SALMAN Rushdie is still obsessed with his beautiful ex-wife, Padma Lakshmi, and talks about her day and night, his ex-girlfriend tells Page Six.
Statuesque actress Pia Glenn said she fell in love with the 62-year-old novelist, who “said he loved me.” She moved into his New York home in January. But she says she became frustrated with his obsession with Lakshmi, and she was heartbroken when he abruptly dumped her by e-mail in June.
Glenn, a star in Broadway’s “Spamalot,” said: “I told him I wanted children, and he was happy with that. He asked me to move in, and we talked about the future . . . Of course I had heard about his reputation as a womanizer, but I wanted to judge him for myself.”
In her first interview following their split, Glenn told Britain’s Mail on Sunday she believed Rushdie was “cowardly, dysfunctional and immature.” She said he pursued her for more than a year after they met at a dinner party at Monty Python star Eric Idle‘s Hollywood home in September 2007.
But Glenn told us Rushdie was still hung-up over Lakshmi, his fourth wife: “He would talk about Padma day and night. He felt hurt and betrayed by her. He would talk about her so much I’d ask him to stop.
“We had a few fights, and he would get angry and it would be difficult to calm him down,” she continued. “We had a fight in London, but when I left, he said, ‘See you in 48 hours.’ When I landed, he had sent me an e-mail saying it was over. I felt like I’d been hit by a truck.
“He stole more than a year of my life, but I held out hope we could be friends. But whenever we tried to speak on the phone it became ugly — yelling and shouting.
“Its clear that he’s not interested in friendship now, which calls into question why he was interested in me in the first place. If I had thought he only wanted me for sex, I would have gotten out immediately.” Rushdie declined to comment.