Rachel Uchitel, “Rachel Redux”, September 2011

September 11 made her a public face; Tiger Woods made her
a household name. Rachel Uchitel reflects on 10 years of accidental fame.
Rachel
REDUX
I
t’s a hot Saturday
dressed casually in a pair of cargo shorts and
afternoon in August, and
an oversize shirt unbuttoned low enough to
Rachel Uchitel is sitting
reveal the edges of her embroidered ivory
alone amid dozens of boxes
bra. Her long, honey-colored locks rest
in her Park Avenue apartment,
messily over her nearly exposed chest. “The
which she just sold for a reported
unknown is what keeps me going,” she says.
$1.95 million. Matt Hahn, her live-in
It’s not the first time she’s sat alone
boyfriend of nine months, is playwondering what would happen next. Rachel
ing golf with his buddies on Long
Uchitel is something of a 21st-century
Island, and the dog walker has taken
Forrest Gump, having had her face plasher two pugs, Rudy Giuliani and
tered across the front pages of newspapers
Ozzy Osbourne, around the block
around the globe twice—both times for
On September 13, 2001, Rachel Uchitel
to stretch their legs. The flat-screen
events that were unrelated, unplanned and
became the face of tragedy when this photo
TV mounted on the wall is blaring a
undesired.
appeared in papers nationwide.
tired segment about Octomom, but
On the morning of September 11, 2001, RaRachel isn’t really watching. She’s
chel left early for work at Bloomberg News,
making plans to meet a friend at the Yankees game later. Beyond
where she was a segment producer. The night before, she and her
that and a move to San Francisco in the near future, though,
fiancé, James Andrew (Andy) O’Grady, 32, had just returned from
Rachel, 36, doesn’t have much idea where she’s headed.
a trip to Greece, so she wanted to get a jump-start on the day. She
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get a job or if anyone will ever hire me,” remembers denying him a morning kiss.
she says, plopping herself down on her plush cream couch. The
“I’ll kiss you later; I just put on lipstick,” she recalls telling
5-foot-6 bombshell, now best known as Tiger Woods’ mistress, is Andy as she hustled out the door. The investment banker was still
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by ANNIE K ARNI
Photogr aphy by Ethan Hill
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Nearly a decade
after 9/11, Rachel
found herself at the
center of the Tiger
Woods scandal
when she was
identified as his
mistress.
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getting ready to make his commute to the
104th floor of the World Trade Center’s
south tower. Rachel had a 3 p.m. appointment at Vera Wang to try on bridal gowns
and then dinner plans with Andy and her
mother later that evening. That morning it seemed as if everything was falling
into place—until 8:46 a.m., when a plane
crashed into the north tower.
“I was on the phone with Andy and he
said he was about to leave the building. He
sounded panicked,” says Rachel, recalling
their last words. “Just as I said goodbye,
there was the second explosion. I was still
holding the phone when it went dead.”
The reality of the tragedy didn’t sink in
until hours later. “I remember thinking,
‘I have to cancel Vera Wang,’ ” she says. “I
only cried at 8 p.m., when I finally realized
he wasn’t going to walk through the door.”
Still, on September 12, Rachel went
looking for her fiancé among the hundreds
of wounded people pulled from the rubble.
Outside Bellevue hospital, where family
members were searching for lost loved
ones, she was photographed holding a flier
with a picture of Andy, her face contorted
in grief. The shot of Rachel ran on the front
page of the New York Post and in papers all
over the world. With one snap of a photographer’s lens, she was transformed into
the face of the tragedy.
“9/11 was the first time I became famous
for something I didn’t want,” she says. “That
picture was me at my most vulnerable moment. It was really uncomfortable, but it was
also amazing because it helped give so many
people a connection to that event.”
Ten years later, Rachel has a philosophical way of looking back and making peace
with those events—an attitude that, to
some, may seem offensive.
“I believe Andy was meant to die
because he was too good,” she says. “I’m
almost happy it ended the way it did
because I’ve learned so many lessons from
him. It would have been tragic if we got
into fights and then divorced. He lives on
in my memory larger than life. I’m glad I
didn’t get to see any flaws that time brings
on everyone.”
But what would her life have looked like
had he lived? “I would be a fat housewife
with three kids living in Sands Point, Long
Island,” snorts Rachel, who today has
washboard abs and fits into a size 0. “I
Galina Sobolev “Single”
dress with belt, $228,
shopsingledress.com.
Walter Steiger “Muse”
pumps, $750,
waltersteiger.com.
Ring, Rachel’s own.
“I know I can come off as
condescending and detached
and rude. But I’m so us
ed to
being on the defensive, because
people have always been out to get me
.”
would have been fine, probably. I wouldn’t
have known any different.”
Following the terrorist attacks,
Rachel was ostracized by Andy’s family,
who, she says, felt she took advantage of
woe-begotten fame. “The last time I saw
[Rachel] was at the burial of my son,”
Andy’s father, James O’Grady, told The
Post in 2009. “She wasn’t trying to be in
the papers [back then]. Maybe 9/11 had
an impact on her and this is how she’s
dealing with that.”
R
achel believes people have
always turned against her.
Raised on the Upper East
Side, she briefly attended
Nightingale-Bamford, the all-girls prep
school that inspired Gossip Girl. By her
own account, she played the role of Blair
Waldorf, the sadistic queen bee.
“We were mean to everyone else,” she
says about herself and her best friend,
Shoshanna Lonstein Gruss (who made
headlines as the 17-year-old dating Jerry
Seinfeld). “If I ran into any of those girls
today, I would burst into tears because we
were so awful to them.”
But in eighth grade, the popular girls
turned against one another. Rachel recalls
coming to school one day to find her
entire class, including Shoshanna, giving
her the evil eye and holding up notebooks
where all her classmates had written
“RADS,” an acronym that she claims stood
for Ruin and Destroy the Slut. “I know it’s
ridiculous,” she says, “but to this day, it
still makes me want to cry and I still hate
Shoshanna for doing it.”
(Shoshanna, now a fashion designer
and Manhattan socialite, could not be
reached for comment, according to her
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Taylor Dresses dress
with belt, $198,
nordstrom.com.
Earrings and Yves Saint
Laurent pumps,
Rachel’s own.
“Men would say they were huge
th me
Tiger fans. They felt like being wi
trophy thing.
was a
The whole thing was gross.”
publicist, Alison Brod.)
“For whatever reason, I rub people the
wrong way,” she says. “It’s been like that
my whole life. I know I can come off as
condescending and detached and rude.
But it’s because I’m so used to being on
the defensive, because people have always
been out to get me. It’s a cycle that has
kept repeating itself.”
Eventually Rachel was shipped off
to boarding school in California. When
she was 15, her father, who had made his
wealth by bringing cable TV to Alaska, died
of a cocaine overdose. The headmaster
of her school delivered the sad news, she
recalls numbly.
His death left Rachel and her half
brother with hefty trust funds—but it also
set them adrift in a world of privilege.
“My mother was never around; I was
raised by housekeepers. I’ve basically
been alone my entire life,” she says. “I
was put in the right settings, but I never
had someone teaching me. Fast forward,
and then I’m engaged to someone who is
killed by terrorists.”
Her next big relationship also ended
abruptly. In 2004 Rachel married her
childhood friend, Wall Street trader Steven
Ehrenkranz, who had interviewed for a
job at the World Trade Center that fateful
morning. The two had grown up in the
same circles and bonded over their traumatic connections to September 11.
“We both needed security in our lives,”
she says of their marriage, which survived
barely 12 months. “I picked a guy that I
knew if something happened to him I
wouldn’t be devastated.”
The couple split in 2005 and Rachel purchased an SUV, threw her beloved dogs
into her car and started driving west with
no plan other than to start over.
During the drive, an ex-boyfriend from
high school, nightlife impresario Jason
Strauss, called and offered her a gig at Tao,
one of his Las Vegas nightclubs. Rachel
told him she’d be there that week.
“I remember that was the first time in
my life I didn’t care about anything else,”
she says. “I was genuinely happy.”
Rachel, who reportedly was raking in as
much as $500,000 a year with tips as a VIP
hostess, had found her niche. “I was really
good at it,” she says. “It meant managing
all these people and deciding how much
people spend and where people sit in a
way that would make the room flow. Then
I’d have to deal with the celebrities, and
where they were going to sit, and help
cover up all their issues. I was great at it.”
From 2005 to 2009, she worked at Tao
and at the Griffin in New York City, where
she was surrounded by A-listers. “My
experience meeting celebrities was that
they were all miserable,” she sniffs. “I got
to see them as real people, and they were
struggling and angry. I never wanted any
of that for myself.”
Still, she enjoyed the cachet that came
from being within those rarefied circles.
And it was in the spring of 2009 that Rachel met Tiger at the Griffin and started up
a steamy international affair with the most
famous athlete in the world.
The National Enquirer broke the story
when Rachel was spotted at Tiger’s hotel
during the Australian Masters. They
both denied the relationship, but friends
blabbed about how Rachel often bragged
about sleeping with Tiger and claimed
they were in love.
In December 2009, e-mails from Tiger
to Rachel became public indicating that the
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certified as a private investigator. But
she’s open to any job that will give her direction. “I don’t care if I become a Zumba
instructor in Hawaii,” she says with a
laugh. “I just want to have a purpose.
“A world that was very big is now very
small,” she adds.
Her intimate inner circle includes her
new beau Matt, 10 years her junior, whom
she met on Facebook. Meeting a man on
the Internet felt safer, she says, than the
creeps who approached her at bars: “Men
would make reference to the fact that
they were huge Tiger fans. They felt like
being with me was a trophy thing. People
knew I had a lot of money and would ask
me to buy them a drink. The whole thing
was gross.”
Matt, an insurance broker and former
Penn State football player, was different. “He’s normal,” she says. “He’s not a
famous person. I find him to be grounded
and I’m totally going to marry him.” The
couple is already considering having
children.
“I never wanted them,” Rachel says.
“Who really likes other people’s kids?
They kind of suck. I can’t deal. But I know
how much I love my dogs, and I think I’d
make a good mother to my own kids.”
Despite her checkered past, Rachel says
she prizes fidelity and would not stay with
someone who strays. “I’ve never been
cheated on—not that I know of,” she says.
“I would freak out. I have trust issues.
Once I let someone into my life, if they do
anything to take away the trust, I have a
real problem.”
She’s also struggling with her part in
history and whether to embrace or reject
the poster-girl status she gained after 9/11.
“I’ve been asked to be a correspondent at [Ground Zero],” she says, about
a possible TV gig. “I would love that. I’m
the expert; better [I be there] than some
reporter pretending they have a connection to it. I’ve had a voice for 10 years.”
Yet over the past decade, Rachel has
visited Ground Zero only once, tailed by
Dr. Drew and a camera crew while filming
Celebrity Rehab.
“I went to find a way to have a connection and to properly say goodbye,” she
says. “But I didn’t feel a connection. It’s
a big pit of construction, and I couldn’t
picture where the buildings were.”
She’s considering visiting again for the
10th anniversary. “It’s uncomfortable
because people recognize me,” she says,
gazing down at her manicured hands. “But
I’m leaning toward going.”
A decade after one photograph
launched Rachel onto the fast track to
unwanted fame, she laughs when she
considers what her deceased fiancé would
make of her today. “I think Andy would be,
like, ‘WTF?’ I definitely floundered,” she
admits, “but I found my own rules. I think
he’d be really proud of how strong I am,
how much of a woman I’ve grown into, as
opposed to the kid he was with.”
TOP: COURTESY OF RACHEL UCHITEL; BOTTOM: VH1
Years after her fiancé Andy O’Grady
(below) perished in 9/11, Rachel had an
affair with pro golfer Tiger Woods, which
again catapulted her into unwanted
fame (middle). In 2010 she joined VH1’s
Celebrity Rehab (bottom) to deal with an
“addiction to love” and prescription pills.
Splash News
philandering golfer felt the relationship was
meaningful: “I finally found someone I connect with, someone I have never found like
this. Not even at home,” he wrote to her.
In another message, he wrote, “I want
you to lay next to me, lay on me or where
ever you want to lay. F--k. Why didn’t we
find each other years ago? We wouldn’t be
having this conversation.”
Rachel’s official comment on Tiger
Woods is that she has no comment. She
reportedly accepted from $8 to $10 million
in hush money to stay mum on the affair.
“I didn’t go out in public much,” she
says, recalling the aftermath of the scandal. “I still have a very big social phobia. I
wasn’t like that before; I was out a lot. Now
I’m a recluse. It’s just uncomfortable. Girls
usually hate me and the boyfriends have to
pretend to hate me.
“People were making up things,” she
continues. “I was sick to my stomach for
almost a year and I couldn’t sleep.”
Rachel dealt with it all by taking Ambien, Klonopin and Xanax and relocating to Palm Beach, where she watched a
distorted version of herself become larger
than life in the media.
It all prompted her to join the cast of
VH1’s Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew in December 2010 with the hope of projecting a
more accurate picture of herself.
Now that the show has aired, she
credits the experience for weaning her off
prescription drugs and cigarettes as well
as what she describes as the need for the
“reassurance of an intense relationship” to
feel loved. “A lot of people have the same
disease,” she says.
The show also gave her a new perspective on life, she says, and a better understanding of herself and her motivations.
In July, however, she reportedly was
forced to return her windfall to the
Woods camp because she had violated
her agreement to keep quiet by appearing
on the program for what the show called
an “addiction to love.” (Rachel would
not comment on whether she’s had to
pay back her hush money and to this day
claims she doesn’t discuss the fling even
with her closest friends or family.)
Today, one looming question remains:
What next?
Rachel recently completed a weaponstraining course in Los Angeles to be
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