Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated documentary maker Susan Froemke was slashed in her Upper West Side apartment yesterday by her live-in boyfriend, who stabbed himself several times in a failed bid to commit suicide, police sources said.
Cops were called to 40 W. 67th St. at around 7:30 a.m. when neighbors heard a man and woman screaming and called 911, sources said.
When police arrived, Froemke, whose films have earned Oscar and Grammy nominations, was standing outside bleeding, and she told them her boyfriend was trying to kill himself.
But a good friend of Froemke told The Post that the filmmaker was not attacked by David Penick – her live-in lover of 12 years – and was only cut because she tried to grab the knife out of his hand.
“She tried to prevent her boyfriend who is depressed from committing suicide,” said the woman, who didn’t give her name.
When Emergency Service cops got to the third-floor apartment, Penick, 45, was barricaded inside.
After a one-hour standoff, officers smashed down the door, and he was taken out trussed to a stretcher soaked with blood.
Penick, a copy editor for Entertainment Weekly, had stabbed himself in the wrists, ankles, chest and neck, sources said.
“I’m shocked,” said a fellow editor at the magazine.
Penick was taken to New York Weill Cornell Medical Center, where he is in stable condition.
Froemke, 56, was taken to Roosevelt Hospital, where she received stitches and was released.
When reached by telephone, Froemke said the incident is “none of your business.” The couple have lived together since 1991, her friend said.
Froemke is the chief administrator and principal filmmaker for Maysles Films and works out of the company’s West 54th Street penthouse office.
She won two Emmys for her second film, “Vladimir Horowitz: The Last Romantic.”
She won a third Emmy in 1991 for “Soldiers of Music: Rostropovich Returns to Russia.”
Her 2001 documentary “LaLee’s Kin” – which portrays life on the Mississippi Delta – was nominated for an Academy Award.
The same year, her film “Recording the Producers: A Musical Romp with Mel Brooks,” was nominated for a Grammy Award.
Additional reporting by Ralph Ginzburg & Dan Brinzac