Paula Abdul Keeps Talking About Surviving a Plane Crash for Which No Record

[BUtterfield 8 41,277]

I never knew this lol

article is from last year:

On Tuesday’s episode of RuPaul’s new talk show, RuPaul (which kicked off a three-week trial run Monday on selected Fox affiliates), consummate survivor and savior of this year’s Billboard Music Awards show, Paula Abdul, took to Ru’s pink couch to promote her upcoming Las Vegas residency. In the process, she told a story she’s previously told several times about surviving a plane crash during her Under My Spell Tour, which ran from 1991-92. She said:

“During the end of my world tour, the Spellbound tour, when I was traveling from one city to the next, in a small seven-seater plane, one of the engines blew up and the right wing caught on fire, and we crash-landed. I didn’t have my seatbelt on and I hit my head on the top of the plane and that went on to... I withstood 15 cervical spinal surgeries and I had to take seven years off. And then I reappeared on American Idol.”

There are several remarkable things about this oft-repeated account that generally go unremarked. One is that this went entirely unreported at the time—a search of Nexis archives yields no news stories from the ‘90s about Abdul, who was at one point a bonafide superstar, surviving a plane crash (or even being in a plane that required an emergency landing). Ditto that on a search of Google Books. The earliest mentionof Abdul surviving a plane crash that I could find was the May 20, 2003, episode of Dateline. As she did on RuPaul, Abdul has consistently told this story to explain the chronic pain that led to a series of surgeries and explain her absence from the spotlight in the late ‘90s, though her account as to whether this led to an dependency on painkillers has varied through the years (in 2005 she told PEOPLE, “No drug ever worked for me,” while a 2009 Ladies’ Home Journal profile said, “For the first time in 12 years Abdul says she’s no longer dependent on medication”).

Another remarkable thing is that none of the plane crashes in the National Transportation Safety Board’s database remotely fits Abdul’s description, given the possible dates when such a crash allegedly took place.

Abdul wasn’t so specific on RuPaul, but in previous tellings, she has pinpointed the date of the accident as occurring between the St. Louis and Denver stops on the tour. A St. Louis Post-Dispatch story that ran June 21, 1992, placed the date of her St. Louis performance at June 19, 1992, Abdul’s 30th birthday. An Entertainment Weekly report about the summer of 1992's tours mentioned a June 22 Abdul concert at Fiddler’s Green Amphitheatre in Englewood, Colorado, which is six miles outside of Denver. In a 2014 Hudson Union Society interview, Abdul said she had “just finished onstage” when she boarded the flight.

Then, 30 to 40 minutes into the flight (the time has varied in her repeated accounts), there was trouble. “About 40 minutes into the flight, an engine [caught fire],” Abdul told People magazine in a May 2005 story. 

“Thirty-five minutes into the air leaving St. Louis, going to Denver, an engine blew up, right wing caught on fire at the other end, and crash landed in flames in a cornfield,” she said on the May 19, 2006, episode of Larry King Live, according to a transcript.

“The whole plane was in flames,” is how she described it to the Hudson Union Society.

Abdul told King there were no fatalities. Her account of banging her head against the plane’s ceiling has been consistent. 

Where the plane landed is another odd matter. When she has specified it, as she did to VH1 in 2008 and in a 2009 interview with Twin Cities radio station KDWB’s show Dave Ryan in the Morning (now The Dave Ryan Show), she’s said that the plane landed in a cornfield in Iowa. But at its closest point, Iowa is about 200 miles away from St. Louis and well north of the straight shot from that city to Denver. The flight in total should have taken some two hours and 15 minutes in total, according to Flight Sphere.

In the aforementioned KDWB interview, Abdul confused several dates. She said that the crash happened when she was “on tour at the end of ’93. It was on my birthday, too.” (As previously mentioned, the Under My Spell tour wrapped in 1992, and Abdul’s birthday is June 19.) She also said that she was 27 at the time (she would have been 31 at the end of 1993) and that she “broke through” her seatbelt during the crash.

“I was knocked out unconscious,” she recalled during the Staten Island stop on her (utterly incredible) 2018 Straight Up Paula Tour, which incorporated the plane-crash story in its narrative of Abdul’s perseverance. “And when I came to, all seven of us were holding hands. Everyone was saying prayers. But all I could think about was, ‘This isn’t right. It’s not my time to go.’ Then we crash-landed in flames in a cornfield. And I was knocked out again, only to wake up in a hospital where a microsurgeon had told me that I had crushed my entire cervical spine, which led to [inaudible] paralysis on my right side. Then I disappeared for close to seven years.”

https://jezebel.com/paula-abdul-keeps-talking-about-surviving-a-plane-crash-1835445212

[guccic0och 1,461]

43 minutes ago, Blue Lagoon said:

Then I disappeared for close to seven years

but didn't she release an album in '95