Tiger's "Other Woman" Speaks Out
Denies affair and lashes out at tabloid media
By DANIEL MACHT
Updated 12:33 PM CST, Thu, Dec 3, 2009
The gorgeous nightclub hostess accused of bedding Tiger Woods blasted the story as "ridiculous" and said she's only met the golf star briefly at a bar and later when she sat his party at a table in the trendy Manhattan joint where she worked.
“It’s horrible to Tiger's family," Rachel Uchitel told the New York Post. "His wife must feel horrible. The worst part of it, it's not true.”
The National Enquirer reported that Woods and Uchitel were hot and heavy just days before the world-famous golfer got into a mysterious one-car accident near his Florida mansion in the early morning hours following Thanksgiving. That incident gave rise to fresh reports that the accident was preceded by a row with his angry wife over the infidelity accusation.
In Woods' only statement, he called the “embarrassing” crash his fault. “I’m human and not perfect,” he wrote on his website. He and his wife, Elin Nordegren, have refused to meet with cops in the aftermath of the accident to address apparent inconsistencies in their story.
Uchitel said she has only met Woods twice and the pair aren’t “friends.”
Their first encounter was “for two seconds at a bar through a mutual friend,” she told the Post. “He was shy and quiet and sitting with someone else.”
Her next meeting with Woods was in her capacity as a A-list hostess for The Griffin, a swanky club in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District last summer.
“As usual in my job, I got a call from a promoter that he's coming in,” she told the Post. “I went outside and brought him and his entire group in, walked them upstairs, introduced him to his waitress.
"I may have asked him if he needed anything. I hung out at the door to make sure they were OK, and when they were ready to leave, I walked them downstairs to the car. That's my job. Then I heard rumors I was making out with him at Griffin, that I had brought him in to Griffin.”
Uchitel said fallout from being in the eye of a tabloid storm has hurt her chances of meeting a “nice, normal guy.”
"I don't want people to think I am having an affair with Tiger Woods, or that I am trying to leak some story that I'm having an affair with Tiger Woods,” she said.
Uchitel also distanced herself from the Enquirer's two sources, calling them “hookers” who made up the affair story.
She was never close to either of them, she said.
One of the Enquirers’ sources overheard a phone call where she was asked to help set up a bachelor party Woods planned to attend, Uchitel told the Post.
"The bottom line was I was setting up a table for them, and obviously, I was saying Tiger's name as I was talking on the phone to my contact, “ she said. “And when I landed, I found out there was a problem, so for like four hours, I was having a meltdown with [her Vegas contact] and with other people at [the nightclub] to try to get to the bottom of what happened.
"I mean, who are these people?"
First Published: Dec 1, 2009 5:29 AM CST
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