Liza Morales thought she knew how her story with Lamar Odom would end. They had been together since high school, shared two children, mourned the loss of a third and had even been engaged. For years, marriage felt like an inevitability. Then one phone call changed that entirely.
In August 2009, Odom met Khloé Kardashian. Within 30 days of meeting her, and just nine days after getting engaged, he was married. Morales found out through a text message followed by a brief call from Odom himself informing her of the news. Then, almost instantly, it was everywhere.
The wedding was filmed for the reality series Keeping Up with the Kardashians and covered wall to wall by entertainment media. For Morales, there was no avoiding it. She could not walk into a pharmacy without seeing the coverage plastered across tabloid covers. The visibility of it all made what was already a painful personal moment feel inescapable and relentless.
It was not simply that Odom had moved on. It was the pace of it, the public spectacle of it and the way she was forced to process her grief in real time while the world celebrated.
A complicated kind of hurt
What made the situation even more layered was that Morales had actually been a fan of Keeping Up with the Kardashians before any of this unfolded. Among all the sisters, she had a particular soft spot for Khloé, who she found genuinely funny and easy to relate to. Learning that the woman she admired on screen was now married to the man she had planned to build her life with was a lot to sit with all at once.
Still, time has a way of softening the sharpest edges. Morales and Kardashian have not had a formal conversation in years, but there is no animosity between them. What once felt like a wound has slowly become something closer to understanding, even if it has never been spoken aloud between the two women.
The overdose, the documentary and what came after
By 2013, the marriage between Odom and Kardashian had begun falling apart under the weight of reported infidelity and substance struggles. Kardashian filed for divorce, though the legal process dragged on. In October 2015, Odom suffered a near-fatal overdose at a Nevada brothel. At the time, the divorce had not yet been finalized, which meant Kardashian was still legally his wife and was able to make medical decisions during his hospitalization.
She paused the divorce proceedings during his recovery, and both she and Morales were present as he fought for his life. It was an extraordinary moment of shared concern between two women whose lives had been tangled together in the most unlikely of ways. The divorce was eventually finalized in 2016.
A new Netflix documentary titled Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom revisits all of it, from his NBA career and personal losses to the overdose and the long road back. The film captures not just the drama but the deeper human cost of addiction, fame and the relationships caught in the crossfire.
Fighting forward
Odom’s recovery has not been without setbacks. Earlier this year he was arrested on an alleged DUI and two traffic violations before entering a 30-day program seeking help for marijuana use. He pleaded not guilty and a bench trial is scheduled for later this year.
Despite the ongoing challenges, Morales speaks about him with a kind of steady, hard-won warmth. The two are not close friends, but they have found their way to a workable peace, shaped largely by the children they share. Last Thanksgiving, the family gathered to honor the birthday of their late son Jayden, a milestone that felt significant for everyone involved.
Morales says the path to that moment required real internal work. Forgiveness, she has come to believe, was never really about Odom. It was about freeing herself.
