Christie Brinkley in court looks real broken up to me.
NY- Christie Brinkley arrives at court Thursday on the day she's scheduled to testify.
Christie Brinkley looked hubby Peter Cook straight in the eye Thurssday as she gave wrenching testimony about the moment she learned he cheated on her with a teenager.
"I thought I had the picket fence," she said, her voice still shaking with disbelief two years later. "I thought we were happy."
Dressed in blue from head-to-toe, the 54-year-old cover girl was animated and emotional as she took the witness stand in a Central Islip, L.I., courthouse.
The packed courtroom was captivated as she told the sordid story in a clear voice, reliving her humiliation in painful detail.
"I was in complete shock. I couldn't believe it," she said, pausing to ask a court officer for tissues to wipe her azure-blue eyes.
She began with an account of a speech she gave at a high-school commencement ceremony in Southampton on June 25, 2006.
Applause was filling the auditorium when she was suddenly approached by Brian Platt, a Southampton cop and Bianchi's stepfather.
"That husband of yours just won't knock it off," Platt told her. "He's having an affair with my teenage daughter. That bastard won't knock it off....so I had to come to you."
Brinkley said she didn't know Platt and was confused - until she she looked over at her husband.
"Peter's face was so tense. His lips were so tight. His lips were saying, 'No, no,'" she recalled.
"I thought, 'Oh my God, he did that!'"
Until this point, Brinkley had been looking at her lawyer, but when she told the court about her terrible realization, she turned her head to face Cook.
The warring spouses - who are fighting over custody of 13-year-old Jack and 10-year-old Sailor Lee - locked eyes.
Then Brinkley continued her story.
"I thought my knees were going to buckle," she told the court.
"How could you?" she asked Cook in the auditorium.
"You're not going to believe that man over me, are you?" Cook replied. "He's a drunk. He's vicious. He murdered a man."
The couple drove back to their home, and then Brinkley fled.
"I just started driving away from my perfect life," she said.
She ended up at the home of her best friend, Jill Rappaport, the TV personality who introduced the couple.
Rappaport testified that Brinkley was in a horrible state, her knees bloody from kneeling on the ground.
"I thought she had died," the friend recalled. "She was lying flat on the ground huddled over with her hands on her knees...She was sobbing...catatonic."
The cover girl pleaded with her, "Can you believe this? Can you believe this happened to me? Please tell me it's a nightmare."
They visited a police station to see if they could find Platt, but they didn't even know his name and soon gave up.
When Brinkley returned to her home with Rappaport, Cook was gone. He had emptied their safe, leaving behind only some jewelry and passports.
The next few days were a blur. Brinkley said she couldn't sleep or eat and was full of questions.
"I wanted to try to find out what really happened," she explained.
She got Cook to give her his computer passwords and checked his email account, where she found messages to and from Bianchi, who was using the cyber-handle Blahmuffin.
She recalled an email in which Cook wrote to the teen that she had put him under a spell, and another in which she asked for "three Gs" and money for dental bills.
As she hunted around, she found a list of Web sites he had visited, including Adultfriendfinder.com.
"I found his naked torso with his profile underneath saying, 'Hey, I'm a really good-looking guy looking for equally good-looking girls. I like them young and fit,'" she testified.
Her voice quavered.
"To come across that was beyond devastating. It was beyond humiliating. It was beyond your wildest nightmare that you could ever imagine," she said.
"He's cheating on me. He's cheating on me with a teenager. He's trawling the Internet."
She said she could tell from his messages that Cook wasn't just browsing.
"It was not a voyeur site. It was a meeting site," she said.
