Hayden Panettiere’s lifelong crippling back pain stemmed from a bizarre on-set accident where she was thrown from a zebra as a child actor.
Panettiere, who died this past weekend at 36, was just 14 when she suffered a crashing fall in South Africa while filming the 2005 movie “Racing Stripes” — and the excruciating pain tortured her for 20 years, she revealed in her memoir.
The New York native played Channing Walsh, a 16-year-old girl who turns a zebra into a racing horse, and quickly fell in love with the “sweetheart” animal she worked with, Sam – even though it had already sent two of her stunt doubles to the hospital, the actress wrote in “This is Me: A Reckoning.”
Panettiere wasn’t fazed when she mounted the animal despite its recent record – before things quickly went south.
“Trusting that he’d always be the angel I knew him to be, I mounted him without a worry in the world,” she wrote.
“At first things went fine. But when I approached what we called the ‘mounting pads,’ which were elevated platforms that helped us mount and dismount, Sam bucked – at the exact moment I tried to hop off him.
“My foot was caught in the stirrup, so my body swung up into the air, then came down hard on the ground. I felt an excruciating pain shoot through my back.”
Heath Harris, a renowned Australian horseman, rushed over to the stricken actress – asking if she was OK.
“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Panettiere recalled replying — while admitting, “It was a total lie. I was injured, in pain, and screwed.”
Knowing she was “far away from the hospital,” she said she “kept my mouth shut and endured the pain in my back and neck.”
“Over twenty years later, these injuries still bother me,” she wrote in the memoir published in May, just three months before her death from a suspected overdose.
Panettiere was 15 when she was first introduced to drugs, just months after “Racing Stripes” was filmed. She recalled in July 2022, she was given “happy pills” so she was “peppy” in interviews.
“That accident became much more than something that happened to Hayden on a movie set as a teenager,” a source close to the actress told RadarOnline, documenting its effects on her.
“She wrote about still experiencing the consequences more than 20 years later, and when the old injury became painful again, opioids became part of that story.”
Over the past year, Panettiere complained about back pain and was seen in March on crutches at Los Angeles airport, telling photographers that it was due to “pinched nerves in my lower back.”
In May, Panettiere, who was candid about her addiction battles in her memoir, revealed the zebra injuries left her with two vertebrae that had “pushed” into her neck, according to Women’s Health.
Panettiere died Sunday — just five days before her 37th birthday — having suffered a cardiac arrest following a suspected overdose. She was taking a “bag of medication” at the time of her death, cops said.
An autopsy was performed on the “Nashville” star’s body Monday, but South Carolina coroners said it could take up to 12 weeks for the full toxicology results to be released.
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