Star finally opens up about nasty divorce from Peter Cook

Mar 29, 2012 06:46 GMT  ·  By
Christie Brinkley opens up about nasty divorce from Peter Cook, gets all choked up
   Christie Brinkley opens up about nasty divorce from Peter Cook, gets all choked up

For the past 4 years or so, Christie Brinkley and architect Peter Cook, once happily married, have been engaged in one of the nastiest, most public divorce battles in showbiz. On The Today Show the other day, she's finally broken her silence on the whole affair.

Brinkley was initially invited on the show to promote her upcoming stint on Broadway, but the conversation slowly turned towards the dispute with Cook, which, as of late, concerns unpaid child support and custody of the children.

Video of the interview is below, embedded at the end of the article.

At first, Matt Lauer tries to get Christie to talk about whether she or her ex have ever considered how this very public and very bitter dispute might be affecting their two children.

She doesn't deny it's happening, that the kids are caught in the middle, but at the same time, stresses that she wasn't the one who started it.

“Since the day that he realized that I was not coming back, there has been a real character assassination going on. I asked for and got a confidentiality agreement with the original divorce. I alone have maintained the confidentiality agreement,” Christie says.

While Cook has been giving interviews left and right, she's kept her part of the bargain, refusing invitations from huge talk shows, like Oprah.

“I have turned the other cheek. There’s not one quote from me, anywhere. This is the first time I’ve ever been on a show (to talk about the split),” she says.

Her ex, on the other hand, has been doing the media rounds all these years, airing the dirty laundry of their 12-year marriage.

“I’m really here because next week I’m going to start promoting Chicago. This became such a big deal. I’ve endured about two weeks of lies and stories, when actually four months prior… I quietly filed to protect my family from that. Part of my suit, I was actually clear to the judge 'please determine this on paper',” Christie says.

She claims she's exhausted of all this, and quite sick and tired of always hearing her husband bringing her down in the press. She just wants peace, she says, choking on her tears.

“I just want peace for my family. I just want peace. And every time I have any joy or any kind of success in anything, he has to try to destroy it,” Brinkley says.

In a statement to TMZ, Peter Cook puts his ex-wife on blast, claiming the televised meltdown was yet another instance of trying to keep herself relevant, at the expense of their children, who are the ones who will suffer the most from this.