With Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom arriving on Netflix March 31, the former NBA champion opens up about sobriety, grief, and survival.
Lamar Odom has not watched his own documentary. It premieres on Netflix on March 31, and as of a week before that date, he has no plans to sit down with it. For someone in early recovery, revisiting the worst moments of your life on a screen is not the same thing as healing from them.
Odom, 46, is approaching 60 days of sobriety at the time of a March 24 interview. He completed a 30-day rehab stay in February following a January arrest on suspicion of driving under the influence. He has pleaded not guilty, and a bench trial is scheduled for July 7. He describes the process of giving interviews about his past as something that costs him something each time. Swimming through it, he says, to help others find their way out.
What Untold covers and what it costs Odom to revisit
Untold: The Death and Life of Lamar Odom is a Netflix documentary that traces the arc of his life from two-time NBA champion to one of the most public near-death cases in sports history. The film covers his rise with the Los Angeles Lakers, his marriage to Khloé Kardashian, and the October 2015 incident at a Nevada brothel that nearly ended everything.
On October 13, 2015, Odom was found unresponsive at the Love Ranch, a brothel roughly 80 miles outside of Las Vegas. He was transported to a hospital and spent close to three months recovering at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He suffered 12 strokes and six heart attacks and was placed in a medically induced coma. Doctors told those around him he might never walk or talk again. He defied both predictions.
Employees at the Love Ranch told investigators at the time that Odom had used cocaine in the days before the incident and had taken multiple sexual performance-enhancing pills. Odom disputes the cocaine account. He has said he did not have cocaine with him that day and that the visit had been motivated by a desire to escape the emotional weight of having just signed divorce papers from Kardashian.
He does not have a clean explanation for what happened inside that building. He has described it as feeling like a hit, and has said he does not know whether anyone might want to finish what was started. The uncertainty, real or perceived, still sits with him.
The grief that came long before any of it
The documentary does not begin with the brothel. One of the most painful chapters it covers happened nine years earlier, in June 2006, when Odom’s infant son Jayden died in his crib in New York from sudden infant death syndrome. Jayden was six months old. He shared him with former partner Liza Morales, who also appears in the film.
Odom has spoken publicly about the fact that he did not process that loss the way grief is supposed to move through a person. He was out the night his son died. He has said that Jayden looked peaceful, that there were no visible signs of what had happened, and that the death certificate offered no word that actually answered the question of why. He did not cry the way people expected. He has described his grief as something that got buried rather than worked through, and the documentary places that burial alongside other unprocessed losses as part of what fed the years that followed.
Kobe Bryant, Khloé Kardashian, and what remains
In the documentary, Kardashian describes the moment during Odom’s hospital stay when doctors offered a surgical option that carried roughly a 10% chance of success. It was the late Kobe Bryant who helped her decide to go forward with it. The surgery worked. Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in January 2020, remains a presence in Odom’s life in the most literal sense. Odom had his image tattooed on his neck after his death, a way of keeping him close.
Odom and Kardashian, who divorced in 2016, have not been in contact since a televised reunion that aired on The Kardashians in February 2025. He acknowledges the meeting did not go well and that the distance between them reflects damage he caused. He does not dispute her feelings about what their marriage looked like from her side.
What he keeps returning to, in interviews and presumably in the film, is the idea that the story is not finished. He is 46, newly sober, and carrying more than most people will ever have to account for. Untold arrives on Netflix March 31.