Shortly after Thanksgiving last year, we came up with a theoretical chain of events that could have explained the bizarre car crash outside of Tiger Woods’s Florida home. But according to Daily Beast reporter Gerald Posner, who has spoken with two friends of Woods’s wife about what happened, we were way off. Mariah Carey wasn’t even involved at all! Instead, the evening apparently involved a startling set of conversations between Elin Nordegren, the wife, and Rachel Uchitel, the reported mistress. According to Posner, Woods knew that the National Enquirer report linking him with Uchitel was going to come out soon, so he told Nordegren about it, explaining that the pair were acquaintances. He even put Uchitel on the phone with Nordegren, and the pair talked for about a half an hour, which appeared to appease Nordegren.
According to Posner’s sources, the next day Nordegren read the Enquirer report, which included distressingly specific details about a trip to Australia that Tiger had been on without her, where Uchitel had turned up in the same hotel. This was Thanksgiving. After celebrating the holiday, Woods took an Ambien and went to bed, and Nordegren set out to do some detective work, peeking through her husband’s phone (the same phone that later turned out to have been used to send filthy texts to rival mistress Jaimee Grubbs):
There she found text messages to Uchitel’s number—Uchitel was apparently listed in Tiger’s cellphone under her real name — and among them she discovered one that said, “You are the only one I’ve loved.” Shortly after 1 a.m. in Florida, Elin began texting Uchitel, pretending to be Tiger, according to both sources. Elin wrote, “I miss you,” and asked, “When are we seeing each other again?” Uchitel texted back, seemingly surprised that Woods was awake. Elin specifically felt, one source told me, that this response indicated that the two of them spoke earlier that night, before Tiger took his Ambien. At that point, Elin called Uchitel, who answered thinking it was Tiger calling. Both sources said that Elin said something approximating, “I knew it was you.” Uchitel’s surprised reply, according to what Elin told one source: “Oh f–k.” She immediately hung up.
This is when Posner says the already public details of that night’s events come in. Nordegren allegedly woke the Ambien-addled Tiger in a fury. “She simply exploded, trying to hit him on the chest and arms with her fists, and then finally chasing him from the house while she wielded a golf club,” Posner writes. “Shoeless, he ran into the car and barreled out of the driveway before careening off a fire hydrant and then smashing into a tree.” The rest, including hospital stays, public humiliation, endorsement loss, and an endless parade of publicity-hungry mistresses, is history.
RadarOnline reports today that Nordegren has been visiting Woods at his sex-rehab center in Mississippi for a few days, and is participating in his treatment. Presumably she told the managers of the center, at which you are not allowed to have sex or even masturbate, that Woods probably should have his cell phone confiscated.
Tiger’s Thanksgiving Mystery — Solved [Daily Beast]
