LI couple stars on two 'Bridezillas' episodes

A demanding Seaford bride-to-be, her leather-jacketed biker dad and her exasperated groom are among the stars this Thursday and next at 10 p.m. on the WE reality-TV show "Bridezillas."

"I think during the process, I was really that bad," concedes Roxanne Coffey (née Filer), 31, a Rikers Island correction officer who was born in Brooklyn, raised in Jamaica, Queens, and has lived in Seaford eight years. On the two episodes, we see her making excessive demands of her bridesmaids — presenting them with written lists requiring signatures — deceiving her father and manipulating him into paying thousands for her wedding dress, and browbeating her fiance Todd Coffey, 37, a fellow correction officer at the New York City Department of Correction's Rikers Island jail.

"But honestly," she adds, in a joint phone call with her husband of a year, "in everyday life I'm the happiest, nicest person you'll ever meet. I was just very overwhelmed during my wedding process."

While she and her three older siblings were raised in a house with a construction-worker father and a mother who worked for the New York City Department of Education, her friends nonetheless rib her about having gone "from the bricks to the 'burbs." "Having a perfect wedding was showing people how amazing my life is now and how far I've come. So me acting that way," she argues, "was the only way to get everyone on board with what I needed to be done."

The couple had met at work and began dating in December 2012. They were in a committed relationship by March 2013, and took their first vacation together, to Cancún, Mexico, the following month. That July, they vacationed in the Caribbean island of Aruba — this time with Roxanne's young daughter, Amelia — and soon they were living as a family in Todd Coffey's Seaford home. Amelia is now in elementary school.

Todd — whose late father, Patrick, was a 32-year Rikers correction officer and whose late mother, Barbara, was a housewife — was born in Manhasset but raised in Seaford. He has an older sister, Lauren, who teaches in Connecticut. While the Rikers Island jail complex is set to close in 2026, he plans to retire a year earlier, after having put in 20 years.

On the show, he threatens to cancel the wedding if Roxanne does not sign a prenuptial agreement. Todd Coffey now admits this was a bluff. "I was showing up one way or another after I spent all that money!" he says, prompting laughter from them both.

The couple came to the show circuitously, through wedding officiant the Rev. Roxanne Birchfield. "She was on 'Bridezillas' previously and also on ... [Lifetime’s] 'Married at First Sight' [and other shows]," says Roxanne Coffey. "And when I signed the contract with her, she notified me that through her platform, our wedding was going to be publicized. So the opportunity arose to be on 'Bridezillas.' She said it was like an audition process, and Todd and I thought we would never get it. Todd felt like we were just normal people and they will never pick us. But literally while we were on our dual bachelor and bachelorette party, they called us notifying us that they wanted us for the show."

Todd Coffey — who attended Uniondale's Kellenberg Memorial High School and earned a criminal justice degree from Farmingdale State College — estimates he spent "north of" $80,000 on the wedding, which took place in August 2019 at Oheka Castle in Huntington. The show, he says, did not contribute toward the cost.

Roxanne Coffey's parents — Marcia and Robert "Rocky" Filer, who now live in Florida — did contribute both advice and, to her dad's on-screen consternation, roughly $7,500 for the wedding dress. Roxanne sold the gown afterward, on a wedding-dress resale website. The buyer, she says, "wanted it but she couldn't afford it. So I actually sold it to her for, like, a quarter of the price."

Did Roxanne kick that back to her dad? "What?! No!" she answers, laughing, a bridezilla to the end.