Former brothel manager Richard Hunter offered rare insight into Lamar Odom‘s near-fatal overdose that caused six heart attacks and 12 strokes.
In Netflix’s Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom, which premiered on Tuesday, March 31, Hunter opened up about being an employee at the Love Ranch near Las Vegas when he caught wind of Odom, now 46, planning to visit in 2015 amid his divorce from Khloé Kardashian.
“His handlers or someone actually contacted the brothel and wanted a car to pick him up. It definitely became real when he gave him the address at where he was at,” Hunter shared. “The car went and picked him up.”
Hunter was working at the brothel the morning of Odom’s health crisis.
“It was early in the morning on Monday or Tuesday. It was a very slow day. The Love Ranch had a separate house behind the brothel. If you were spending enough money, we’d put you in the house — and I knew Lamar was there,” he noted. “He’d been there the last two days at that point. I’m sitting at my desk, I’m working and one of the girls that was with him comes running into my office, screaming.”
The room was “completely blacked out” when Hunter came in to help. Hunter said the first thing he noticed was how “heavily” Odom had been snoring, which made him think “something was wrong” with the athlete.
“I’m explaining to the [911] operator what is going on,” he said. “When I got him on his side, he just expelled. Fluid starts coming out of his mouth. He had told one of the girls that he had had some cocaine before he arrived at the brothel. Now, that would have been two days prior.”
Hunter continued: “The girl that had been with him said, ‘He also took these,’ and she holds up this packet [of sex enhancement pills]. I asked her how many he took, and she said probably 12. I looked at the package and it said, ‘Don’t take more than one every 24 hours.’”
The manager helped three EMTs carry 6-foot-10 Odom out, adding, “Because of his size, they weren’t going to be able to get him on the stretcher to wheel him out. So we had to pull up the fitted sheet that he was on on the bed, and each of those three guys took a corner. I took the fourth corner and we held the sheet. We walked him out of the suite, and when the sun hit his face, I had one of the corners that was up by his head. I looked down at his face and I just remember thinking, ‘This guy may be dead.’”
Odom — who struggled with substance abuse for years — was left comatose following the overdose at the legal brothel in Crystal, Nevada. In the aftermath, Odom struggled to regain his ability to walk and talk while the owner of the Love Ranch, Dennis Hof, used the incident as a way to score more press. (Hof died on the property in 2018 at age 72.)
Later in the documentary, Hunter recalled a bidding war for items from Odom’s near-death experience.
“They wanted the receipt that Lamar signed where he paid a tab of $75,000 up-front. They also wanted the footage,” he noted. “A bidding war ensued. Denis gave it to the Today show. The deal he works out is [then-host] Matt Lauer was sitting there and he said, ‘Joining us now is the owner of the Love Ranch and the author of The Art of the Pimp, available in bookstores everywhere.’ If I didn’t know it before, I knew after that. In terms of what we were going to do or would be willing to do for publicity, there wasn’t a limit.”
Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom is streaming now on Netflix.
