Christina El Moussa Has a Few Things She'd Like to Say
Most of the stars on HGTV — a network so popular it beat CNN's ratings during an election year — lean toward a look that, well, blends in. Crown jewel Joanna Gaines of Fixer Upperis often seen in denim, plaid and baseball caps to match the Waco, Texas, scenery. Love It or List It's Hilary Farr is almost always wearing jeans and a plain, bright sweater or blouse. Karen Laine and daughter Mina Starsiak of HGTV's new show Good Bones also favor simple plaids and neutrals. Christina El Moussa from Flip or Flop, HGTV's second most popular show after Fixer Upper, will sometimes wear a conservative blouse or drapey sweater on-camera, but she'll also pair them with ripped jeans or visit demolition day in form-fitting yoga pants. She's hardly ever without a blowout and brown smokey eyeshadow. She stands out and gets noticed — but with that must come a thick skin.
Internet commenters are quick to point out if they feel Christina has stepped over a line. Many who don't even watch her show, for example, went after her for an Instagram Story she posted in March, in which she and her 6-year-old daughter Taylor showed off matching bikinis. The meanest comment she's ever read was in response to a December 2015 Instagram she posted of Taylor "feeding" her baby brother Brayden, who was born via C-section, from a bottle.
Valirangeress: Wow!! A c-section and bottle feeding?? Should have just got a cat you deadbeat fake. @tarekandchristina you are disgusting. This is why you had to struggle for another one.
"That was an emergency C-section, and I pushed for eight hours," Christina, who also went through multiple rounds of IVF before getting pregnant with her son, tells me at her home in Yorba Linda, California. "I think most people see me as a glamorous type of person, and at the end of the day, I'm more just a low-key mom."
The scrutiny Christina has had to face has only increased since her headline-grabbing separation from her husband and Flip or Flop costar Tarek El Moussa was announced in December 2016. When asked what it's been like, she makes several references to "everything."
"After the divorce…and everything..."
"Everything I've gone through..."
"Everything that's gone on..."
The "divorce" part is well-known by now: Shortly before Christmas last year, Christina and Tarek announced they were splitting up after seven years of marriage. "Like many couples, we have had challenges in our marriage," they said in a joint statement to People.com. The "everything" part, unfortunately, is also well-known: On December 12, 2016, TMZ attributed their separation to an "explosive fight," and by 2:30 p.m. that same day, InTouch had obtained and published court documents describing a May 2016 incident, where police responded to a "call of a possibly suicidal male with a gun." Christina, according to the documents, was described as "crying and shaking."
The day the divorce news broke, Christina was planning to take Taylor to Disneyland and had made arrangements to leave her son Brayden, now 2, with a friend so they could ride "the big rides." First, she had to make a quick trip to her doctor, but as she pulled into the parking lot, she heard an odd clicking sound.
"I turned around and there were six paparazzi there," she says. "I was oblivious to it at first because I'd never had one following me before, and I jumped back in the car and called Cassie. The first question she asked me was, 'What were you wearing?'"
Cassie Zebisch, Christina's close friend and publicist, is sitting with us in Christina's backyard, and the two friends burst out laughing as they're telling me this. "And I'm like, 'NOOOO,'" Christina continues, "And Cassie goes, 'What?' And I go, 'I'm wearing a shirt that says, Pink Champagne, Can't Complain!'"
Christina jokes that these days her enthusiasm for logo shirts remains but is "more strategic" — like "Stay Humble" or the one she's wearing that day, which says "Rise and Shine." But she goes on to say that the public's perception of her (materialistic, high-maintenance, there's no shortage of digs for women who put effort into their appearances) has irked her at times — mostly because it's adjacent to a much more down-to-earth portrayal of Tarek.
"Ironically, right before that, someone had alerted the media that I had 'champagne taste' and Tarek was a 'beer can kind of guy'" she recalls. Christina is referring to another December 12, 2016, article on People.com, where a "source who has worked alongside the couple for several years" was interviewed. "We definitely have the same taste as far as wanting nice things because we work hard, so if you're going to say it, at least say 'both of them.' Don't just label me," she says.
When you go back in time and understand how the El Moussa's came into their money and fame, it's easy to see why this narrative bothers Christina — and why the sting might feel worse if she's reading an interview from someone who claims to have known her for several years.
Christina and Tarek, then 22 and 24, met in 2005 while working as real estate agents at Prudential, a Fortune 500 insurance firm, in California. She had just graduated from San Diego State University, and he was the hot shot selling lots of houses, so her manager suggested she get to know him as a potential mentor. Christina was just getting out of a relationship, but Tarek was seeing someone, so they kept it professional at first. Once Tarek was single too, about 14 months later, they didn't waste much time.
"The day Tarek and I officially started dating, which was October 9, 2006, we moved in together," Christina says. They continued working at Prudential and from real estate coach Mike Ferry, they learned how to hustle, knocking on people's doors and making phone calls to land rare but lucrative expired listings. "That's what Tarek specialized in, and what he taught me," she says. "Part of Mike Ferry's thing was always big goals, big dreams," Christina says, so the couple made a dream board and kept it in their office, right out in the open where anyone who passed by could see it. It featured a wedding ring, a house with a rock pool, a Bentley, a private jet and "some Mercedes" Tarek wanted, she recalls. "The weird part is, by the time I turned 31, we had all of it."
First, Christina and Tarek found themselves at risk of losing everything. They initially lived together in Tarek's spacious home in Anaheim Hills, California, but once the market crashed in 2008, money became so tight that they had to sell his house, move into a two-bedroom apartment in the small town of Placentia and find a roommate to help them make the $1,700-a-month rent. Christina left real estate and took a job selling uniforms at a company called Cintas, while Tarek continued at Prudential, driving to and from work in his father's truck.
Their big break came at a convention hosted by Ferry, where a real estate agent took an interest in them. "He said he had a small show in Palm Springs, so we were picking his brain about that," she says. The agent mentioned that a production company, Pie Town Productions, happened to be casting for a show called House Flipper, and the couple had just started talking about flipping houses. They borrowed a friend's camera, and Christina, then seven months pregnant with Taylor, filmed Tarek and his friends walking through an open house. Pie Town sent a crew to film more footage. "I just remember driving to an auction and thinking there's just no way this is really going to happen," Christina says. "Then, all of the sudden, HGTV wanted a pilot [later named Flip or Flop], and the pilot got picked up and it was a series, overnight."
The show exploded in popularity — it now averages about 2.8 million viewers — perhaps in part because Christina and Tarek often have dueling tastes and a natural inclination to spar about it. Today, she and Tarek are filming their seventh season together, which will air in December. In earlier seasons, she says, "we were bickering about things [on-set], and we went home together." But with space after the separation, now she says they're able to do what they do best: the work. "We met at work, and we actually probably get along best at work," she says. "He handles the business side, whereas I do better with the decorating side — we just have that dynamic together."
Her memories from their marriage aren't all bad. When asked about the best gift she's ever received (other than her kids), she recalls a day shortly after Taylor was born, when she and Tarek "had just started making some money."
"My dream car was always a Cadillac Escalade with big rims, like 26s — so I was upstairs changing Taylor's diaper and Tarek called me and told me he spilled something in his car," she says. "He asked me to come downstairs and bring a towel. I heard something like a revved engine, and I looked out her window, and he'd pulled up with the exact car I liked. I had no idea it was coming, and it was our first big purchase, so I freaked out."
Christina calls herself a private person who never talked much about her relationship, even to her parents, who have been married for 44 years. And while couple's therapy with Tarek helped clarify that their marriage was over, it's created a "difficult" situation with her mother and father. At this point in our conversation, the boisterous Christina I'm getting to know freezes up and turns toward Cassie again. She clearly doesn't want to misspeak about her parents, but the strain on her is obvious. After some careful thought, she tries to sum it: "I wasn't very vocal with them about some of the issues that Tarek and I were having, so all of the sudden it's like bam — I've moved out, I'm living at my nanny's house. It came as a shock to 99.9% of people, including my parents. Tarek was talking to them more than I was at first, and that made it a little difficult because they were just hearing his side. They were hoping we would be able to reconcile, especially for the kids, and also because Tarek and I had built such a life together. We were involved in every aspect of each other's life, we still are. But in the end, it's mine and Tarek's decision, and only ours."
As for today, Christina says: "I told them I only want to talk about positive stuff. Tarek and I are still filming Flip or Flop, and #1 we have the kids, so at the end of the day I just want to be positive and not think about anything else."
The other obvious question is how the kids have handled the divorce. While Brayden, who just turned 2, will only have memories of his parents living separately, it's been more of a process for Taylor. Initially, Christina and Tarek put her in therapy so she could talk about her feelings with someone else, but that ended about four months ago. "One day, as I was driving her to an appointment, she said, 'I don't need to go to therapy anymore. I think you and Daddy are happier apart, and I don't really need to talk about it anymore,'" Christina says. "She's very open and honest with her feelings, but still I was like, 'Wow, that's a big comment for a 6-year-old.'"
As her family life has shifted, she's leaned on a close group of girlfriends for support. Cassie, her publicist, has been her best friend since they were tweens. Her makeup artist, Shannon Rhodes, is another confidante. "We talk about everything from which pair of underwear I should wear to whether I should get married or not," Shannon tells me. Christina first reached out to Cara Clark, a nutritionist, when Tarek was going through cancer treatment, and they bonded while taking taking pre-natal yoga and other fitness classes together. Now she's also part of Christina's inner circle. "The good thing about my best friends is, they've known everything — but not one thing that they've known has ever gotten leaked," Christina says.
While Shannon does Christina's makeup for the portraits taken for this piece, I notice there are tons of shots of Taylor and Brayden throughout the house, including a small cluster on the countertop beside the sink. One photo features a couple of kids and a handsome older man who is definitely not Tarek. It looks more like Doug Spedding, the 55-year-old businessman and former car dealership owner who is rumored to be Christina's new boyfriend.
Christina shares the full story. The two dated "very briefly" — about two months — before she met Tarek, but they lost touch afterward. Fast-forward 12 years, and earlier this year, they ran into each other at a hockey game. "I'm very spiritual, and I believe in things happening for a reason," she says. "I had it in my head, and it'd never been in my head before, that I was going to run into him that night. We crossed paths as we were walking down the hallway, and I was just like, I knew it."
In April, Doug called and invited Christina to another hockey game, but Christina turned him down — she was vacationing in Maui with her kids. He convinced her to have a drink once she was back in town, then dinner, and then Doug really stepped up his game for date #3: a limo to and from a U2 concert.
"During the limo rides we really caught up — L.A. traffic, you know? — so for, like, four hours we just kept talking," she says. "It just felt right."
Christina looks back at Cassie a third time, wanting permission to say what she's really thinking. "I'm just going to say it," Christina turns and says to me. "Doug was very successful, and Tarek had some jealously toward Doug. And I don't care if it's out there. It's true."
Whether Tarek harbors any jealousy toward her new boyfriend — and yes, she confirms they are boyfriend-girlfriend official — it's pretty hard not to like the idea of Doug. The guy is a solid height, at 6-feet-4-inches, and he takes his two 10-year-old daughters to hockey games, which is pretty cute. Additionally, Christina says, "He's very honest, which is hard to find in a fake world. You know how when you're honest with someone, and you can just tell there's no fluff? No ego? Anything that's on his mind, he'll just say it."
"I'm like that with everyone now," she says. "If something is on my mind, you're gonna know. Because Tarek and I lost that communication, completely, and it's so hard to get it back once it's gone."
Even as she moves on in a new relationship, Tarek still appears to be a pillar in her life: They're filming Flip or Flop together three days a week and producing Chi-Town Flip, a Flip or Flop spin-off, in addition to other projects. Just a week ago, Entertainment Tonight also announced that Christina is asking for joint physical and legal custody of Taylor and Brayden and also wants Tarek to pay spousal support in addition to covering her attorney fees. "The divorce was filed in January by Tarek and I responded to the filing last week," she wrote in an email after our interview. "We currently have joint custody of our two children and that is our plan moving forward."
Christina is confident good things are to come. "I feel very happy, calm and clear. It's my life and it's wide open," she says. Her motto is "don't overthink it," otherwise, she says, "I'll go crazy."
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