Information from Elin Nordegren’s lone interview regarding her breakup with Tiger Woods
I can’t forget that day, it was like the end of the world!
“Give Daddy kisses,” says Elin Woods, cuddling her two children—one on each hip—in the garage doorway as they return from their father’s house a mile around the corner. In this moment, she and Tiger Woods are simply two parents working together, discussing when Sam, 3, last ran a fever and how long Charlie, 19 months, napped that afternoon. Sam, all smiles, wiggles to be put down so she can make her presentation: a pink Barbie Band-Aid that she tenderly places over a spot between her mother’s eyebrows. “For Mommy’s boo-boo,” the girl says.
Five days later, with the Aug. 23 execution of the couple’s divorce agreement, the fiercely private golden girl married almost six years to the world’s most famous athlete legally reclaimed her identity as Elin (pronounced EE-lin) Nordegren and hoped that healing the more profound hurts—those she won’t let her children see—would begin.
About walking away with a settlement that neither she nor Woods will disclose but is estimated to be more than $100 million (nowhere near the rumored $750 million, which would be the bulk of Woods’ net worth), Nordegren says plainly, “Money can’t buy happiness.” She pauses. “Or put my family back together.”
Before she can close this chapter of her life, she wants, finally, to say her piece. But opening a window into her private thoughts was not a decision she came to easily.
After the drama of last Thanksgiving weekend, when Woods, 34, crashed his car at the bottom of the driveway and she watched his double life unspool across months of tabloid headlines, the Swedish-born Nordegren, 30, faced down the press with silence.
“My plan was to just stay the way I was,” she explains in her crisply accented voice. “For my kids, I felt that [remaining private] was the only normalcy I could give them, since they have a very famous dad. But after everything that happened and everything that was written and speculated—what I did or didn’t do—I felt like setting some things straight.”
Most important, she wants the world to know that she was blindsided by her husband’s betrayal. “I’m so embarrassed that I never suspected—not a one. For the last 3 1/2 years, when all this was going on, I was home a lot more with pregnancies, then the children and my school.”
The final exam for a summer course toward her bachelor’s degree in psychology was looming — and both kids were battling a fever — when, on Aug. 15, she invited a PEOPLE reporter to the rented Windermere, Fla., home where she, Sam and Charlie have lived since the end of December.
In 19 hours over four visits, Nordegren opened up about what she was feeling in the crucible that was her life these past nine months. “I’ve been through hell,” she says at her kitchen table. “It’s hard to think you have this life, and then all of a sudden—was it a lie? You’re struggling because it wasn’t real. But I survived. It was hard, but it didn’t kill me.”
In some ways, she says, it is almost liberating to be out from under the PGA schedule and corporate apparatus that grew up around her husband. She is now the ruler of her own world, living on her own for the first time in her entire life, and Woods needs her permission to get past the guard of her gated community.
There were ground rules for the Q&A in these pages: Nordegren would talk through PEOPLE’s questions but then write out her answers, saying she is still not 100 percent confident in her spoken English. And she refused to allow Sam and Charlie to be photographed for this story: “I want to shelter them as much as I can.”
Shelter, for now, is the five-bedroom rental with its borrowed furniture that she originally intended as a temporary place while she and Woods worked on their marriage. “They asked me to sign a year’s lease, and I thought, ‘Whoa. I’m only going to be here a month!’” She won’t say when or why she decided that reconciliation wasn’t possible — only that “we tried for months and months” before she concluded that a marriage “without trust and love” was good for no one.
In those months she motored through the business of motherhood and generally stayed busy as a way of coping. The 21-year-old nanny, Marie (who, like the part-time housekeeper, moved with Nordegren in the split), taught her and the children to bake, and they all produced endless batches of cupcakes.
RICK MENDOZA / SPLASH NEWS
In what had been a game room, Nordegren turned the wet bar into a diaper-changing station and removed the pool table to make room for dance parties to the Pippi Longstocking soundtrack. She read stacks of picture books to the children — in both English and Swedish — and whenever she could, she’d take off for a run or a bike ride. “I’ve not watched one minute of golf,” she declares.
Only at night, before Sam inevitably wandered into her bed, would Nordegren allow herself to be alone
