It was 2009. The world was watching the fate of Tiger Woods, a swinging superstar and a living legend of golf at 34, sink into the heart of a scandal worthy of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
At the time, he had been married for five years to Elin Nordegren, a 29-year-old Swedish model he met in 2001 at a golf competition in England, through mutual friends.
On Thanksgiving Eve, his wife and mother of his two children discovered an article about the athlete’s “new girlfriend” in the columns of the National Enquirer.
A simple check on her husband’s phone confirmed her suspicions: he was indeed having an affair with Rachel Uchitel, a nightclub manager.
Ten years later, Tiger Woods’ former mistress is set to “break the silence” on their affair, as she revealed on the Juicy Scoop podcast on September 1, 2020.
Rachel Uchitel will speak out in a two-part docuseries – titled Tiger – which will air on HBO starting January 10.
According to the network, it will explore “the rise, fall and redemption of global icon Tiger Woods.”
“I felt the need to break my chains”
“Rachel Uchitel, the woman behind the sex scandal that forever altered Tiger Woods’ world, will break her silence for the first time,” we can read on the HBO website. The main interested party explained to Heather McDonald why she had participated in this documentary. “Ultimately, I felt like people were being sneaky with me after the last 10 years and everything that came out about the scandal,” she said. “At some point, I felt like I needed to break my chains and know what it was like to have a voice.” Tired of the label that stuck to her, Rachel Uchitel said it was “harder for a woman” to escape the fallout of a scandal.
In video, “Tiger”, the trailer
“Tiger can win awards and win tournaments,” she said. “He can have misfortunes and bounce back, and people still want to cheer him on. But women don’t get that chance, not just with him but with any scandal, and that’s not really fair.” The 40-year-old also recounted her encounter with the golfer. “When I met Tiger Woods, I was dating Derek Jeter (a former professional baseball player, editor’s note), and he came to sleep at Derek’s house, she explained. He was just a friend. (…) That’s how I met him in Manhattan.” Before starting a story with the athlete.
The “Tiger” bed
When she discovered her husband’s affair in 2005, Elin Nordegren was furious. She threw him out of their home in Wyndemere, Florida – the story goes that she broke a few windows of his black Cadillac with a 7 iron. The couple’s daughter, Sam, was then 2 years old. Their son, Charlie, was only a baby.
A few weeks later, rumors that Rachel Uchitel had been paid ($1 million, to be precise) not to hold a press conference in which she was supposed to confirm and report her affair with Tiger Woods were mentioned by E! Online. Officially, she canceled it due to “unforeseen circumstances.” Several months of resounding scandal followed: Rachel Uchitel was not the only woman to have shared the bed of the one nicknamed “the Tiger”.
Escalating the scandal
Joslyn James, porn actress, Mindy Lawton, restaurant waitress, Raychel Coudriet, daughter of a neighbor… At the National Enquirer, Mindy Lawton recounts that they once found themselves at 5:30 in the morning in a parking lot, for a quick embrace in her Cadillac before the “feline” joined a golf tournament.
The list of extramarital affairs maintained by the golfer is growing by the day. Among them, the barmaid Jaimee Grubbs declared to the American magazine US Weekly that she had “20 sexual relations” with Tiger Woods in three years. For her part, the pin-up of the Playboy magazine, Loredana Ferriolo aka Loredana Jolie, would have seen the golfer “four or five times”, paid 15,000 dollars per interview.
From the green to the detox
For two months, the said champion plays cat and mouse with the paparazzi. Absent during the Hero World Challenge (golf tournament that he himself founded) in December 2009, he nevertheless makes the headlines of the tabloids daily. Cornered, Tiger Woods ends up going to a specialized clinic in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he follows a 45-day sexual detox treatment. Many of his sponsors abandoned the champion, who was forced to make a public apology in a carefully rehearsed speech in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, in February 2010. In it, he admitted, live on CNN, that he had behaved in an “irresponsible and selfish way.”
“I had affairs, I cheated on my wife. What I did was not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame,” he declared impassively on camera. Jaimee Grubbs, 24 at the time, also apologized in Extra! magazine: “I can’t tell you how guilty I feel about hurting Elin Nordegren and her family,” she explained. “If it hadn’t been me, it would have been other girls. He meant the world to me – I didn’t do it for superficial reasons. I didn’t do it to hurt her.”
Black streak
Mr. and Mrs. Woods’ divorce was pronounced in 2010. On the professional side, Tiger Woods struggled to recover from the scandal. Fallen from his pedestal, the golfer announced a break in his sporting career. He would not reappear on the greens until three months later. However, he experienced a series of defeats and bad times.
In 2013, Tiger Woods was once again crowned world number 1. But his meteoric rise came up against a major obstacle: physically weakened, he accumulated sporting disappointments and worried by his psychological fragility. Absent from the 2016 and 2017 seasons, the fallen legend fell asleep at the wheel of his car in May 2017, on a Florida road, after having consumed a cocktail of medication and antidepressants. The police immediately arrested him.
Champion seeks stable relationship
A year later, the “Tiger” seems to definitively present himself as a new man. Of those who have learned from their mistakes, both professionally and romantically. After briefly dating former world ski champion Lindsey Vonn in 2015, he finally found love again in the arms of Erica Herman, who once managed the golfer’s restaurant, The Woods, in Florida.
Today “happier than he has been in years”, he made his relationship with the thirty-year-old official in September 2018, during the Presidents Cup competition in New Jersey. And if the couple does not yet plan to get married, an anonymous source explained to People, the golfer would be very attached to his new partner.
Since then, the “Tiger” also seems to have taken back the reins of his career. The American won the Masters in Augusta, in the United States, on April 14, 2018. The player who has fifteen Grand Slam titles is now just three awards away from the record for victories in this type of tournament. Tiger Woods, or the story of a spectacular redemption swing.
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Source: USA Today
