Paulina Porizkova, 61, marries boyfriend Jeff Greenstein, 62, in casual ceremony in Italy… seven years after death of ex-husband Ric Ocasek
Paulina Porizkova has married her boyfriend of three years Jeff Greenstein in Italy.
The supermodel, 61, announced the happy news on Instagram on Friday, sharing photos that showed her and her new husband, 62, smooching on a balcony in Florence.
The images, published by the Czech edition of Elle, reveal that the beauty dressed casually for the legal ceremony in a pale pink sun dress and sandals.
Greenstein, an acclaimed TV writer who was the showrunner for Will Grace and produced dozens of episodes of Friends, wore jeans and Converse sneakers.
‘We have so much to share with you all, but at the moment we’re also trying to see all of our loved ones who traveled some distances to be here, and just enjoy our favorite place with our favorite people,’ Porizkova wrote in the caption of another video, in which she detailed the trials and tribulations of obtaining a marriage license in Italy.
Porizkova and Greenstein met in 2023 and got engaged last year. The silver-haired stunner was previously married to The Cars rocker Ric Ocasek, from whom she split in 2017 following 28 years of marriage.
Paulina Porizkova has married her boyfriend of three years Jeff Greenstein in in Italy
Greenstein, who is an acclaimed TV writer who was the showrunner for Will Grace and penned and produced dozens of episodes of Friends
Porizkova and her new husband posted a new instagram video in which they detailed the trials and tribulations of obtaining a marriage license in Italy
The couple, who share two children together, were still in the thick of their divorce proceedings when Ocasek died two years later, aged 75, while recuperating from cancer surgery.
Porizkova, who was nursing him through his recovery and was the one who found his body, then discovered he had brutally cut her and their two sons out of his will, depriving her of even her own earnings and triggering a bitter legal battle.
She fought a legal battle at the end of which she finally acquired a third of the estate, which she described as ‘what is mine under New York state law’ to Vanity Fair.
As a result of her financial woes, she was forced to sell the $10 million Gramercy Park townhouse in which she had found Ocasek’s body.
Last month, they revealed that the impetus for them to make their union legally binding was so that they could make medical decisions for each other.
‘The only reason I’m marrying you is so that I have the right to unplug you,’ Porizkova told Greenstein on their couple’s podcast Twenty Good Summers.
She explained that she had previously sworn off marriage, disillusioned about the ‘unequal’ institution after her experience with Ocasek.
Porizkova said she would be ‘absolutely happy to be engaged for the next 20 years,’ but that she was taking the next step to ensure she and Greenstein had the rights that spouses enjoy with respect to each other’s end-of-life care.
The Czech supermodel regarded her reasoning as ‘romantic,’ reminiscent of Cathy and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights in its intersection of love and death.
Greenstein agreed, noting that by legally marrying ‘you are putting your ultimate faith, your ultimate fate, in the hands of your partner.’
In an Instagram video promoting the episode, Porizkova teased that she and Greenstein would explain why two ‘seasoned people,’ having ‘failed miserably at this before,’ would be ‘stupid’ enough to embark on another stab at matrimony.
Days before the wedding, they were evicted from their New York apartment because Porizkova’s landlord refused her request for a lease extension.
Porizkova became internationally famous as a child when her refugee parents waged a highly-publicized bid to extract her from their native Czechoslovakia, which was then under Soviet control in the shadow of the Cold War.
Porizkova is pictured with Ocasek at his 2018 induction ceremony into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame, the year after they separated and the year before he died
She found love again in 2023 with screenwriter Jeff Greenstein, an alumnus of the Friends staff who also worked as the showrunner on Will Grace
Her mother and father left the three-year-old Porizkova at home with her grandmother when they fled to Sweden after the Prague Spring of 1968 was crushed.
The couple’s attempts to get their daughter out from behind the Iron Curtain in the teeth of opposition from the communist authorities became a media sensation.
At one point Porizkova’s pregnant mother snuck back into Czechoslovakia and tried to kidnap her, only to get caught and wind up under house arrest for three years.
After the family were finally allowed to reunite in Sweden – thanks in part to an intervention by its prime minister – Porizkova was scouted as a model at the age of 13 and covered the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue at 18 in 1983.
When she was 19, she struck up her romance with Ric Ocasek, whom she married at the age of 22 and with whom she welcomed her sons Jonathan, 32, and Oliver, 27.
Over the course of their unhappy union, she felt ‘invisible’ and ‘boring’ because her attempts to talk to Ocasek were met with yawns, she recalled after his death.
She also felt her sexual appeal to him was dwindling as she advanced into the middle of her life, she explained in a video for StyleLikeU’s series Defying Ageism.
‘We had been together for my entire life, since I was 19, and suddenly he seemed not to find me attractive anymore,’ shared Porizkova.
‘I started feeling like I was a coffee table, something you put s*** on and bump into in the middle of the night but pay no more attention to other than that.’
Porizkova became one of the top models of the 1980s after her refugee parents waged a successful bid to extract her from what was then communist Czechoslovakia
When she requested a separation, she hoped she would give her husband a wake-up call and provoke him to ‘fight’ for the marriage, only for him to ‘coldly’ reply: ‘Well, it seems like your mind’s made up, so whatever.’
She fled the room in tears and the separation commenced, but she remained in love with him through their divorce proceedings and nursed him after his cancer surgery.
As she brought him his morning coffee in the midst of what was meant to be his recuperation, she discovered him dead in their Manhattan townhouse.
Porizkova was then confronted with the revelation that Ocasek – who had refused her suggestion of a prenuptial agreement decades earlier – had cut her and their sons out of his will and left her without even the money she herself had made as a model.
She fought a legal battle at the end of which she finally acquired a third of the estate, which she described as ‘what is mine under New York state law’ to Vanity Fair.
As a result of her financial woes, she was forced to sell the $10 million Gramercy Park townhouse in which she had found Ocasek’s body.