This Is Rachel Uchitel, Representing Herself

For more than a decade, a sweeping nondisclosure agreement with Tiger Woods, brokered by Gloria Allred, has ruled her life. Now she’s ready to rip it up.

Rachel Uchitel was sitting at a table in her Upper East Side apartment not long ago, alternately stoic and tearful, surrounded by hundreds of pages of legal documents. For more than a decade these have been familiar company: the wallpaper of a room she can’t seem to leave. In 2009, days after the dramatic revelation of her affair with the golfer Tiger Woods, then married, Ms. Uchitel signed a nondisclosure agreement more than 30 pages long, prohibiting her from talking about Mr. Woods with anyone. She was represented by the famed Hollywood lawyer Gloria Allred. In return for her silence, under pressure to protect a powerful man’s reputation and brand, she got $5 million and a promise of $1 million annually for three years to follow. “His lawyers are saying, ‘We want all your text messages and here’s the price,’” she recalled, “and you’re like ‘screw you’ and you move into deal-maker mode and all of a sudden, it’s the rest of your life.”