The Netflix documentary Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom dropped today, March 31, 2026, as the opening entry in the fourth volume of the streamer’s acclaimed sports documentary series. It covers all of it. The two NBA championships.
The marriage to Khloe Kardashian that happened 30 days after they met. The drug addiction that ran quietly beneath the celebrity surface for years before it stopped being quiet.
The October 2015 overdose at a Nevada brothel that produced 12 strokes, six heart attacks, and a four-day coma. The recovery that Khloe managed almost entirely on her own.
The moment she walked up a set of stairs in a house she was paying for, six months after that coma, and found him sitting on the edge of a bed smoking crack.
“I just punched him in his face,” Khloe said in the documentary. “I just put my life on hold to f–king take care of you. How did you get this? You don’t have a f–king phone. You can’t talk.”
It turns out he did have a phone. He was, as Khloe put it, “better than I knew.”
Directed by Ryan Duffy, who serves as showrunner of the Untold franchise, the film features candid interviews with Odom himself, Khloe, the former manager of the Love Ranch brothel, and others.
Lamar Odom is 46 years old and approximately 56 days sober at the time of the documentary’s release. He has not watched it.
Who Is Lamar Odom?
Lamar Odom was born November 6, 1979, in Jamaica, Queens, New York. He grew up in difficult circumstances, losing his mother to colon cancer when he was 12.
He was raised largely by his grandmother, Mildred. He was drafted fourth overall by the Los Angeles Clippers in the 1999 NBA Draft out of the University of Rhode Island after one season and became one of the most uniquely skilled players of his generation, a 6-foot-10 forward with point guard instincts who could handle, pass, shoot from range, and defend multiple positions.
He was traded to the Miami Heat in 2003 and then to the Los Angeles Lakers in 2004 as part of the Shaquille O’Neal trade.
With the Lakers, Odom won back-to-back NBA championships in 2009 and 2010 alongside Kobe Bryant.
He was traded to the Dallas Mavericks in December 2011, a move the documentary suggests accelerated his drug use significantly, and then returned to the Clippers, who had originally drafted him, the following summer.
His basketball career also carried private grief throughout. In June 2006, his six-month-old son Jayden with longtime girlfriend Liza Morales died of sudden infant death syndrome.
He and Morales, who had been together since high school in Queens, also share daughter Destiny, now 27, and son Lamar Jr., now 23.
Both appear in the documentary. Destiny said of her father’s struggles,
“Rejection from a parent is extremely hard and hurtful, and it definitely pains your development growing up. There’s some moments you never forget. Now I know he was partying and using.”
The Marriage
Khloe Kardashian and Lamar Odom met in 2009 at a party thrown by Lakers teammate Ron Artest, later known as Metta World Peace. Khloe agreed to host it, she said in the documentary, largely because her brother
Rob was a devoted Lakers fan. She did not know who Lamar was before that night. He did not know who she was either.
He described his initial intentions with characteristic bluntness,
“The first night, I’ll be honest, I was trying to f–k her. She’s like, ‘Nah, it ain’t that type of party.’ Got with her the next day, and then the next day turned into the next day, and then…”
He proposed with a nine-carat diamond ring and they married on September 27, 2009, a month after meeting.
Khloe acknowledged the optics. “We were getting married in 30 days. That is insane.” Lamar’s approach to it was: “You gotta have a gut feeling and some big balls.”
Liza Morales was notified of the wedding by text and said in the documentary she thought he was joking.
His children were not at the ceremony. His son L.J. said, “I don’t think he told me he was marrying her.”
The show Khloe & Lamar premiered April 10, 2011 on E!, though Khloe said in the documentary that the show was “led very much by Lamar” and that she had doubts about it from the start, worrying it would cannibalize the family brand.
Lamar’s own account of why he wanted to do it was characteristically direct, “Part of the deal was that, ‘If I’m gonna marry you, f–k it, I want in too.'”
The marriage deteriorated as Lamar’s drug use escalated and became impossible to hide. Khloe described cleaning up after him in hotel rooms, looking for him in alleys and motels, and finding foil cutouts and spoons from freebasing.
“I was either looking for him in alleys, looking for him in motels,” she said. “I was such an enabler without knowing I was an enabler, but I just felt such a responsibility to cover this up, hold it together and protect him.”
She found out he was cheating when a woman called her directly and said, “I’ve been f–king your husband. He is so f–ked up and he just keeps wanting money and drugs, and I’ve got to get off this ride. So will you come and pick him up?”
She filed for divorce in December 2013. The proceedings were almost complete by October 2015.
The Overdose
On October 13, 2015, Lamar Odom was found unconscious in a room at the Love Ranch, a legal brothel roughly 80 miles outside of Las Vegas in Crystal, Nevada. He had been there for several days.
Employees told investigators he had used cocaine in the days preceding the incident and had taken ten doses of a sexual performance-enhancing supplement since arriving.
He was airlifted to Sunrise Hospital in Las Vegas.
Odom told both Sports Illustrated and USA Today in interviews ahead of the documentary’s release that despite having cocaine in his system, he did not actually take cocaine that day.
“I didn’t have any cocaine to take to the brothel that day,” he said. “And I was kind of f—–g heated that I just signed these divorce papers and I thought I was going to live out a young addict mind’s dream and go to this brothel with some cocaine. And that just wasn’t the case.”
He suffered 12 strokes and six heart attacks. He was placed in a medically induced coma for four days. Doctors told those around him he might never walk or talk again. He defied both predictions.
In the documentary trailer, he described what he experienced during the coma. “The afterlife is not what people make it out to be,” he said.
He has not elaborated extensively beyond that statement, but the remark is consistent with other interviews he has given, in which he described the experience as deeply unsettling and nothing like what he had expected.
Khloe, still legally his wife at the time since the divorce had not yet been finalized, flew to Las Vegas immediately after sister Kim Kardashian called her.
She found Lamar’s father Joe Odom at the hospital ready to remove him from life support. Khloe intervened. “I’m still his wife. What do you need?” Joe Odom asked for a pair of Nikes, $100, and a hotel room. He left and never came back.
Khloe put visitation on lockdown, requiring her personal authorization for anyone to enter. She stayed for approximately four months, every day. After three days in the coma, Lamar woke briefly.
“He says, ‘Hey, baby,’ and falls back asleep,” Khloe recalled. He was then transferred to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, where he remained until early January 2016. Khloe had put the divorce proceedings entirely on hold.
Odom’s Life After The Coma
When Lamar was discharged, Khloe rented him a house near her home in Calabasas, hired a caretaker and a personal chef, and organized a rehabilitation plan. She was, as she described it, determined to see him walk and move again.
In May 2016, she stopped by the house unannounced. She smelled something she recognized.
“Once you know the smell of crack,” she said in the documentary, “it’s the most identifiable, disgusting smell, and there’s nothing you can confuse it with.”
She tiptoed up the stairs. He was in his bedroom, on the edge of the bed, smoking crack. She punched him.
She told him he had until Monday to be out of the house. She said she was done paying for anything and never wanted to speak to him again.
He had somehow acquired a phone she didn’t know about and had been managing the situation far more actively than she realized. “He was playing me so I can continue this lifestyle for him,” she said. She refiled for divorce. It was finalized in December 2016.
They did not see each other in person for nine years. When they finally reunited, as shown on The Kardashians in 2024, Lamar told her he didn’t remember how that moment went down but did not want to dismiss it.
“That s–t shouldn’t have happened,” he said. In the documentary, reflecting on who would give someone cocaine after what he had just survived, he said simply: “That’s f–ked up.”
Where Is Odom Now?
On January 8, 2026, Lamar Odom was arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence on Interstate 15 in Las Vegas at speeds reported above 100 miles per hour.
Officers noted a marijuana odor in the vehicle and bloodshot eyes. He has pleaded not guilty. A bench trial is scheduled for July 7, 2026.
On January 29, he voluntarily checked into the iRely Recovery facility in Los Angeles, which he completed on February 25. He has approximately 56 days of sobriety at the time the documentary releases. He has not watched it.
He told Rolling Out in a March 24 interview that giving interviews about his past costs him something each time. He describes doing it to help others find their way out.
Odom launched Odom Wellness Treatment Centers ahead of the documentary as part of his ongoing public commitment to addiction recovery. His own recovery, as this documentary makes clear and as his January arrest underlines, is not a finished story. He is still in it.
Untold: The Death & Life of Lamar Odom is streaming now on Netflix.
