Humiliated, shocked, mortified, betrayed, embarrassed, violated – those were the words Philip Smith used today in an attempt to describe how it felt to see his wife mocking him about their sexless marriage on YouTube.
Or, as the 76-year-old self-made head of the Shubert Organization repeatedly called it, “TV Tube.”
Speaking out for the first time since Tricia Walsh-Smith aired their dirty laundry for millions to see, Smith said her vicious online rant “hurt.”
“I can’t fully express myself. It was so embarrassing. People know more about us . . .,” he said on the witness stand in Manhattan Supreme Court, fumbling as he searched for words.
“I’m basically a very private person. I’ve made an effort not to be exposed to the press,” he said.
“I was humiliated. I was embarrassed. I was hurt. I felt violated in every sense of the word.”
Smith was testifying in Manhattan Supreme Court, where he’s trying to convince Justice Harold Beeler to grant him a divorce from his wife of nine years on the grounds that she was “cruel and inhuman” to him.
His strongest evidence is the four video rants his wife posted about him online, where she claims they never had sex, calls him “a mean bad husband” and his daughter “evil.”
“I never knew anything about YouTube until my secretary told me my wife had put up an article on YouTube,” he testified. He said he couldn’t believe his eyes.
“I was mortified and shocked. Here was my life being spread out on TV. If 100 people saw it, that’s 100 more than I wanted to see it.”
To date, almost 3.5 million people have seen it, thanks in part to the group e-mail Walsh-Smith sent alerting people to the video. Among the recipients were Smith’s bosses and competitors, and The Post’s Richard Johnson, “who controls the dreaded Page Six,” Smith said.
He was especially offended at how Walsh-Smith talked about – and showed pictures – of his daughter Linda. “She’s the kindest, most decent person I know, besides maybe her late mother,” Smith said.
He said it’s changed his entire life, with friends and strangers seeming to take pity on him. “There’s a tone of sympathy,” he said, adding that he has a thick file of sympathy cards sent to him from around the world.
“It makes feel very bad,” he said. “People know more about you than you are entitled to know.”
He said he started living with Walsh-Smith in the mid-1990s, after his wife of 34 years passed away. He said their problems started about two years ago “when she wanted to make changes” to their pre-nuptial agreement and “I did not want to make changes.”
She started getting more and more angry and irrational, accusing him of sabotaging one of her plays. “I worked later and later in the office because I was reluctant to go home,” he said. “I didn’t much want to spend time with her, to be honest with you.”
When she left him angry voicemails where she threatened to cause a public scandal unless she got what she wanted, Smith said he was flabbergasted.
“She’s somebody I would trust with my life and in fact did … and going around discussing all over town about me,” he said, including talking about their problems with The Post’s Cindy Adams.
“That scared me. I fought long and hard to get where I was,” he said, recounting how he’d worked his way up from a ticket taker at a Shubert theater to head of the entire 21-theater chain.
He said the marriage died a “sudden death” when she went on expletive laden tirade about him and his daughters. “I loved her and still today have love for her,” he said, but he could not ever reconcile with her after all that’s happened.
“Under no conditions,” he said. “I can no longer trust her, impossible. I couldn’t close my eyes and go to sleep.”
Walsh-Smith said he told some “whopping lies” on the stand, and his testimony showed “he loves his daughters. He didn’t love me.”