Meet Iggy Pop’s former flight attendant third wife of 18 years

Nina attended the prestigious Howard University in Washington, D.C., where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1996 and graduated summa cum laude after studying broadcast journalism in the School of Communications.

Nina opted against a career in journalism and became a flight attendant instead. She worked for US Airways when she met Iggy in 1999.

Iggy had recently relocated to Miami from New York City when he spotted Nina and her friend outside a pizza shop, but their first interaction didn’t go as easily as he’d expected.

“Yeah, I was checking them out, thinking, ‘What the hell am I gonna do?'” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “I’m really not good with the pickups. I’m a klutz and don’t have a line of gab. I’m only good if they know who I am. So I’ll just sit and wait for somebody to say, ‘Aren’t you …?’ and then go from there. But that wasn’t happening.”

Despite Nina not recognizing Iggy as the music star he was, he soon got her attention in his cherry-red 1968 Cadillac DeVille, with a white top and brown Naugahyde seats. “So, anyway, I got back in my car, pulled up to where they were and said, ‘You girls want to go for a ride?” And they did! So then I started dating Nina.”

In a 2019 interview with The New Yorker, Iggy revealed that during a date with Nina, his electric-blue 1984 Ferrari 308 GTS caught on fire – and not for the first time. “You’d see the paint bubble first,” he said. “I had a rag that I used to beat it out with.”

Recalling his and Nina’s date, he said: “I had a date with a girl who became my wife, and I took her somewhere nice, and on the way home she said, ‘I think the car’s on fire!”

It was the third time a charm for Iggy when he wed Nina on November 22, 2008, in a low-key ceremony. His first wife was Wendy Weissberg, whom he wed at 21 in 1968, but the marriage was annulled one month later. He then married Suchi Asano in 1984, and they were together for 15 years before they split in 1999, shortly before he met Nina.

Speaking about his marriage to Nina with the Sydney Morning Herald, he said: “I found myself hitting 50 and realizing that I was lucky to meet her. Happiness with a woman doesn’t need to be complicated. When you find the right one, it’s easy.”

Despite his energetic stage antics, Iggy and Nina prefer a quiet life at home in Coconut Grove, Miami, where they enjoy a nice bottle of Bordeaux and “lots of desserts.”

Iggy has a son, Eric, from his relationship with Paulette Benson, but he and Nina have no children and instead live with their Insta-famous Moluccan cockatoo, Biggy Pop.

“About 12 years ago, a roadside vendor in a remote part of Florida stuffed Biggy, who was very young, into a tiny cage alongside some chickens, by the side of the road,” Iggy said in a press release after Biggy was announced as a “founding patron” of the Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital in Australia in 2020.

“He seemed to be in peril of a bad future. So we decided to take care of him, responsibly. And we have. He gets and gives a lot of love,” Iggy added.