Exclusive: “Married to El Chapo” Trailer Breaks Emma Coronel’s Silence

Emma Coronel is finally telling her side of the El Chapo story, and The Movie Blog has your first look.

Oxygen, the network that has turned true crime into appointment television, is debuting a new two-hour documentary special, Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks. The film puts the spotlight on Emma Coronel Aispuro, the wife of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, and gives her an unprecedented platform to walk viewers through the love story, the cartel empire, and the fallout that changed her life forever.

Premiering Friday, November 28 at 8pm ET / PT on Oxygen, with streaming to follow on Peacock, Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks arrives over Thanksgiving weekend, right when families are together and the conversations about crime, power, and accountability are already happening at the table.

Check out the tense first look at Emma Coronel’s story below.

“This is not another documentary about El Chapo. This is the woman who lived beside him, finally speaking for herself.”

From teenage beauty queen to the heart of a cartel empire

The documentary reveals Emma’s story long before she was a tabloid headline. As a child growing up on a ranch in Durango, she eventually stepped into the spotlight as a teenage beauty queen. It was there, at just 17 years old, that she met Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a man 32 years her senior and already one of the most notorious figures in the drug world.

What begins as a whirlwind romance slowly turns into something far more dangerous. The film follows Emma as she falls in love with a man who is not only a fugitive, but the powerful head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Along the way, the documentary revisits infamous moments like El Chapo’s escape from a maximum security prison through a mile long underground tunnel, where he literally rode out on the back of a motorcycle.

Impossible choices, haunting questions

At the core of Married to El Chapo is Emma’s struggle to protect her family, including her two young daughters with Guzmán, while living inside a world built on secrecy, violence, and shifting power. The special leans into the “impossible choices” she faced and the thin line between victim, accomplice, and survivor.

Attorneys, investigators, and journalists who covered El Chapo’s legendary trials provide context and pushback throughout the film. Their perspectives raise the questions many viewers will bring into the room: Was Emma an innocent young woman pulled into a nightmare, or a calculating partner who understood exactly what she signed up for?

The team behind the documentary

Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks comes from Maxine Productions, a part of Sony Pictures Television, in association with Hangtime International Pictures. Mary Robertson, who has already proven she can dig into complicated, high profile stories with projects like Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV, serves as executive producer, alongside Hangtime founder and co CEO Frida Torresblanco, Ted Bourne, Eric Laufer, Cameron Penn, and Noah Evans, with Ted Bourne also directing the film.

That creative team signals that this is not meant to be a glossy “cartel chic” doc. It is positioned as a grounded, detail driven look at one of the most talked about criminal figures of the last two decades and the woman who chose to stand next to him. Emma Coronel is not just a supporting character in El Chapo’s story. This documentary argues she is a lead in her own tragedy.

We have seen El Chapo stories before. Courtroom sketches, news packages, podcast deep dives, the whole ecosystem. What makes this special stand out is the access. Emma Coronel has largely stayed silent in the broader media conversation, even as her own legal troubles and prison sentence became headlines. This is the first time she sits down for an in depth, on camera interview built entirely around her perspective.

True crime fans who are tired of hearing the same case files recycled will likely be drawn to the idea of hearing directly from the woman at the center of the story. At the same time, the trailer makes it clear that the filmmakers are ready to press into uncomfortable territory about complicity, guilt, and the cost of looking the other way.

When and where to watch “Married to El Chapo”

Married to El Chapo: Emma Coronel Speaks premieres on Oxygen on Friday, November 28 at 8pm ET / PT, with a two hour special presentation. After that, the documentary will also be available to stream on Peacock for those who want to catch up on demand.

If you are a true crime fan, a follower of high profile cartel cases, or simply someone interested in how far people will go for love and survival, this one is going to be on your Thanksgiving weekend watchlist.