Metro

Killer who strangled designer ordered to pay family $12.5M

The jailed stoner playboy who strangled swimsuit designer Sylvie Cachay in a Soho House bathtub must pay $12.5 million to her family, a Manhattan judge ruled Wednesday.

The award, granted after a day-long inquest that included emotional testimony from the tragic woman’s parents, may provide them with “some measure of solace,” the judge said.

“I got to know Sylvie through the mom,” Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Martin Schoenfeld said of Sylvia Cachay, a West Virginia artist who’d taken the stand to describe painting her daughter’s portrait from memory, over and over.

“When I paint her, she’s happy,” the mom explained. “She’s always with me.”

Convicted murderer Nicholas Brooks had enjoyed enviable privilege and wealth — his father, the late Joseph Brooks, was the jet-setting, millionaire composer of the Oscar-winning ’70s song “You Light Up My Life.” But collecting on the whopping judgment will require great effort, notes Cachay family lawyer Susan Karten.

Cut out of his father’s will and serving a 25-years-to-life sentence, Brooks is crying poverty.

“We are going to hire a forensic economist,” Karten said after the award.

“We believe there are assets, and if there aren’t, that they have been diverted. The family is committed to seeing that he never sees a dime,” Karten says of Brooks, who is 28 and could be paroled as early as age 53.

“From what I understand, the father’s estate receives residuals every time that song plays, and more importantly, he did jingles and commercials that all go into the father’s estate,” she said.

Brooks was a layabout recipient of his dad’s trust fund checks until the night he strangled and drowned Cachay in December 2010, leaving her half-dressed corpse in an overflowing tub.

The father was under indictment at the time for a string of a dozen brutal casting-couch sex assaults, and cut his son out of the trust fund and his will right before committing suicide.