Tiger Woods’ No. 1 mistress suggested yesterday that she took up with the golf great because she saw him as her “knight in shining armor” after losing her fiancé on 9/11.
As a “love addict,” “I sort of put a bag on somebody’s head and create them into this knight in shining armor that’s going to save me from this hole in my heart that really, I came to learn, was created after the loss of my fiancé in the World Trade Center,” sultry nightclub hostess Rachel Uchitel told CBS’s “The Early Show” yesterday.
“I always considered addictions something with a substance: cocaine, meth, heroin. And you know, I finally came to terms when I was spending time in rehab [with the fact] that I had a problem,” said Uchitel, 35.
“I realized what that label was. And that there was a solution to it. And I realized that that is called love addiction.
“And what that means for me is I mistake intensity for intimacy,” said Uchitel, now infamous for being the main other woman in Woods’ marriage and helping to lead to his sensational downfall.
“I missed all the red flags that people have,” she said.
Uchitel is featured along with several other B-listers on VH1’s latest season of “Dr. Drew’s Celebrity Rehab.”
When first told she was a love addict, Uchitel said, she balked.
“I was like, love addiction? What is that? That sounds ridiculous,” she said.
She said she came around to the notion after undergoing therapy with show shrink Dr. Drew Pinsky, who helped her realize the loss of her fiancé, and her father years earlier, had led to her problems.
“Losing two primary male figures in my life really affected me,” Uchitel told the NBC show.
The stunning party planner also has been described as battling addictions to uppers and Xanax.