11 Years Before Marrying 'Billionaire' Michael Jordan, Yvette Prieto Announced Bankruptcy
Jun 25, 2022; Nashville, Tennessee, USA; NASCAR Cup Series 23XI Racing owner Michael Jordan walks pit road with his wife Yvette Prieto during qualifying for the Ally 400 at Nashville Superspeedway. Mandatory Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports
Yvette Prieto now has all the luxuries in the world at her wish. However, things weren’t always this easy for her. She met Michael Jordan in 2008, two years after his infamous public divorce with his first wife, Juanita Vanoy. After dating each other for five years, they got married in 2013 with a lavish ceremony at the Episcopal Church of Bethesda-by-the-Sea in Florida. However, a lot of people don’t know that before meeting Jordan, Prieto had filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2002, which is also known as liquidation bankruptcy.

According to the IRS, Chapter 7 bankruptcy is “available to individuals who cannot make regular, monthly, payments toward their debts.” Under this, the debtors are required to sell their nonexempt possessions and use the proceeds from that to repay the amount they owe to the creditors. While for most people a setback like this could put them in serious trouble as far as their credit score is concerned, Prieto didn’t actually suffer the consequences of that event.

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The Cuban-American model was just 24 years old at the time and she went on to marry the richest athlete in the history of sports. So, everything turned out well for her. Regardless of the unfortunate time in her life, her journey from Cuba, where she was born, to moving to Miami with her whole family, to being a model, to getting married to Michael Jordan, is straight out of a movie script.

A short timeline of Michael Jordan and Yvette Prieto’s conjugal life

Jordan was married to Vanoy from 1989 to 2006, and in that time, he became the greatest basketball player and one of the most successful athletes of all time. So, when he parted ways with his first wife in 2006, his divorce settlement became one of the biggest settlements in the world in terms of transfer of funds. Jordan paid $168 million to Juanita at the time. Two years after the messy divorce, he met Prieto at a Miami nightclub in 2008. The couple immediately hit it off and started seeing one another very frequently.


As things went their way, Jordan proposed to his now wife in 2011 and the two got married in 2013 in an event attended by the who’s who of Hollywood. Even though Jordan no longer lives in the limelight, his name still holds a lot of star power across the globe. Because the couple likes to travel a lot, they use code names to avoid being noticed in public. One of their code names, which is now public information is, Harmony for Prieto and Yahweh for Jordan.