Tarek El Moussa is opening up about the shocking gun incident that led to his divorce from Christina Hall.
HGTV stars El Moussa, 42, and Christina Hall (nee Haack), 40, were married from 2009-to 2018, co-hosting their hit show “Flip or Flop” together (and they even co-hosted after their divorce) until it ended in 2022.
In his new memoir out Feb. 6, “Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress — in Real Estate, Business and Life,” he reveals what really happened during the 2016 incident with Hall involving a gun.
“I’ve never said any of this, ever,” he told People.
According to the outlet, in his book, he writes that after a heated argument, he “Went out to our backyard in Yorba Linda and hopped over the fence.”
However, Hall thought he was fleeing with a gun and called the cops, fearing a potential suicide. According to El Moussa, he wanted to exercise and scout the trails near their house. He said that he brought along a gun because they lived near Chino Hills State Park, Calif., which is a hotbed of mountain lions and bobcats.
When he saw a helicopter hovering, he thought it was there for a wildfire, before realizing they were there for him – because Hall had called them.
“A police officer leaning out of the helicopter pointed a rifle at me. Dust swirled around me from the spin of the blades, and a loudspeaker crackled, ‘Get your hands in the air!’” he said.
“I heard an officer shout, ‘Tarek?’” he wrote in his book. “I screamed back, ‘Yes! I’m the guy from TV! What are you guys doing?’”
For the next several hours, I sat on a cooler on my driveway, handcuffed. 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?”
Together, El Moussa and Hall have daughter Taylor and son Brayden, now 13 and 8.
He told the outlet that the weeks following this incident were “physical and emotional hell.” In his book, he said he hid on his boat, drank himself unconscious, and went through withdrawal from the testosterone he’d been taking – until his friends sent him to rehab.
“Everybody gave up on me: the magazines, the outlets, the network, nobody believed in me,” he said.
He said he found out that reuniting with Hall “Wasn’t in the cards” when he learned that he moved onto her second husband, British TV host Ant Anstead, who she started dating in 2017, married the following year, and had a child with in 2019 (the two have since divorced in 2021, and she’s now married to realtor Joshua Hall).
“I would say devastating would be an understatement,” El Moussa wrote, about realizing that Hall had moved on.
But, now, years after the gun incident, he said, “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.”
After meeting his second wife, “Selling Sunset” star Heather Rae Young, and marrying her in 2021, before welcoming their son in in 2023, he said, “We all communicate well,” referring to his ex-wife, Christina, and his current wife.
“We really focus on the kids.”
If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts, you can dial the 24/7 National Suicide Prevention hotline at 988 or go to SuicidePreventionLifeline.org.
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