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Paulina Porizkova has shed light on why she made what she jokingly referred to as the 'stupid' decision to get married again.
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue icon previously tied the knot with The Cars frontman Ric Ocasek in 1989, becoming his third wife.
They separated in 2017, but were still in the thick of their divorce proceedings when he 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 found love again in 2023 with screenwriter Jeff Greenstein, an alumnus of the Friends staff who also worked as the showrunner on Will & Grace.
They got engaged in 2025, and now, three weeks before they make their way down the aisle, they have revealed the motivating factor for the move.
Paulina Porizkova has shed light on why she made what she jokingly referred to as the 'stupid' decision to marry screenwriter Jeff Greenstein, whom she is pictured with in January
The Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue icon previously tied the knot with The Cars frontman Ric Ocasek in 1989, becoming his third wife
'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 making medical decisions for one another.
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 their latest podcast 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.
Greenstein, who has an adult son from a previous marriage of 25 years, will be marrying Porizkova in Italy at the start of next month.
Four days before the wedding, they will be 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.
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