Tarek El Moussa Was Once Arrested for Attempted Murder After Gang Fight: 'I Would've Been Killed' (Exclusive) 

‘It’s part of my story,’ the HGTV star tells PEOPLE as she shares an exclusive excerpt from her upcoming book ‘Flip Your Life’

Tarek El Moussa tells shocking stories from his troubled youth in his new book, Turn Your Life Around: How to Find Opportunity in Adversity—In Real Estate, Business, and Life (out Feb. 6) — and PEOPLE has an exclusive first look.

The HGTV star, 42, opened up with fans about some dark times in his life: overcoming addiction, beating cancer and his very public divorce from Flip or flop colleague Christina Hall, to name a few.

But in his new book, he opens up about growing up in a rough neighborhood and shares stories that will surprise even longtime fans — the most brutal of which can be found in the exclusive excerpt below.

As a teenager, Flipping the El Moussas host writes, he was involved in a gang fight for which he was arrested and charged with attempted murder, and spent a short time in a juvenile prison.

“It’s part of my story,” she tells PEOPLE of her decision to include the harrowing details in her book, which is part self-help guide, part memoir. “We’re all a product of our environment, and I grew up in that environment. To thrive in that environment, you have to do certain things.”

Tarek El Moussa reveals he lived in a halfway house after divorcing Christina Hall: ‘I didn’t trust myself’

Tarek El moussa/instagram

El Moussa says that for him there were many more fights like this one that he includes in the book. “That one had the most extreme consequences for me, but that one was not the most extreme,” he recalls. “I’ve been in shootings, I’ve been in knife fights, I’ve been hit in the face with a bat. Whatever, I’ve had it.”

More than 20 years later, he says, he was lucky to escape that environment, but it shaped the adult man he became.

“That’s why I shared what I shared. [To show] now you can literally be a bandit, rob people, and you can change your life. Everyone can change. They just have to want to.”

Looking back on the day of his arrest, he says: “I’ll never forget it. I was terrified when I was there because the charges I had were very bad and I didn’t know if I was going to be there for days or years.”

That fight was a turning point for him. “I still had problems here and there,” he says, “but it was a big enough incident that made me really, really think about things.”

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Both my parents were fully aware of the dangerous alternatives that existed. The neighborhood we lived in was not so much white or blue as “no collar”. True, the little pocket in which we lived had some upstarts; there I first saw some of the finer things in life. But it was the least rough neighborhood in a very rough area. Parts of Lakewood and Buena Park were heavily gang-influenced. If anything, I was determined to adapt to the gang’s sense of style. In high school, I started waxing my hair and sleeping with a cap in pantyhose. I wanted to make sure my hair would be slick enough for school the next day. I wouldn’t leave the bathroom in the morning until every hair was in place and my pants had the right degree of “looseness”. Since Angelique and I shared a bathroom, this routine drove her crazy. And I lost count of how many pairs of mom’s pantyhose I cut up (but I’m sure she remembers!).

But of course, neighborhood gangs represented something much more serious than a dress code. When I started high school, I often looked over my shoulder. One after another, guys I knew from school were drawn into gangs and I saw the terrible consequences when that happened. I consciously decided to direct my life in a different direction. But first I had to survive.

Courtesy of Dominique El Moussa-Arnould

At the end of my sophomore year, my parents’ worst fears came true. I barely passed A’s in school and had a terrible attitude. My girlfriend was graduating and I promised to come the night she graduated. However, that same day, a guy I knew found out that his girlfriend had started dating someone else. I can’t remember all the details of this Romeo and Juliet story, but the guy was heartbroken and furious. Word got out and soon both sides – my friend and the rival boyfriend – decided that scores had to be settled, immediately. Later that afternoon, about fifteen of us went to the local park, ready to get into a fist fight with a rival boy and his friends…or so I assumed.

A few minutes after we arrived, it was obvious that our opponents had other plans. Two SUVs came and unloaded a bunch of guys who had their hands taped together for protection. They had baseball bats and crowbars. “Okay,” I said to myself; “we are outnumbered – we have more bodies, but they have guns.” The two sides clashed in the middle of the park. A few words were exchanged and then chaos broke out. Fists were flying, baseball bats were also flying. During the free-for-all, an older guy – maybe nineteen or twenty years old – stepped towards me and swung a bat. I tried to jump out of the way, but the club connected, hard – hard enough to break my ribs. As a reaction, I dropped my hand and knocked the club out of his hands. I grabbed the bat and hit him on the head. He fell on the pavement and lost consciousness.

When I looked up, the park was a mess, all I could hear were police sirens in the distance, and all my friends were gone. There were bodies everywhere. But then across the park I saw that the “second wave” was gathering. And these were not teenagers; they were the older brothers of the guys we just had a fight with. Some were apparently in their thirties. And they ran at me with crowbars. I was seventeen years old and at that moment I was all alone. Then the police arrived and saved my life.

Heidi Gutman-Guillaume

I can’t say for sure what happened next, but I must have passed out. When I came to, I was sitting in the back of a police car, handcuffed, charged with assault and battery, aggravated assault, attempted murder, and assault with a deadly weapon. Today, I am convinced that the police arrived at the right moment. If they hadn’t arrested me, they would have killed me.

I spent that night — the night I was supposed to honor my girlfriend by watching her graduate — in juvenile detention in the city of Orange. When the cell door slammed shut, I was terrified. The charges against me were very serious and I didn’t know if I would be there for a day, a week or years. The beds were made of bare metal, and I had no idea that the sheets were in the pillow case, so I was shivering all night with fear and cold. Since they didn’t give us toothbrushes, I had to brush my teeth with a sponge.

The second night I got a cellmate. With his bald head, wrinkled neck and tattoos all over his body, he looked like he was in his forties – much older than the people you’d expect to see in a “vacation”. He was a scary looking guy and had obviously been there before. When he saw me lying on the metal bed, he told me to look for sheets in the pillow case. Meanwhile, my parents, who were distraught, got a lawyer and worked to get me out. After a short investigation, the prosecutors concluded that I used the other’s baton in self-defense, during a mutual fight. It helped that I had a clean record. They dismissed the charges and sent me home, but I was under house arrest for about a week. I was still in pain and it took a few weeks for my ribs to heal, but I knew I was lucky to be alive.

Shortly after this episode, my psychiatrist gave me a drug called Dexedrine, a powerful drug that reduces impulsivity. This was the first time I was medicated for my ADHD and the change I experienced was amazing. It was as if everything suddenly slowed down. I could finally focus on school. By the time I graduated, my GPA had gone from a C average to a 3.8, almost straight As. But there were other consequences that were not so great. Doctors considered me “normal” for a while and I learned that “normal” got good grades – but I knew something was wrong and I hated it. In fact, I’m sure those first doses were fifty times stronger than the one I’m taking today. Overnight, I went from hyperactive, wild-eyed Tarek to a guy who just sat there, busted his ass, saying nothing and feeling frozen. The point is, it took a while to get the dosage right, and the medication did not “cure” my ADHD by any means, but I am deeply grateful for it.

In the meantime, I promised myself that I would never end up in such a situation again. On the one hand, I’ve never looked for a fight in my life. Even in my stupid teenage years, I only fought to protect someone else. On the other hand, this whole juvenile experience scared the hell out of me. Walking through the park that day, I came face to face with the worst incarnation of the “crew”, and they came very close to killing me. I saw that I would have to redirect my instinct to fight. I had to throw myself into the fights that really mattered, the ones where I wouldn’t die.

Excerpted from Flip Your Life: How to Find Opportunity in Distress—in Real Estate, Business, and Life by Tarek El Moussa. Copyright © 2024. Available on Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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