Metro

Family of man on trial for girlfriend’s drowning death in the spotlight again

SASSY SIB: Amanda Brooks (left) was heard in court calling Sharon Lombardo (right) “awful bitch” after Lombardo’s testimony against her brother, Soho House murder suspect Nicholas Brooks (above). (INFphoto.com)

WHAT A FAMILY: Nicholas Brooks’ parents were composer Joseph Brooks (above), who was charged with rape before committing suicide, and Playboy cover girl Susan Paul.

WHAT A FAMILY: Nicholas Brooks’ parents were composer Joseph Brooks (above), who was charged with rape before committing suicide, and Playboy cover girl Susan Paul.

(Steven Hirsch)

SASSY SIB: Amanda Brooks (bottom right) was heard in court calling Sharon Lombardo (bottom left) “awful bitch” after Lombardo’s testimony against her brother, Soho House murder suspect Nicholas Brooks (far left). (
)

Mom stripped for Playboy. Dad killed himself with a helium tank suicide kit while indicted for raping starlets. The son is on trial for allegedly drowning his beautiful girlfriend in a hotel bathtub. And now, the daughter has grabbed a shoddy spotlight of her own.

Manhattan prosecutors said yesterday that they had to call cops in to investigate B-movie actress Amanda Brooks after she hissed, “Awful bitch!” at a woman who had testified Tuesday against her younger brother Nicholas Brooks in his Manhattan murder trial.

Nicholas Brooks is on trial for the murder of his swimsuit-designer girlfriend, Sylvie Cachay, who was found half-dressed and fully submerged in an overflowing bathtub at the trendy Soho House hotel.

“This is about as far from a role-model family as you can get,” said one trial observer, family-law attorney Anne Peyton Bryant, a friend of the Cachay family.

Nicholas, 27, and Amanda, 31, are the offspring of Joseph Brooks, the composer of the 1970s hit “You Light Up My Life,” and model Susan Paul. Mom was the cover girl for Playboy in September 1978, a year after dad won an Oscar for the song.

Amanda Brooks, an attractive actress whose IMDb page credits her as having “starred in the 2007 film D-War,” did not attend court yesterday and could not be reached for comment.

“She mouthed the words ‘awful bitch,’ ” prosecutor Jordan Arnold told the trial judge yesterday.

“The police were alerted,” Arnold said, by the witness herself, Sharon Lombardo, a 41-year-old design exec for Kate Spade.

Lombardo had told jurors on Tuesday that her longtime friend Cachay had confided that Nicholas Brooks “would get so angry that he would threaten to kill her.” Lombardo appeared to fight back emotion throughout her afternoon on the witness stand, and then burst into tears upon leaving the witness stand.

“She has since identified this individual through a photo array, and that is the defendant’s sister, whose name is Amanda Brooks,” the prosecutor told the judge, who ordered both sides to advise their audience members to behave themselves.

The flap over Amanda capped a three-witness day of testimony.

Brooks had insisted to cops Cachay was in bed when he left the hotel room; his defense is that Cachay had drawn the bath herself and then drowned in an accidental drug overdose.

But the day’s final witness, Jacqueline Easton, an administrative assistant and the sixth Cachay pal to testify, told jurors that just two weeks before her death, Cachay had mentioned to her and two other pals that “she thought baths were disgusting and gross.”

Asked by prosecutor Joel Seidemann how she remembered that, Easton answered, “Because only a couple weeks later she was found dead — in a bathtub.”

Testimony will continue tomorrow.