Tarek El Moussa is finally sharing his side of the story seven years after everything took place The 42-year-old HGTV star opens up in his new book Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress — in Real Estate, Business and Life (releasing on February 6, 2024) about the gun incident that led to his downward spiral and his divorce from Christina Hall, his Flip or Flop costar, in 2016. In December 2016, when their split was highly publicized, it was revealed that the former pair had already been separated for seven months.
Their split came after an altercation in which Tarek ran off to a California state park with a gun after he and Christina has a fight. She called 911, and he remembers being in complete shock as police flooded the park.
According to his book, after the argument with his ex wife he "went out to our backyard in Yorba Linda and hopped over the fence." What comes next is where his story differs from Christina's. He claims that rather than "fleeing," he wanted to exercise and scout the trails near their home since he had recently purchased some new mountain bikes.
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He went on to explain that the Chino Hills State Park, which was right next to their house, had a lot of wildlife, including mountain lions and bobcats. To ensure his safety, he took a .38-caliber pistol with him. He explained that he'd received his California concealed-carry license a few weeks before the incident.
But it wasn't far into his run before things took a left turn. Tarek noticed a helicopter overhead and thought there might be a wildfire, but soon realized that he was who they wanted.
"A police officer leaning out of the helicopter pointed a rifle at me," he wrote. "Dust swirled around me from the spin of the blades, and a loudspeaker crackled, 'Get your hands in the air!'" After that, off-road vehicles that were police swarmed in.
One of the officers luckily recognized him, and authorities lowered their weapons.
“For the next several hours, I sat on a cooler on my driveway, handcuffed,” Tarek wrote. “That was the very last time we were together as a family: with Christina walking down the driveway, crying, and me sitting there in handcuffs, asking myself, What in the world is going on?”
After the incident, Tarek says he hid out on his boat, drank himself unconscious, and went through extreme withdrawal from the testosterone he’d been taking. His friends eventually got him into a rehabilitation facility. “Everybody gave up on me: the magazines, the outlets, the network, nobody believed in me.”
After living in a halfway house and then dealing with the hurt from Christina, who had moved on, Tarek has finally gotten to a point in life where he is happy again. “I hold nothing against Christina. I understand why she did what she did. We had a lot of hard years through my sicknesses and my mental health struggles from the testosterone.” He continued to share that meeting his current wife, Heather El Moussa, was a "breakthrough moment" for him. “Ever since that day, I just haven't looked back and I'm just so happy and excited about the family I have today.”
