Paulina Porizkova, 55, has revealed that she felt “stupid” for not signing any sort of prenup when she married Ric Ocasek, the late frontman for The Cars. The gorgeous model and the rocker were married for twenty-eight years before they announced their separation in 2018. But, they hadn’t finalized the divorced and were still living together when he passed away in 2019 at age 75. Paulina found out the day after he died that Ric left her nothing in his will and now she’s warning other women not to make “the same mistake.”
During a recent conversation with UBS, as part of a paid partnership she is doing with the bank, Paulina got very candid about her financial regrets following the death of her estranged husband. Speaking to Paula Polito, vice chairwoman of UBS Global Wealth Management, Paulina explained why it was a “bad idea” not to sign a prenup.
“Now if I had a daughter, any of my goddaughters or granddaughters or any of the young women I know…if there’s one good thing I could do for them is to let them hear my story of how romance eclipsed any financial thinking and what a bad idea that is,” she said.
Paulina explained that she and Ric didn’t sign a prenup because he felt it was a “bad omen” and “not romantic” and instead they merged their finances. The model explained that even though they split in 2018 she still had access to money. But, after his death in 2019, that all changed. Suddenly she had none — because Ric had cut her out of his will. “I couldn’t go to dinner,” she said.
“I got two mortgaged houses and the pension, but no way to pay for anything,” she revealed. “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, who was just 19-years-old when she met Ric, who was 21-years her senior, said she avoided bringing up the topic of money in the early days of her marriage. “It put our relationship into a sort of a calculated romance rather than just love and passion,” she shared. Instead, she trusted her finances to a money manager and her husband because, “I was stupid,” she admitted. “It was incredibly naïve of me.”
Now, she’s opening up about the “painful process” in an effort to help others. “What happened to me, it seemed like it was so easily preventable. 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.”
Less than a month before his death, Ric changed his will to exclude Paulina from getting anything. In paperwork obtained by Page Six in Nov. 2019, he wrote, “I have made no provision for my wife Paulina Porizkova (‘Paulina’) as we are in the process of divorcing. Even if I should die before our divorce is final…Paulina is not entitled to any elective share…because she has abandoned me,” he added.
Paulina didn’t respond with bitterness and instead took to Instagram to share a photo from happier times with her husband and their two sons Jonathan, 27, and Oliver, 22. She wrote in the caption, “I’ve known about the will since the day after Ric passed. All you have heard from me since – is in spite of that. #loveneverdies.”