Paulina Porizkova has claimed a photographer exposed himself to her when she was just 15 years old.

The 57-year-old model has opened up about the "traumatic and offensive incident" which took place when she was just beginning her career, admitting she had no idea what was happening when the unnamed snapper put his penis on her shoulder while she was getting her make-up done.

Appearing on 'Red Table Talk', she recalled: "So I'm 15 years old, freshly 15 years old. I'm in Paris; getting hired for any kind of a job was such a big deal because I thought that every job would be my last and you wanted to be the nice little girl who obliged everybody."

Explaining how she was sitting in front of a mirror with a hairstylist and make-up artist on this one particular occasion, she continued: "The photographer walks in from behind and then I feel something on my shoulder, and it's kind of warm and heavy. And he's laughing at me and the make-up artist [is] laughing at me, and the hairdresser is laughing, everybody's laughing.

"And I'm like 'What is that?' It almost looks like a flower, but it feels like pantyhose stuffed with mashed potatoes. I could not for the world figure this out.

"It wasn't until he retracted it and zipped up his fly that I realised it was his penis."

Asked if it was the "first time" she'd seen the body part, she said: "Well, yes. It was certainly the first time I saw a penis."

Elsewhere on the show, Paulina also discussed how she was left "very specifically broke" following the sudden death of her estranged ex-husband Ric Ocasek - the father of her sons Jonathan, 29, and 24-year-old Oliver - in September 2019.

She said: "I was very specifically broke. I just want to set that right so that people don't accuse me of lying.

"I was a woman with assets. I had two mortgaged houses and I had a pension plan that I can access in 10 years and zero cash, and no way to pay for anything. So I was in a really, really peculiar position of being a woman with assets and no money."

The former Sports Illustrated model noted the COVID-19 pandemic worsened her situation because "property values in New York had just fallen off the cliff," but she had no choice but to sell her house "immediately".

She added: "I was asking my friends to buy our groceries for a little while."