Fifty-two-year-old Christie Brinkley may look 20 years younger, but apparently her soon-to-be ex-hubby prefers his paramours to actually be about 20--no, make that 30--years younger.Just two days after a 19-year-old girl copped to having a year-long affair with Brinkley's husband of 10 years, architect Peter Cook, another young woman has told the New York Post that when she was a teenager she too had a relationship with him, one that almost made it all the way down the aisle.
This was before he got engaged to his supermodel wife, however.
Pop singer Samantha Cole told the Post Tuesday that she laughed when she heard the news that Cook, 47, had seduced teenager Diana Bianchi in 2004 after hiring her as an assistant at his architecture firm--but that she was surprised by hearing that Cook allegedly cheated on his "Uptown Girl."
"Our story is exactly the same," Cole said, referring to Bianchi, not Brinkley. "It's very odd. My mother's the one that pointed it out." (Well, if your mom can't point out your past mistakes, who can?)
"I met him when I was 18, probably just turning 18," the now 29-year-old Cole said. "We met on a boat party." At the time, "he was engaged" to someone other than Brinkley. He "offered to introduce me to some people in the music business."
But in the meantime, Cole added, like Bianchi she also took an assistant position at Cook's company.
"He hit on me after I worked there a little while," Cole said. "He asked me to dinner. And I said, 'No, I think you're too old for me.' Blew him off for a while and then he convinced me to go to dinner. He's very charming." Their relationship lasted about a year, she said.
Cole went on to say that after she broke up with Cook in 1996, he popped the question to keep her from walking out. About a month after she refused him, she said, he was engaged to Brinkley."I was pretty upset about it, pretty angry," Cole said. "I was the last person he was with before Christie?I thought that she was too old for him. I said to him, 'You've always dated younger girls.'"
The "Happy With You" singer was shocked, however, about Cook's purported extra-marital activities.
"I never thought he would do something like that, being married, with his family so important to him," Cole said. "He's very old-fashioned, very well-mannered?He definitely treats a woman like the old-fashioned way the way they should be treated." (According to some cultures, maybe?)
Her head probably reeling with rumors of infidelity, Brinkley has taken her daughter with Cook, eight-year-old Sailor Lee, and her 11-year-old son Jack (with third husband Richard Taubman) to Los Angeles to spend time with her parents, People magazine reported.
"She is totally shocked and just devastated," a friend of the CoverGirl model told People. "She has been extremely concerned about the impact of this situation on her children and felt it was very important to protect them and take them away for a little bit."
Brinkley first learned of Cook's alleged relationship with Bianchi when the young woman's stepfather, a Southampton police offer named Brian Platt, confronted the wife and mother of three at a high school graduation she spoke at, telling her that her onetime "Prince Charming" was stepping out.
"We were all tools of his little game, I guess," Bianchi told the Post
Cole, however, rejected Bianchi's claim that she "never expected" Cook would take their relationship to the next level.
"Nineteen is not that young," Cole said.
Naﶥ or not, Bianchi's camp is exploring the possibility of filing a sexual harassment lawsuit against her former boss.
"What Cook did is prey on an 18-year-old girl," Bianchi's lawyer, Joseph Tacopina, said. "It's a textbook case of why an employer is not supposed to carry on a relationship with an employee."
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