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Tarek El Moussa is ready to flip the script on the dramatic end of his marriage to Christina Hall.
In his new memoir and how-to book, the real-estate guru and TV personality finally shares his side of the story behind his highly public split from his former Flip or Flop costar — including a 2016 incident with a gun that precipitated their divorce.
As El Moussa tells it in Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress — in Real Estate, Business and Life (out Feb. 6), he was craving some exercise after a particularly heated confrontation with Hall and hopped over his backyard fence.
Tarek Christina and El Moussa on ‘Flip or Flop’.
HGTV
Behind the house lies Chino Hills State Park, a large wilderness area, where El Moussa was hoping to scout the trails for a couple of new mountain bikes he had just ordered. In addition to the area’s rugged beauty, Chino Hills is known for being a habitat for animals like bobcats and mountain lions, so he brought an “insurance policy” — a .38-caliber pistol. (El Moussa notes that he had recently received a concealed-carry license, which had required him to take classes and undergo a background check with the local sheriff’s department.)
After a half-hour hike, El Moussa heard the distinctive sound of a helicopter above him. While his first thought was that there was an emergency, such as a wildfire, he soon realized what was actually going on. “A police officer leaning out of the helicopter pointed a rifle at me,” he writes. “Dust swirled around me from the spin of the blades, and a loudspeaker crackled, ‘Get your hands in the air!'”
Off-road police vehicles arrived, and more officers came out with their guns drawn, yelling at El Moussa to get down.
Fortunately, one of the officers recognized him from his television work. “I heard an officer shout, ‘Tarek?’ I screamed back, ‘Yes! I’m the guy from TV! What are you guys doing?'” he recalls.
‘Flip Your Life,’ by Tarek El Moussa.
Hachette Go
El Moussa then recounts how the officers handcuffed him and escorted him home. “For the next several hours, I sat on a cooler on my driveway, handcuffed,” he writes. “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?”
He goes on to say that he understands, in retrospect, why Hall was so concerned, because his mental health had been at an all-time low in the weeks prior.
A representative for Hall declined to comment on El Moussa’s book.
Flip Your Life marks the first time El Moussa, 42, has publicly addressed the incident. He and Hall, 40, went public with their split in December 2016, and it was subsequently revealed that their separation had actually begun seven months prior, following the incident.
Speaking to PEOPLE about his new book, El Moussa 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… I’ve never said any of this, ever.”
After their breakup, Hall and El Moussa continued to film Flip or Flop together for several years. The HGTV series officially ended in spring 2022.
El Moussa and Hall have both since remarried. El Moussa married Heather Young in 2021. Hall was married to presenter Ant Anstead for a little under two years, from December 2018 to September 2020. She married realtor Joshua Hall in 2022, and they are still together.
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