Eighteen years after it happened, Ali Landry still recalls her short-lived marriage to Mario Lopez – and all that came with it – as ‘horrible.’ The two had dated for six years, after meeting at the 1998 Miss Teen USA pageant, but their union was annulled after just two weeks.
“Not even a week after, I found out that it was, like, a Tiger Woods situation,” Landry told Lacey Leone McLaughlin on the Unfolding Leadership podcast. “It was, you know, cheating across the board, with some women for one year, some women for two years.”
The revelation made Landry question everything. “I thought to myself, ‘How did I, how did I miss this?’ Then I looked at myself and thought, ‘How did I even end up with a person like that? Like, what part of me… what did I do in this situation?’ It couldn’t be all him…,” she said before adding that most of it was him. “And moving forward, like, it was devastating. It was truly, like, devastating. And I made a commitment that moving forward, I was gonna take the blinders off, number one. And I was gonna walk through, you know, my life in full awareness and really being aware of my choices, and those choices were gonna represent who I was as a person. And with everything. Not just with the person that I chose but also with my career. And that was the biggest shift in my life.” After that, Landry said, she took more ownership in her career too. She no longer allowed agents and managers to tell her what she should do, which meant changing her people-pleasing ways. -Agency
