Metro

DA set to reveal e-mail ‘motive’ in designer Sylvie Cachay’s Soho House death

DUMPED: Nicholas Brooks, accused of murdering girlfriend Sylvie Cachay, apparently got a scathing e-mail from the beautiful swimsuit designer, who had also written a letter to a friend about splitting from him.

DUMPED: Nicholas Brooks, accused of murdering girlfriend Sylvie Cachay, apparently got a scathing e-mail from the beautiful swimsuit designer, who had also written a letter to a friend about splitting from him. (Steven Hirsch)

FATEFUL NIGHT: Sylvie Cachay, a swimsuit designer, was found dead in an overflowing bathtub at the tony Soho House after spending a night there with her boyfriend in 2010.

FATEFUL NIGHT: Sylvie Cachay, a swimsuit designer, was found dead in an overflowing bathtub at the tony Soho House after spending a night there with her boyfriend in 2010. (PatrickMcMullan)

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He stole her money. He smoked pot and drank. He cheated yet was violently jealous. And he had threatened to kill her before.

Manhattan prosecutors are amassing explosive new evidence against accused playboy strangler Nicholas Brooks as they prepare to try him for the bathtub drowning of swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay.

Chief among the evidence is an e-mail sent by the 33-year-old brunette beauty only 18 hours before her body was found semi-nude and submerged in an overflowing bathtub at the trendy Soho House hotel, where she and the then-24-year-old Brooks had spent her final night.

Dated Dec. 8, 2010 — and bearing the subject line “F–k you” — the note reads: “For the past six months I have supported you financially and emotionally. The fact that u cheated on me makes me sick and you will f–king pay. I am speaking with the credit card company and the police and I am going to tell them that I never allowed you to use my card. I don’t care. Have fun in jail.”

The e-mail alone shows Brooks had incentive to kill Cachay, prosecutors say in a filing detailing evidence they hope to show at trial.

“His meal ticket for expensive dinners, home delivery of marijuana and $300-$400 weekly allowance was about to be cut off,” prosecutors write of Brooks.

His father, Joseph, composer of the Oscar-winning ’70s ballad “You Light Up My Life,” had also cut his son off financially.

But there is far more, prosecutors say in urging a Manhattan Supreme Court judge to let them paint Brooks, now 26, as a money-grubbing, layabout stoner with a deadly temper.

“Are you trying to f–k my girlfriend in the bathroom?” Brooks is quoted as telling one of Cachay’s male acquaintances at the Soho House bar — four months before Cachay would die in a room upstairs.

“You don’t know who I am,” he allegedly raged at the unnamed pal. “I will slit your throat.”

Additional motive evidence includes testimony by Cachay’s gal pals showing that Cachay had been trying to end the relationship — and kick Brooks out of her West 10th Street apartment — for many weeks and that Brooks had pitched death-threatening, bottle-smashing tantrums in response.

Cachay had designed for Victoria’s Secret, Tommy Hilfiger, Marc Jacobs and her own swim line, Syla. Brooks was broke and unemployed.

Around Thanksgiving 2010, about a month before her death, Cachay e-mailed one girlfriend:

“I love nick, but he wasn’t good for me. . . he holds me back. I’m always sad with him. He’s 24 for f sake . . . he wants porn sex! He wants to b drunk or stoned all the time . . . he doesn’t have any goals and stops me from mine.”

The pair fought viciously the night before her death, Cachay told another girlfriend, noting Brooks “lost it.”

“What a night,” Cachay wrote.

“Honestly one of the worst nights of my life. Almost done,” she texted another girlfriend.

An ex-girlfriend of Brooks from the University of Colorado in Boulder is set to tell jurors that when they fought, he would knock things over, break her cellphones and punch out windows.

“You belong in the ground like [your father]!” Brooks had allegedly railed at her.

But while Brooks fought to keep Cachay, he was sexting his ex, and asking her to buy him a plane ticket to visit her in California.

“I’ll b your man whore love,” prosecutors say the freeloading philanderer texted, four days before Cachay’s death.

Brooks had run up her credit cards, too, the ex is set to testify.

Prosecutors are not yet disclosing Brooks’ purported prior death threat against Cachay, though they do warn that five of Cachay’s girlfriends are set to testify.

Then there’s the proposed testimony about Brooks’ enjoyment of hookers and weed.

Pals of Cachay and Brooks are set to testify that the cad enjoyed “happy ending” massages and boasted that his wealthy father had paid for escorts for him starting when he was just 14 years old.

The elder Brooks killed himself with a mail-order helium-tank suicide kit in 2011 at his Upper East Side apartment. He was under indictment for drugging and sexually assaulting 13 starlets during “auditions” for nonexistent films.

Cachay felt “revulsion” over Nicholas Brooks’ escort use and his pot smoking, prosecutors say.

Weeks before her death, Cachay broke up with Brooks over his pot use, leading him to write a groveling letter, found among her effects.

“I love smoking weed. However quitting is not even a second thought in my mind. I would stop in a heartbeat. Did I think I would stop at 24? No,” it reads.

In jail pending trial, Brooks has been thrown in solitary for testing positive for pot, prosecutors say. Only 90 minutes before she died, Cachay had told a Soho House concierge, “He is such a stoner.”

Brooks is back in court today with his lawyers presenting forensic evidence to argue Cachay’s death was due to an accidental prescription-pill overdose.

Defense lawyer Jeffrey Hoffman said he will file his own motion Thursday asking the DA’s evidence be kept from jurors.

“We are going to argue strenuously for the exclusion of this material,” he said. “It’s a recognition on their [prosecutors’] part that it’s a totally circumstantial case.”