Lamar Odom is owning up to his faults in his new memoir, Darkness to Light. In exclusive excerpts shared with People, the former Lakers player, who was married to Khloe Kardashian, opens up about his vices, including his insatiable cravings for sex and drugs.
“I’ve been obsessed with sex for as long as I can remember. I am a sex addict — I’ve had sex with more than 2,000 women,” he admitted in his memoir. “There were too many strippers to count. It wasn’t a big deal, but often, I would pay them. I never thought less of them.”
“My sex addiction and my cocaine addiction go hand in hand,” he continued. “The first time I tried cocaine was in 2004. The rush was like nothing I’d felt before. I was a drug addict, plan and simple. the first time I overdosed, I came within minutes of dying.”
It was both of those addictions that nearly cost him his life in 2015. Odom, now 39, was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel after ODing on cocaine and other drugs, the Associated Press reported at the time. He was in a coma for three days, and during that time, suffered 12 seizures and six strokes.
Kardashian, his then estranged wife whom he married in 2009, immediately flew to his side to support him, despite numerous rumors of his cheating. “Khloe never left my side,” he wrote.
Odom admits that while he was faithful to her in the beginning, he eventually strayed from the reality TV star. “My cocaine use spiked in the summer of 2011, and I rarely touched a basketball. I could not handle the lethal cocktail of the spotlight, addiction, a diminishing career and infidelity,” he confessed in his tome. “I couldn’t keep my d—k in my pants or the coke out of my nose.”
They finalized their divorce in December 2016.
