Christie Brinkley is weighing in on Billy Joel’s “Honesty.”
The supermodel, 71, recalled in her new memoir, “Uptown Girls,” how rumors swirled that the singer, 75, was having an affair with another woman towards the end of their marriage — which he allegedly still denies.
“To this day, Billy continues to deny ever having had affairs, and I’ve always believed him,” Brinkley wrote, per People.
“But on that New Year’s Day in 1994, when he did finally straggle home, I asked him to leave,” she added.
Brinkley and Joel tied the knot in 1985 and had a daughter together, Alexa Ray Joel, 39.
“We laughed like you couldn’t believe. And seeing him in concert, I felt like the luckiest girl in the whole arena,” she recalled of her good times with Joel. “I liked to be right in the front row by the piano so he could glance at me and I could look up and see everything.”
But the pair’s marriage ended in 1994 after Joel’s heavy drinking became too much for Brinkley too bear.
Brinkley wrote that their relationship “wasn’t functioning in the way you want it to anymore and it was painful.”
The “Parks and Recreation” alum also recalled the time Joel drunkenly ate spaghetti from a pan on the stove and then kicked his family out of the house, claiming they ate his pasta.
“I hesitated to put that scene in the book,” Brinkley told the Los Angeles Times in an interview published Tuesday. “But at the same time, it demonstrates what I was up against.”
“I loved him and I wanted to make it work,” she continued about her marriage to Joel. “Drinking is a disease. And I knew that there had to be some way to help him, and not always get to that point where this person who you love is suddenly a stranger to you.”
Brinkley added: “I was 100% dedicated to Billy, but I never told anyone about our issues, not even my friends. It was very difficult in that way, but we had a child together and I was trying to protect the family.”
In her memoir, Brinkley revealed that Joel would disappear for days while he was boozing during their marriage. He even left their daughter’s fifth birthday party and went missing for two days.
“The drinking was bigger than the both of us,” she wrote. “Booze was the other woman and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with her rather than me.”
Joel struggled with alcoholism for many years. He went to rehab for the first time in 1992 and got sober, but returned to rehab in 2005 after he relapsed.
In 2023, Joel told the Los Angeles Times that he stopped drinking “a couple of years ago.”
Brinkley confirmed that Joel supported her decision to write about their marriage in her book.
“Billy said, ‘Go ahead and tell your story… the good, the bad, whatever you need to say,’” she told Page Six.
