From 9/ 11 victim to Tiger Woods villain
She speaks!
As much as a new, two- part doc on HBO puts the refocus on Tiger Woods — it is must-must-watch, “Tiger”: the rise and fall, the triumphs, the foibles, the messiah complex, the race factor, the father- son knots — I have to admit I was equally fascinated by the resurgence in it of Rachel Uchitel who, besides having been the Other Woman in his saga, the Eve in the garden of superstar golf, also happens to be one of the great Forrest Gump- like characters in recent Americana.
First, after Sept. 11, she says, “the media branded me as the victim.” Then, a mere 10 years later “I was branded as the villain.”
I mean, get this: Years before Uchitel showed up on the cover of the New York Post ( and scores of other publications) in the context of her affair with Woods in late 2009, she had already been on the cover of the Post ( and scores of other publications) as a face of 9/ 11. The photo might be familiar, even if the context is not: an anguished beauty, holding up a photo of a man, caught in a moment by a photog from The Associated Press. Her fiancé — to whom she’d just become engaged — was in one of the towers, yup.
She was outside Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan when the infamous photo was taken. Everybody was frantic about their loved ones, she shared in an interview on the “Juicy Scoop” podcast with Heather McDonald last September, “so I had gone to Kinkos and made a missing poster of my fiancé.”
At the time, the 26- year- old worked at Bloomberg ( yup, she tumbled fully formed from the media itself) and had returned from Greece just the morning before with her man. She actually talked to him on the phone a few times that fateful day, as he watched the first tower get hit, describing what he was seeing. Unaware then that it was a terrorist attack, he thought he would just go to the roof to get rescued — then his building was hit, too, and she sat helplessly as the inevitable became clear. Seeing the tower fall on TV, “I watched him die and everyone in the newsroom watched me watch him die.”
Sinking to the floor, she said, “I felt a change in my body. I was no longer a little girl at that moment.” A quiver coiled through her that said, “there are no more happily ever afters.”
Many things happened in the years that followed. She went back to work. She took a leave from work. She went to Brazil: “to find herself.” She married a guy who was a childhood friend — and who had a shared 9/ 11 story — with a 500- person wedding at Cipriani, but then divorced him months later when the marriage turned out to be a sexless one ( a bit like the Charlotte/ Trey storyline on “Sex and the City”).
In a random move, she settled in Vegas, where she wound up a VIP hostess at the standardsetting Tao nightclub — the No. 1hostess for what was then the No. 1 money- making nightclub in the world. They called her the “First Lady of Las Vegas,” as she also took over VIP operations for the sister venues in New York ( including Stanton Social, Marquee, etc.), transferring some of her journo skills — back when she used to schmooze CEOs — into her new job.
Enter Tiger.
How did she first meet him? Well, she doesn’t go into as much detail in “Tiger,” but on that podcast she framed it this way: “I was dating Derek Jeter ( who, of course, also dated Mariah Carey and many other famous women) and Tiger was sleeping over at Derek’s house. He was just a buddy … and we just became friendly. So that’s how I originally met him in Manhattan. I met him a couple of times in the nightclubs through other people …”
But in “Tiger,” she does make it amply clear that it was as much of an emotional relationship as it was physical. Her comments come as the doc makes the point umpteen times that, having known and witnessed his own father’s philandering, “Tiger became what he loathed most about his father,” as someone says. Uchitel recalls her lover phoning her, begging her to fly all the way to Australia where he was competing in the Masters. “I cannot win unless you come,” she recalls him saying.
While some have hypothesized that his affairs amounted to a kind of thrill- chase, Uchitel reckons that sex, much like alcohol or drugs, was for him a form of “pain relief.” She even paints a picture of him reverting to an almost childlike trance when he was with her, watching cartoons — safely away from the business of Being Tiger Woods.
Eventually the National Enquirer had enough to run a story ( they had followed her everywhere). In “Tiger,” Uchitel admits to the ugliest part of the tale: when she got on the phone with Elin, Tiger’s wife, talking to her for 30 minutes, trying to bamboozle her into believing the whole thing was untrue.
After the story broke — and everything came out — Uchitel’s life as she knew it was over. With the TV offers pouring in — and with nothing to lose — she considered both “Celebrity Rehab” and “Celebrity Apprentice.”
To woo her for the latter, she told the podcast that Donald Trump sent his nowinfamous fixer, Michael Cohen, to take her to dinner, but when she chose the Dr. Drew show — they paid her $ 400,000, ostensibly to deal with her “addiction to love” — Trump went to TMZ and, in classic Trump fashion, denied any reports of her doing his show and that, quote, “I don’t even know who she is.”
Later came a romance with “Bones” star David Boreanaz, who was married but had told her he was separated ( Uchitel says she found out he was still with his wife, who was pregnant, when she saw a People mag story of Boreanaz in the delivery room!). Then she got married herself. A man 10 years younger. Got pregnant. Got divorced. More drama. Opened a children’s clothing boutique. Even had relationships with the husbands of not one, but two “Real Housewives”: P. K. Subban ( before his marriage to Dorit, in Beverly Hills) and Mario Singer ( ex of Ramona, in New York … whom she met through Bumble).
You exhausted yet?
As for why she is speaking now, Uchitel — being the most conspicuous of the Tiger mistresses — feels as if she got cast as the unforgivable hussy while the now 45- year- old athlete, who later had that infamous DUI arrest, reclaimed his public stature by winning the 2019 Masters, settling down a with steady girlfriend, seeming like a good dad.
She has a point. As she told “Juicy Scoop”: “Tiger gets to win awards or win his different tournaments. He gets to come out of things and have mishaps, get up again, and people want to cheer for him … but the women don’t get that so much, not just with him but with any scandal, and that’s not really fair. I just felt like I needed to be able to have a voice finally.”