Brinkley split is newest image-crushing NY divorce

"It's a freak show," celebrity divorce lawyer Raoul Felder said Friday of the latest chapter in divorce--New York-style--under the media's microscope.

The collapse of the 10-year union of the former Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and architect Peter Cook is being recounted in slow motion in a Central Islip courtroom on Long Island, not far from the Hamptons home where the couple had lived together.

The first day of a trial settling several million dollars in assets and custody of their children, ages 10 and 13, featured the 49-year-old Cook tearfully recounting a pornography obsession and his affair with an 18-year-old mistress. The mistress also testified.

A day later, Brinkley took the witness stand to recall being told of the affair by the teenager's stepfather just after she had delivered a high school commencement speech in Southampton in June 2006.

"That husband of yours won't knock it off. He's having an affair with my teenage daughter," she recalled being told by the man, a Southampton Village police officer.

Brinkley, 54, said she looked at Cook, shaking his head even though he had not yet heard the allegation, and thought: "My God, it's true. He did do that."

Newsday called it "Beauty & the Beast." The Daily News dubbed it "Lady And The Louse." In the New York Post, it was "XXX files."

For the public, it's familiar territory, the latest in a series of breakups exposing the dark side of the not-always glamorous life of the rich and famous.

In the late '90s, observers for several years witnessed the petty squabbles between Democratic fundraiser and Revlon Inc. Chairman Ron Perelman and Patricia Duff as they split after only 20 months of marriage.