Who is Tiger Woods’ wife Elin Maria Pernilla Nordegren Woods? – PHOTOS

Until recently no one’s really paid attention to Tiger Woods’ wife, the pretty blonde Swedish model Elin Nordegren. She’s a beautiful woman who’s always smiled sweetly by Tiger’s side and posed in charming family photos as their family grew. The Woods have stayed quiet and their personal life has stayed out of the media until that fateful late Thanksgiving night / early Black Friday when a disoriented Tiger Woods got into a strange car accident. Refusing to speak to police, Tiger is raising suspicion even more about what happened that night.

Tiger’s wife, Elin Nordegren told police that she rescued Tiger by smashing out windows with a golf club, but sources told TMZ that Elin herself might have inflicted the wounds on Tiger’s face and that she was beating his SUV with the golf club out of pure rage over tabloid reports about another woman, Rachel Uchitel.

So who is Elin Nordegren? Here are a few facts we were able to drum up about Elin’s life and biography.

Elin Maria Pernilla Nordegren Woods was born January 1, 1980 in Stockholm, Sweden, and has an idential twin named Josephine. She worked as a swimsuit model and au pair to golfer Jesper Parnevik before her marriage to the famous golf champion. Her parents, Barbor Holmberg and Thomas Nordegren have had distinguished careers, and raised Elin in an intellectually charged environment. Her mother, Barbo, is a policitian and former migration and aslym policy minister of Sweden. Her father, Thomas, has served as bureau chief in Washington, D.C for the Swedish Broadcasting media. They divorced when Elin and Josephine were six. They spend most of their childhood in Stokholm, but did spend a year in D.C. with their father, attending the prestigious John F. Kennedy School.

In her early twenties, after a brief modeling carreer, Elin was already familiar with the golf community through her nanny work with Jesper Parnevik. She was going to law school in Sweden and had dreams of becoming a child psychologist when Jesper’s wife Mia Parnevik hired her to be a nanny. Tiger was smitten with the blonde beauty, but too shy to ask her out himself. Instead he sent a friend, which got him rejected straight away. Her friend told Sports Illustrated: “Her reaction was, ‘What the hell was that?'” says the Parneviks’ friend. “She thought it was so weird and pathetic. Of course she said no.”

Eventually she came around, and the pair started dating privately. Tiger Woods greatly values his private life, even naming his Yacht “Privacy.” However, as things got more serious, it was impossible to keep their relationship secret. Everyone discovered Elin Nordegren as Tiger Woods’ love in 2002, but she was prepared; she had a preapproved stockpile of glamour shots to release into the world. In August ’02 some nude pictures surfaced that were supposedly Elin, but were later identified as Playboy model Kim Hiott. Nordegren won a lawsuit against The Dubliner magazine after they published the nude photos of Kim Hiott, claiming that they were Elin. The magazine, which published the article under the title “Ryder Cup Filth For Dublin?” was required to donate $180,000 to charity and issue a number of apologies in various venues.

Elin’s family, including her brother Axel, an economist, has been extremely unhappy with the media exposure her marriage to Tiger Woods has caused, so I’m sure they’re not at all happy about the media coverage this current scandal has caused. Although for years the couple has managed to avoid controversy and media coverage by laying low and keeping quiet, staying quiet about this peculiar incident will online feed the rumor mills more fodder.

Tiger released a statement on his website apologizing for what happened, and stating that he’ll make sure it never happens again. But there’s a flaw in his argument: if this is just supposed to be a fluke accident that had nothing to do with a domestic fight, how can he ensure it will never happen again?

Be sure to check out our ELIN NORDEGREN GALLERY for 20 high-resolution images from Elin’s modeling days!

Sources: (Golf.com, PopEater, The Daily Beast)

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Just for bonus, here’s a swimsuit pic of Elin: