A nightclub hostess said to be at the centre of a violent showdown between Tiger Woods and his wife insisted today that allegations of an affair with the world’s No 1 golfer were “just dumb stuff”.
Surfacing for her first full-length interview since Woods crashed his Cadillac Escalade while reportedly fleeing from his furious wife, Rachel Uchitel lamented: “I look like a homewrecker and an a**hole.
“I do not have sex with celebrities and I have not had an affair with Tiger Woods,” she told the New York Post.
“It’s horrible to Tiger’s family. His wife must feel horrible,” she said, adding of her accusers: “It’s just their word against mine and Tiger’s.”
As Florida Highway Patrol continued its investigation into Friday’s incident — in which Woods was found lying unconscious outside his mansion in Orlando at 2.25am after smashing his vehicle into a fire hydrant and a tree — Ms Uchitel said that she had met the sports superstar only twice: once “for two seconds” at a bar and the other time on a strictly professional basis while working as director of VIP services at Griffin, a New York nightclub.
Advertisement
A subsequent trip to Melbourne, in which she happened to stay at the same hotel as Woods while he was playing at the Australian Masters tournament last month, was coincidental and “none of anybody’s business” she said.
“I did not go to Australia to see Tiger . . . I was down in Australia with friends who were there for a number of different reasons and had nothing to do with Tiger Woods,” Ms Uchitel, 34, protested, saying that she checked in to the hotel with a male companion.
“I travel all the time for business. I travel with bottle-service customers and I set up their nightclub stuff, their restaurants, their lunches, kind of like a concierge would. I become friends with my clients and go on trips with them,” she explained.
It is not the first time that Ms Uchitel — a former television news producer who lost her fianc?, the investment banker James O’Grady, in the World Trade Centre terrorist attack in 2001 — has been at the centre of celebrity sleaze rumours. She was also alleged last month to have had an affair with David Boreanaz, a married actor who stars in the American television crime drama Bones.
“I don’t want to comment on the David Boreanaz stuff. That one is a different ballgame than the Tiger Woods thing,” she told the Post. ”My statement is: I work in clubs and I am a businesswoman. I do not have sex with celebrities, and I have not had an affair with Tiger Woods.”
Advertisement
Yet in June 2008, she told BlackBook magazine: “Although I’ve been romantically linked to a famous baseball player, a Broadway star, a musician and various film and television actors, I will never kiss and tell.”
And her claim to the Post that “I’m a recluse, I don’t go out, I stay home with my dogs and friends” appeared at odds with photographs that emerged yesterday, showing her partying on the Caribbean island of St Barts, appearing to slap the bottom of American Idol host Ryan Seacrest.
Woods, 33, whose previously squeaky-clean image and precision golf earned him a place as the world’s highest earning sportsman, remained bunkered in his Florida home today. He has denied an affair with Ms Uchitel, condemned “the many false, unfounded and malicious rumours” surrounding last week’s crash, and described the episode as a private matter — so private, that he has even refused to yield to questioning by state troopers.
Among the latest twists in the saga are claims that he was not wearing shoes at the time of the accident. Driving shoeless is a crime in Florida.