Brigitte Nielsen Admits She's 'Been With a Lot of Strange Men' But Is Finally Happy in Love
Brigitte Nielsen, 55, says happiness these days is quiet nights at home cooking with her husband, Italian model Mattia Dessi, 39, and watching Netflix with their five-week old baby girl Frida and their two rescue dogs, Joker and Tootsie.
“I have that real old-fashioned feel to my family that I always wanted, the kind my mom and dad had,” she says.
Nielsen, who gave birth to Frida on June 22 after more than 10 years of undergoing in vitro fertilization treatment, says finding the right man took many years and several unhappy relationships.
The Danish model famously married Sylvester Stallone in 1985, but their union exploded two years later amid plenty of tabloid headlines. She tried her hand at marriage two more times (with Sebastian Copeland in 1990 and Raoul Meyer in 1993) and had a 2005 reality show, Strange Love, with rapper Flavor Flav. She was also briefly engaged to football star Mark Gastineau and the two had one son together.
At age 40, while going through a messy divorce from Meyer, Nielsen says she wasn’t looking for love when she met Dessi, who was 15 years younger.
“Mattia walked in, and I literally fell off my chair,” she recalls of the instant attraction. Their relationship took off at lightning speed, and soon they were planning for the future.
She credits Dessi for helping her face her alcohol addiction. Today she is sober and says, “I’m literally a different person, and that has a lot to do with my husband, because my husband doesn’t smoke, doesn’t drink. When I met him I was like rock and roll, and he said, ‘I adore you, but I cannot live with that,’ ” she says. “I’ve had some strange men in my life. But I finally found the real deal.”
Nielsen, who made headlines when she revealed on Instagram that — at age 54 — she was pregnant with her fifth child, already has four other children, all boys: Raoul Meyer Jr., 23, Douglas Meyer, 25, Killian Nielsen, 28, and Julian Winding, 34.
She adds that seeing Dessi with their baby girl has brought them even closer together and says when it comes to fatherhood, “he’s a natural.”
For more from on Nielsen’s baby joy, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands now.
