Oscar De La Hoya doesn’t shy away from his various controversies in part 2 of The Golden Boy — and his ex Shanna Moakler plays a key role in exploring his various affairs and more.
During the second half of the HBO documentary — which is currently streaming on Max — the retired boxer recalled setting eyes on Moakler for the first time in the ‘90s.
“I’m like this little kid in the candy store, hanging out with celebs. There’s women everywhere — beautiful women. But then I saw her. [A] beautiful, blonde-haired girl, tall, slender, looks like a silhouette. It was almost like a ghost,” he said “She was the first American that I dated. She was an actress, and she was Miss USA. For a little Mexican from East L.A., I was like, ‘Whoa, this is gonna enhance or help my career.’”
Moakler, for her part, said she knew she had just “met a soulmate” when she crossed paths with the athlete.
“He was fun. He always made me feel so beautiful,” she said. “I fell in love with him.”
De La Hoya and Moakler wasted no time as they started dating. “Being part of a power couple was things I, you know, dreamt about when I was a little girl,” she explained. “I loved the attention and loved our life. … I would go to the fights. I had a car to pick me up in my apartment and drive me to Big Bear and then we flew on this private jet. And, you know, we’re escorted by security guards and bodyguards and the secret tunnels, you know, through the Bellagio to these penthouses.”
Six months into their whirlwind romance, Moakler learned she was pregnant in 1998. “We were engaged. We moved into this beautiful dream home. It was like a fairy tale,” Moakler, who gave birth to daughter Atiana in March 1999, said. “But then things got weird.”
One of the couple’s first big hurdles came when De La Hoya’s ex-girlfriend claimed he was the father of her son Jacob, who was born in February 1998.
“I remember him saying, ‘I don’t have a son.’ And he went and bought me a tennis bracelet,” Moakler said. “I was like well, ’It’s OK if you do, like, I just need to know.’ I remember them doing the paternity test. And Jacob did turn out to be his son. And I was like ‘OK, well, we’re gonna love him and you have a son, congratulations.’”
The same year Jacob was born, De La Hoya had unknowingly fathered another son. After giving birth in November 1998, Angelique McQueen came forward and revealed they conceived a child named Devon after a one-night stand.
“I have three kids now,” De Le Hoya recalled. “It’s a huge responsibility. I just didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know how to be a parent. And my answer was to drink.”
As De Le Hoya struggled with substance abuse, Moakler claimed he became “a different person when he drinks.”
“Even now I look back on it and I just didn’t want to believe it,” she explained. “I didn’t want to believe — even though it was happening to me even though I was living it, you know, I was seeing it — maybe I was in love with the idea. You know what I envisioned him in my mind to be. Women would call me up and say, ‘I slept with your fiancé.’ And I would say ‘No, you didn’t. He would never do that to me. You just want his money.’”
While De La Hoya’s indiscretions became more frequent, Moakler didn’t want to walk away.
“I would chase him down in the nightclubs and security guards would see me and they would rush him out the back door so I couldn’t catch him. He would always just tell me like ‘No, I love you,’” she said. “And then I had heard that he was accused of rape by women in Mexico. Things like that started to happen and I stood by him because I just didn’t believe any of it.”
De La Hoya denied the rape claims after the woman filed a lawsuit against him when she turned 18. (The civil suit was settled out of court in 2001.)
“I never thought he was guilty of any of it,” Moakler said in the doc. “You know, I thought these women were just trying to make a quick buck.”
Moakler went on to recall another accusation against De La Hoya.
“We were spending Christmas in Palm Springs. His friends were having a party at our house in Bel Air, so he left and he went to that party and I was really hurt. I was like, ‘This is Christmas.’ And then another woman accused him of rape at our home,” she said.
There were no criminal charges filed against De La Hoya for the December 1999 allegation, which he denied. De La Hoya told the HBO cameras: “Did I put myself in the position where I was vulnerable? Where people can, you know, accuse me of anything? Yeah, I did put myself in positions like that. Because I was reckless. But I’m not a bad guy. I would never. It’s not in my DNA. It’s not in my bones to ever do something like that.”
After two big losses in the ring, De La Hoya fired his team and hired a business manager named Richard Schaefer.
“I just knew. I was like, ‘This is so bad,’” Moakler said.
Among De La Hoya’s new career plans was a Latin pop singing career.
“We flew to Florida and I was there for about three weeks while he recorded this album. Richard told Oscar I wasn’t Latina enough and that he needed in the public eye to be respected by the Mexican community to be with a Mexican or Latina woman,” Moakler claimed.
De La Hoya said his producer showed him a photo of singer Millie Corretjer, whom he described as “angelic.” The recording company then made it a priority for the twosome to meet and he put her in a music video.
“I went to set that day. I remember being with Richard Schaefer in the golf cart. I was saying, ‘Oscar and I are kind of having some problems.’ And he goes, ‘Well, you know, Shanna, I can’t control the heart.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, you son of a bitch! Like, you did it,’” Moakler said.
Moakler claimed that De La Hoya told her that the pair were going to “start fresh” after he returned from a trip to New York City. After she “didn’t hear from him,” as Moakler recalled, she saw him holding hands with Corretjer on the red carpet at the Latin Grammy Awards.
In the film, Moakler and De La Hoya disagreed on whether they were still a couple at the time of the 2000 awards show.
“The next day, he got in the car with me. I just said, ‘Why did you do that?’ He looked me dead in the face — he goes, ‘I don’t love you anymore,’” she claimed. “He goes, ‘Shanna, I have more money than God.’ And he got out of the car. And he came over to the window where I was sitting there bawling and he knocked on the window. And he goes, ‘Don’t be too hard on me!’ Nothing he said to me was the truth.”
De La Hoya went on to marry Corretjer in 2001 and they welcomed three kids before calling it quits in 2016. During their marriage, De La Hoya — who admitted he didn’t tell his new wife about son Devon until she read about him in a magazine — was accused of cheating with Russian dancer Milana Dravnel.
Dravnel recalled meeting “very charismatic” De La Hoya at a nightclub in NYC, claiming that the twosome struck up a “no strings” attached romance. Dravnel was with De La Hoya when he was famously photographed dressed in fishnets and high heels but denied that she was the one who took the images. After paying $1 million to unsuccessfully stop the photos from leaking, De La Hoya vehemently denied that the pictures were real at the time.
In the doc, De La Hoya detailed how he and his team convinced the world they were fake pics, hiring “experts” to comment on the images and Dravnel agreeing to lie for him.
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Parts 1 and 2 of The Golden Boy are streaming now on Max.
