Veteran TV journalist Fernando del Rincón got his start in Mexico when he was just 16, scraping to become an anchor of TV Azteca's national news before landing an even bigger dream job: A gig in the United States as co-host of Primer Impacto, Univision's investigative news magazine show.

In Mexico, he regularly dodged death threats thanks to his hard-hitting exposés of police and government corruption, learning how to take serious peril on the chin for the sake of the story.

But he fell to pieces early this year, sobbing on Telemundo after his ex-wife Carmen Dominicci (they had met about five years earlier as co-hosts of Primer Impacto's weekend edition) accused him of roughing her up in a Dominican Republic hotel room several months before their divorce in November.

``The most difficult of all of this is,'' Dominicci told People en Español magazine, ``beside the fact that the victim of domestic abuse is always questioned, that there are always attacks saying she's a liar, that perhaps she provoked it -- comments that denote ignorance and machismo -- the most difficult has been confronting commentaries that imply that because I denounced someone else 15 years ago for the same kind of incident that makes you somehow the origin of the problem.''

Right after the divorce, Univision canned Dominicci for publicly airing details of her personal drama. In December, the network also let del Rincón go after he responded to the accusations, saying he never beat Dominicci. (An investigation in the Dominican Republic has produced no charges against him.)

The media ate up the scandal, and, for a while, the model-pretty, well-known del Rincón and Dominicci dominated the Spanish-language news. Reporters went after them with almost as much fervor as they spent hounding misbehaving priest Alberto Cutié.

``It affected me. I see life in a different way now. This whole thing hit me very hard,'' del Rincón, 39, says over crab wantons at PF Chang's near Brickell. He's been back in front of the camera since April, when he became host of Mega TV's Paparazzi TV Sensacional, a nightly show that focuses on entertainment and breaking news. The young network, owned by Spanish Broadcasting System, reaches about 11 percent of the U.S Hispanic market and is gaining ground through its relationship with DirecTV but can't claim anywhere near the national ratings of Univision, which reaches 90 percent of the U.S. Hispanic market.

Nonetheless, del Rincón is thrilled to be back on the air. He is also a host of Romance 106.7 FM's morning show, also part of SBS.

``When I look back, I don't know how I was able to keep going,'' he says. ``When I got kicked out of Univision, people said I would have to go back to Mexico. I worked so hard for a career that seemed over.

``Four months later I was anchoring a TV show with a network that is much fresher and takes more chances than Univision and Telemundo. I never hid when I was getting all those death threats in Mexico, because there was nothing I could do about that. If someone is going to kill you, it's boom, and you're done. But with this scandal, I would lock myself at home. There were so many rumors, and I was so embarrassed. I didn't want people to say negative things to me on the street, even though, when I went out, nobody did. But I didn't want to see anybody.''

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