Wrestler, girlfriend go to the media mat

As one of the most colorful icons in the gonzo world of professional wrestling, “Stone Cold” Steve Austin has been involved in myriad ringside brawls and trash-talking feuds. But even by the hell-raising standards of World Wrestling Entertainment, it’s hard to top the melee that unfolded earlier this month at a Beverly Hills eatery that ended with Austin’s business manager going to the emergency room with a stab wound and Austin’s girlfriend going to jail, charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

To hear Austin tell it, Aug. 4 was going to be his last night together with Tess Broussard, a blond 38-year-old model and adult movie actress who’s appeared in such films as “Wicked Temptations” and “Andromina: The Pleasure Planet.” Austin’s plan was to end their torrid, tumultuous 18-month romance. “I’m not a rocket scientist,” the beefy 39-year-old wrestler explained Thursday in his first interview about the incident. “But I knew I had to get out of this relationship.”

Broussard, who had been living in Austin’s house in San Antonio, joined him in Los Angeles, where he’s been shooting his first big movie role, playing a prison guard in the Adam Sandler comedy “The Longest Yard.” She says she thought they had reconciled their differences and were going out for a romantic dinner. Austin says that after a day of haggling she had agreed to take a check for $1.5 million in return for cutting ties with him and agreeing not to file an assault and personal injury suit against him tied to several incidents over the last year.

“The plan was to go out, have a nice steak, hand her a check and get on with my life,” he says, his voice rarely rising above a low rumble. Austin’s business manager, George Vrabeck, arranged to meet the couple and serve as a witness to the transaction. Austin and Broussard went to dinner at Mastro’s, a popular Beverly Hills steakhouse, then walked over to Il Fornaio, where at roughly 10:45 p.m. they met Vrabeck, who was having a steak at a sidewalk table. Vrabeck brought a check for $1.5 million in a briefcase with him that night and a security guard, who was seated in a car nearby.

There is a considerable difference of opinion about the subsequent events, which Beverly Hills police detectives are still investigating. Both Austin and Broussard say what they’ve told me in interviews about that night reflects statements they made to the police. That they are talking at all exemplifies the latest strategy employed by high-profile celebrities with an image to protect -- going public with bad news before anyone else does.

According to Austin, once at Il Fornaio, “all of a sudden Tess said, ‘Honey, we’re not breaking up. We just had a wonderful night.’ She started getting really irate, saying, ‘You can’t do this -- you just can’t break up with me now.’ ” Vrabeck says he tried to calm Broussard down. “I said, ‘Tess, relax, everything is going to be fine.’ ”

Vrabeck says Broussard abruptly made a move for Austin. “The next thing I know,” Austin says, “she went up over the top of the table with a steak knife and she was trying to stab me.” Vrabeck raised his arm and everyone went tumbling to the floor. By the time Vrabeck got up, his bodyguard had grabbed Broussard and handcuffed her to a chair. Austin was unhurt, except for banging his head on the pavement. But Vrabeck was bleeding profusely from a knife wound in his left arm.

Broussard offers a strikingly different version of events, saying in a lawsuit filed last week that she was lured to the restaurant for “the specific purpose of staging a fabricated assault” by Austin and Vrabeck. The suit charges that “Vrabeck turned the table over causing the plates, glasses and other items on the table to shatter to create the false impression that an ‘attack’ of some kind had occurred.” The lawsuit, which asks for $10 million in punitive damages, also alleges that Austin was driving while intoxicated and caused “serious physical injury and permanent disability” to Broussard when his truck hit a tree last year. It further alleges that the wrestler assaulted Broussard earlier this year.

In an interview Sunday at her lawyer’s office in Century City, Broussard said that when she tried to leave the restaurant Vrabeck “grabbed me and shoved me down in my chair. When I tried to get up, out of nowhere some guy came up from behind me and knocked me down, yelling, ‘Get down!’ as if gunshots were going to be fired. The next thing I know, he’s on top of me and I’m handcuffed. And there’s George dumping over the table. Then I see him bend down and it looks like he’s stabbing himself. All of a sudden, he says, ‘I’m bleeding,’ and the bodyguard says, ‘I saw you stab him!’ ”

She emphatically denies stabbing anyone. “Obviously I’d been set up. Steve had threatened me, in no uncertain terms, that I’d get screwed over if I didn’t drop [a proposed] personal injury suit.”

Within minutes, police were on the scene. According to Beverly Hills Police Lt. Micaela Garland, Broussard was taken to jail and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, which carries a maximum penalty of a $10,000 fine and four years in prison. Broussard, released the following day on $30,000 bail, is due in court Sept. 1. Garland said detectives “are still investigating the case.” Asked if the arresting officers took Broussard to jail in the bodyguard’s handcuffs, Garland replied, “We put our own handcuffs on her. We’ve got plenty of handcuffs to go around.”

Tabloids at the ready

In days gone by, when a celebrity was busted for drugs or caught in bed with a high school cheerleader, their first impulse was to duck and cover. But in today’s insatiable media world, there’s no way to avoid the army of tabloid magazines and TV shows, all ravenous for juicy stories about celebrities behaving badly. According to Austin, when he tried to break off his relationship with Broussard, she threatened to tell her story to a tabloid.

Austin must have known he wouldn’t come out smelling like a rose. Charged in 2002 with assaulting Debra Williams, his third wife, he received a year’s probation and an order to undergo domestic violence counseling. He has a widely reported history of guzzling beer in the ring and downing ephedra-laced energy drinks before bouts. When asked if he takes steroids, a popular drug with wrestlers, he would only say, “I take medication prescribed by my physician.”

Given Austin’s WWE notoriety and Broussard’s appearances in adult films, it was inevitable that the Il Fornaio fracas and the messy details of their frayed relationship would eventually surface. The day after the stabbing incident, Austin’s manager, Barry Bloom, began a damage-control campaign. He hired Allan Mayer, the top scandal spinmeister at Sitrick & Co., a crisis-management public relations firm that has represented the likes of Rush Limbaugh, R. Kelly and Paula Poundstone. Mayer advises his clients to get their version of the story out first. When the tabloids broke the story of Limbaugh’s problems with painkillers, the conservative talk-show host went on the air and announced he was going to rehab. Even politicians follow a similar script. Last Thursday, New Jersey Gov. James E. McGreevey, faced with what he said was the threat of a sexual harassment suit from a man he’d hired as an advisor while having an affair with him, took the offensive: He acknowledged his homosexuality and resigned from office.

“If you have bad news, announce it yourself,” says Mayer, who contacted The Times about the incident involving Austin. “Steve is a celebrity with millions of fans. If he’s involved in anything that smacks of something lurid or sensational, it’s going to affect him. If you don’t tell your own story, someone is going to tell it for you, and chances are you won’t like the way it comes out.”

If Austin and Broussard agree on anything, it’s that they had a honeymoon period of several months early in the relationship. “Things were just peachy” for a while, said Austin, adding, “We had a wonderful sex life.” Things went downhill fast. Broussard says when Austin drank, “he turned into another character -- mean, horrible, violent and emotionally abusive. He drank every night, beginning at 6 p.m. until he would pass out around 1 a.m.” As for Austin’s charges that it was Broussard who drank and took pills to excess, she responds: “He got me started on pills. He’d open my mouth like an animal and stick the pills in my mouth. He said, if I’m taking them, you’re taking them too.”

Austin acknowledges taking a variety of prescription drugs, saying his physician prescribes them for insomnia and “neurological issues” involving the injuries he’s suffered in the ring, but he denies forcing Broussard to take any. He insists that he was sober when his truck hit a tree last year. He says he was not given a Breathalyzer test and that a police report did not indicate that alcohol was involved. He said he drinks “about a six-pack of beer” each night, adding, “I might have a shot of Crown Royal” as well.

With the relationship spiraling downhill, Austin moved out of his San Antonio house into a rented home, leaving her in the house. (They disagree over whether he asked her to move out or encouraged her to stay indefinitely.) They acknowledge having a fight at the house this March. Broussard says he flung her across a table, threw her to the ground and “stomped on my broken foot where I have permanent physical damage from the car accident,” leaving blood on her arms, hip and knees -- one of the incidents that she says triggered the lawsuit. Austin refutes that account, saying when he tried to leave, Broussard grabbed a gold necklace around his neck and jumped on his back, receiving a bruise on her arm after he tried to pull her hand off his necklace.

Broussard gave a statement to police at the time but did not file charges, saying, “I played everything down. I got scared. He said he’d screw me over if I filed charges,” which Austin again denies.

One of Austin’s friends saw the couple argue frequently. Henry Garza, lead guitarist of Los Lonely Boys, a popular Texas rock band, and his two brothers were at Austin’s house one night when he saw Broussard pull a gun. “She put it right up to Steve’s head, like she was trying to get him to do something,” he says. “Then she pointed it at me, which was when I really got scared.” Another night, when the band came over to barbecue some steaks, Garza says Broussard threw the steaks on the ground and began slapping Austin. He said she also hit him when he came to a club to see the band play. “We even got e-mail from fans who were there, saying, ‘What’s up with Steve’s girlfriend?’ She was pushing people, being rude, throwing fits. I saw her hit him and scratch him, but I never saw him touch her.”

Broussard says she never hit Austin. She recalls once “playing” with one of Austin’s guns but says she never pointed it at anyone. “I didn’t pick it up in anger.” She says she did throw the steaks on the ground, explaining, “It was 3 a.m. and the guys were drunk and yelling and I told them to take the party outside.”

Someday a team of lawyers and a judge will have to sort out these conflicting accounts of a love affair gone awry. After hearing the sordid details of so much bad behavior, I asked Austin and Broussard the same question: If all these horrible things were happening, why did you stay in the relationship? “I was naive,” Broussard says. “He’d apologize and say he’d change and go to counseling, but he never did. He told me I was his soul mate, so I kept going back and really believed in the relationship. But it was a lot of empty promises.”

And what about Austin? “I kept seeing her because, as kooky as she was, I still loved her,” he says, cracking his knuckles. “I feel like I’ve been a pawn on the chessboard. I was too trusting and too nice, and that’s what I’ll have to live with.”

The Big Picture runs Tuesday in Calendar. If you have questions, ideas or criticism, e-mail them to patrick.goldstein@latimes.com.