A “hurt” Farrah Fawcett once caught long-time lover Ryan O’Neal in bed with a younger actress, the embarrassed “Love Story” star admitted in an LA courtroom on Monday. He was forced to recount his cheating ways during testimony in a lawsuit pressed by the University of Texas, Fawcett’s alma mater.
The school’s lawyers asked O’Neal how angry Fawcett was when she found him at his Malibu pad in the arms of Leslie Ann Stefanson, star of “The General’s Daughter,” who was 25 at the time of their tryst.
“No [Farrah wasn’t angry], she was hurt,” O’Neal told the court of the 1997 incident. “She was in shock.” The university is suing O’Neal for a $12 million Andy Warhol silkscreen image of Farrah that she had bequeathed to the institution, but that O’Neal kept for himself after her death in 2009.
The school claims the painting, one of two which Warhol made of Farrah, was hanging on O’Neal’s wall when she caught him cheating — and then she took it back. O’Neal, however, claims he only asked Fawcett to keep his Warhol at her place because her picture was a turn-off for his other sexual conquests. He claims he asked her, “Will you store my Warhol because it is making my girlfriend uncomfortable.”
O’Neal insisted the work was always his, testifying that Warhol gave them two paintings of Fawcett. “Well, I think mine is better — that was my way of being funny,” O’Neal testified, recalling how he and Farrah received Warhol’s gifts. “The paintings had traveled back and forth between our houses [over the years],” reports The Post’s Helen Kumari.
O’Neal testified that he and Warhol, who died in 1987, had been pals since the 1960s. He said, “It was my idea that Warhol paint two [works of Farrah].”
When Fawcett died, she had both Warhol silkscreens. The disputed one was seen hanging in her room in a video shot of her dying days. While the university claims “Charlie’s Angels” star Fawcett donated both Warhols, O’Neal took back the one he claims is his following her death and left the second behind in her Beverly Hills condo.