobby’ money and his money was the real money,” she recalled. 

She seems to be doing better now, thankfully.

Last September, she sold the Gramercy Park townhouse where she and Okasek had lived for more than 30 years for $10 million. She also still has her home in upstate New York, and recently moved into a Manhattan rental apartment.

Throughout it all, she says, she’s not bitter.

“What happened to me, it seemed like it was so easily preventable,” she said. “And it was based on not misfortune, it was based on my own stupidity. It wasn’t that I had an evil husband. It wasn’t that things conspired against me, this is literally, I have nobody to blame for this except for myself.”

(Photos: MediaPunch)