Emma Coronel insists she had no idea who Joaquin Guzmán Loera was when she met him in 2007.
She said the ranch she grew up on in the Mexican state of Durango had no running water or electricity, and therefore no TV. So, she didn't know that the older man who wanted to dance with her at a party one night was the notorious drug lord known as "El Chapo," head of the murderous Sinaloa cartel.
"Honestly, the Emma of those times, I don't know if she really thought much about the future, or if she was just living and surviving in the present," Coronel said in the Oxygen documentary Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks. "I was young, immature, inexperienced. And he was 50 years old."
Coronel was a 17-year-old aspiring model when she met Guzmán, who at the time had been a fugitive for six years since his first escape from prison in 2001.
Guzmán is now serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in Colorado after being found guilty in February 2019 of running an international drug trafficking network.
But when he visited her family's ranch for the first time 18 years ago, arriving by helicopter while she was hanging laundry to dry, Coronel recalled, "I was just thinking, 'You blew all my clothes away and covered everything in dust.'"
And yet he was "very handsome, interesting, energetic," she said. "That's what caught my attention, what made me want to be around him."
Coronel was soon crowned Reina del Café y la Guayaba (Coffee and Guava Festival Queen) in Canelas, a moment she remains proud of to this day, despite rumors that her relationship with Guzmán influenced her win.
On July 2, 2007, her 18th birthday, she married Guzmán—who was already married and never divorced his first wife, Alejandrina Salazar—in a "symbolic wedding" at her family's ranch, with Coronel explaining that they didn't have a "civil union."
But, she noted, "It doesn't excite me to talk about my wedding or my life," adding, "I wouldn’t say it provokes anything in me anymore other than sadness."
Now 36, Coronel maintains that Guzmán never talked about what he did for a living, she never asked about it, "nor did I watch him working."
Meanwhile, she got used to living in Culiacán—the capital of Sinaloa—and seeing Guzmán at his hideouts on weekends.
To visit, she'd leave her phone at home to avoid being tracked, and take a circuitous route that could involve multiple vehicles—"There were times that I had to leave in a car, then go into a store, leave through the back door and get into another car"—and small planes that landed on "clandestine air strips" in rural areas.
"For me, that was a normal life," she said. "Now I realize it wasn't normal."
They welcomed twin daughters in 2011, and it was during a rendezvous with Coronel and their children in Mazatlán that Guzmán was arrested in February 2014 after 13 years on the run.
But when she visited him in prison he assured her, Coronel remembered, that "'Everything will be fine, I'll be out soon.'"
And he was, escaping from El Altiplano prison in July 2015 through a mile-long tunnel dug under his shower.
Guzmán was at large for six months before being captured again in January 2016.
When the proceedings got underway in November 2018, Coronel attended her husband's trial in New York every day.
"I attended of my own free will," she said. "No one was forcing me, but if I'm honest, a lot of the things that happened at the trial, I'm still trying to heal from that period of time."
Amid the damning evidence presented by prosecutors, an associate of Guzmán's testified about plotting his 2015 prison escape, alleging on the stand that Coronel was also involved.
Coronel was ultimately arrested in 2021 on suspicion of conspiracy to distribute drugs and aid in her husband's escape.
She pleaded guilty to charges related to international drug trafficking, money laundering and a criminal violation of the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act, per the Department of Justice, and was sentenced to three years in federal prison on Nov. 30, 2021.
Attorney Mariel Colon said in Married to El Chapo that Coronel never considered going to trial and risk being separated from her children for life if convicted.
"I accepted my guilt," Coronel said, "and I'm good with that."
When she was released from federal custody in September 2023, she was given four years' probation and ordered to turn over $1.5 million to the government.
Asked about her husband's alleged fortune—Forbes estimated he made $1 billion in 2012 alone—Coronel said in Married to El Chapo that she "never saw those amounts."
"I didn't even hear him mention that he had them," she added. "I'd also like them to say where it is, because I never saw it."
Now, Coronel says she's focused on shaping her own name and image. In September 2024, she made her modeling debut, opening and closing April Black Diamond's Spring/Summer 2025 show during Milan Fashion Week.
While she still wonders what life might have been like if she had married someone else, her daughters remain "the best thing that ever happened" to her.
"I'm trying to be separated from them as little as possible, even if I annoy them sometimes," she said. "I want to move forward, so that when my daughters grow up, or even now, they can be proud of me. And my intention is, I hope I don't fail again."
(E! and Oxygen are both members of the NBCUniversal family.)