Heavy/HGTV HGTV's Tarek El Moussa
Longtime HGTV star Tarek El Moussa has opened up about the day his marriage to “Flip or Flop” co-star Christina Hall ended, with him in handcuffs in their driveway.
In an interview with People published on January 31, 2024, El Moussa discussed revelations he makes in his upcoming book — “Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress — in Real Estate, Business and Life,” out on February 6 — about a “blowup” with Hall that led to him fleeing their home with a gun and being apprehended by police.
“That was the last time we were together as a family,” he writes in the book, according to People, adding that he had high hopes for a reconciliation until Hall began dating — and marrying — fellow TV personality Ant Anstead.
Here’s what you need to know:
Tarek El Moussa Gives His Perspective on What Happened After ‘Blowout’ Fight With Christina Hall
GettyTarek and Christina El Moussa, now Christina Hall, in 2014
After seven years of marriage, El Moussa and Hall announced in December 2016 that they had split. Within hours, TMZ reported that the couple had actually split seven months earlier, in May of that year, following an “explosive fight” that ended with El Moussa leaving their California home with a pistol, jumping over their backyard fence and onto a walking trail behind the house. After Hall called 9-1-1, a police helicopter and 11 deputies searched for “a possibly suicidal male with a gun” and apprehended El Moussa, per TMZ.
In “Flip Your Life,” according to People, El Moussa aims to set the record straight about what happened that day, at least from his perspective. According to him, he was not “fleeing” the home; he claims he just wanted to check out the trails near their house on one of their new mountain bikes. A police report from that day obtained by Heavy made no mention of him being on a bike.
Aware that the adjacent Chino Hills State Park was a wildlife habitat with many mountain lion and bobcat sightings, he writes that he brought a .38-caliber pistol along as an “insurance policy,” and that he had received his concealed-carry license a few weeks before. He was stunned when police descended upon him, he shares in the book.
“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!'”
After he put down his gun and one of the police officers recognized him from his HGTV show, El Moussa says in his book, per People, that for the next several hours, “I sat on a cooler on my driveway, handcuffed.”
He continues, “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?'”
According to the 2016 police report, five guns were seized from El Moussa’s home that day — a Kahr K9 handgun, a Pietro Baretta handgun, a Springfield EMP 9mm handgun, a Stag Arms AR-15 rifle and a Ruger GP 100 .357 handgun.
Losing his wife and young children — daughter Taylor, now 13, and son Brayden, now 8 — was “physical and emotional hell,” El Moussa writes in an advance book reviewed by People, adding that he spent weeks “hiding out on his boat, drinking himself unconscious and going through extreme withdrawal from the testosterone he’d been taking until friends stepped in to get him to a rehab facility.”
Tarek El Moussa Had High Hopes He & Wife Christina Hall Would Get Back Together
El Moussa recently revealed that he lived in a “halfway house” for several months after Hall left him, hoping he could get clean and reconcile with Hall.
He told People, “Everybody gave up on me: the magazines, the outlets, the network, nobody believed in me.”
Eventually, he and Hall returned to filming “Flip or Flop,” even as they went through divorce proceedings and she found new love with Anstead in 2017, squashing El Moussa’s hopes of a reconciliation.
“I would say devastating would be an understatement,” El Moussa told People about learning Hall had moved on with someone else. Though tensions between the two remained high for a while, El Moussa now tells People that he doesn’t “hold anything against” his ex-wife.
“I understand why she did what she did,” he said. “We had a lot of hard years through my sicknesses and my mental health struggles from the testosterone.”
El Moussa has previously shared that their marriage — and his mental health — was marred by him going through two bouts of cancer, a severe back injury, and a resulting dependency on painkillers and testosterone.
The final episode of “Flip or Flop” aired in October 2022, after he and Hall had each launched their own shows on HGTV and married new spouses. After a brief marriage to Anstead and the September 2019 birth of their son, Hudson, Hall got married for a third time in early 2022 to former police officer Joshua Hall.
Meanwhile, El Moussa married former “Selling Sunset” star Heather Young (now El Moussa) in 2021 and the couple welcomed their first child together, son Tristan, in January 2023.
The real estate investor, who now stars in “The Flipping El Moussas” with Heather, told People that his relationship with Hall is “better than it’s been ever since the separation. We all communicate well, even Heather and Christina. We really focus on the kids.”