Christie Brinkley Reveals Real Reason For Divorce From Billy Joel – His Binge Drinking

Baila Eve ZismanApril 29, 2025, 5:22 pmNews >

Model Christie Brinkley’s new memoir, Uptown Girl, reveals new details about her life with Billy Joel behind closed doors, from when the two were married.

Brinkley and Joel met at a dive bar in St. Barts while Brinkley was grieving the death of her boyfriend. The two were married in 1985 and divorced in 1994. In her memoir, Brinkley reflects on their time together and what drove her to ask for a divorce.

Brinkley recently opened up about discovering skin cancer on her face.

“If there wasn’t that issue…I do think that we were probably really soulmates. It was an amazing time of my life,” Brinkley said, admitting that Joel’s drinking problem is what drove a wedge between them. “I had so much fun. We were such nomads just between his job and mine, we were seeing the world…it was wonderful, really wonderful.”

Despite the wonder, Brinkley remembered how Joel would mysteriously disappear for days-long benders, regularly missing important family events. She recalled the “panic I couldn’t shake” that he would get hurt while on a binge.

“When I told him how worried I’d been, he only got angry at me and started yelling,” she recalled.

Brinkley put her foot down when Joel drunkenly yelled at his bandmates for eating his pasta ahead of a rehearsal, when he had eaten the pasta himself.

She recalled, “He was acting delusional in a way I’d never seen before,” and added that she requested a divorce the very next day.

“To be clear, I never wanted to end things with Billy,” Brinkley clarified. “I read every self-help book I could find. We went to see a string of psychiatrists, psychologists and other medical doctors. The drinking was bigger than the both of us.

“Booze was the other woman, and it was beginning to seem that he preferred to be with her rather than me.”

Joel has long had public problems with addiction, going to rehab for the first time in 1992, and returning once again in 2005 following a relapse. In a 2023 interview with The Los Angeles Times, he shared that he had quit drinking a few years earlier. He is now married to his fourth wife, with whom he shares two daughters.

Brinkley said, “He’s the father of my firstborn, and we spent such great formative years together. And I’ll love him forever…things just reached a point where I knew I couldn’t live with him…I’m very, very content and happy doing my own thing.”

Uptown Girl is set to be released on April 29.