Rachel Uchitel, the woman with whom Tiger Woods had an affair was revealed in 2009, claimed that days after the affair came to light, she signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) prohibiting him from talking about the golfer to anyone, the New York Times reported on Monday.
According to the Times, Uchitel claimed that she received $5 million and the promise of $1 million per year for three years in exchange for her silence. Uchitel told the Times that the agreement also prohibited her from disclosing that she had signed the NDA.
A decade later, in 2019, Uchitel agreed to be interviewed about her relationship with the PGA champion in HBO’s two-part documentary Tiger, the second part of which aired in January.
“I’ve been quiet about this story, but at this point I have nothing to lose.
My name hasn’t lost its stigma at all.
It was always ‘Rachel Uchitel comma Tiger Woods’ lover,” she said in the documentary.
Uchitel, 46, was born in Anchorage, Alaska. Her grandfather was Maurice Uchitel, a famous nightclub owner famous New Yorker who owned some of the famous venues of his time, such as El Morocco.
Uchitel was working as a news producer for Bloomberg Television when her fiancé, James Andrew O’Grady, killed in the September 11 terrorist attacks. She was photographed in the New York Post just days after the attack, in tears, holding a photo of O’Grady.
O’Grady’s father told the New York Post in December 2009 that the terrorist attack transformed Uchitel into someone he hardly recognized.
“The last time I saw [Uchitel] was at my son’s funeral – she was not the same person she is now,” he said at the time.
“At that time, she wasn’t trying to get attention. Maybe 9/11 affected her and this is how she dealt with it.
Uchitel married a high school friend in 2004, but moved to Las Vegas after the marriage lasted about a year. In Las Vegas, she began working as the director of V.I.P. operations at a new club launched by Jason Strauss, an old friend of hers.
According to The Times, Uchitel and Woods met in 2008 through former New York Yankees baseball player Derek Jeter, who was a mutual friend. The pair began their relationship a year later.
Uchitel told The Times: “I knew him [Woods] to be cheating on his wife from the first time I met him, well before we got together.” But she believed she had special status in the eyes of Woods, who would fly her around the world to various tournaments and events, The Times reported.
In the latest HBO documentary, Uchitel described the first time she’d met Woods in New York and the first time they had sex in Orlando, Florida. Without going into too much detail, Uchitel explained how the atmosphere around Woods made her feel afterward.
“How can I be with a mortal anymore?” Because so many people have put him on such a pedestal, and he’s in my bed, and he’s mine, Tiger,” she said in the documentary.
Unable to escape the shadow of her relationship with Woods, Uchitel struggled to get the Times to report the move forward in other areas of her life, from finding a romantic partner to starting a business.
She tried to open two children’s clothing stores in New York in 2013 and 2015, but by 2019, she fell into debt with the owners of both stores. According to the Times, Uchitel believes she lost clients after discovering who she was and her connection to Woods.
“I felt like the world was closing in on me,” she told the Times, with bills piling up and her name “dragging through the mud,” as she describes it in her latest documentary by HBO.
She filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy after interviewing Tiger and was given protection from creditors earlier this year, according to the Times.
After the documentary aired, Uchitel claimed to have heard that one of Woods’ attorneys, Michael Holtz, would seek to sue for damages for breach of the NDA, despite protection from creditors she now benefits from in bankruptcy, the Times reported.
He would have told her: “If you find a job, I will come and collect your salary. If you get married, I’ll go after your joint bank accounts. I will pursue you for the rest of my life,” according to the Times.