Hayden Panettiere’s memoir revealed a 2005 zebra fall that left her with lifelong back pain.
The “Nashville” star, who died Sunday at 36, wrote in “This Is Me: A Reckoning” that she was just 14 when she suffered the injury on a South Africa set while filming the family comedy “Racing Stripes.” Panettiere played Channing Walsh, a teenager who trains a zebra named Sam to race against thoroughbreds. She described the animal as a “sweetheart” despite its history — the zebra had already sent two of her stunt doubles to the hospital.
“Trusting that he’d always be the angel I knew him to be, I mounted him without a worry in the world,” Panettiere wrote in the memoir published in May. “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,” she continued.
Heath Harris, a renowned Australian horseman working on the production, rushed to the fallen actress and asked if she was okay. “I’m fine, I’m fine,” Panettiere recalled replying. “It was a total lie. I was injured, in pain, and screwed.”
Knowing she was “far away from the hospital,” the teenage Panettiere 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 just three months before her death from a suspected overdose in Greenville, South Carolina.
The accident’s long-term damage was severe. In May, Panettiere told Women’s Health that the zebra injuries left her with two vertebrae that had “pushed” into her neck. She was also seen on crutches at Los Angeles airport in March, telling photographers the mobility aid was due to “pinched nerves in my lower back.”
A source close to the actress told RadarOnline that the zebra accident became intertwined with her later addiction struggles. “That accident became much more than something that happened to Hayden on a movie set as a teenager,” the source said. “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.”
Panettiere was 15 when she was first introduced to drugs, just months after “Racing Stripes” wrapped. She recalled in a July 2022 People interview that she was given “happy pills” so she was “peppy” during press interviews. “I had no idea that this was not an appropriate thing, or what door that would open for me when it came to my addiction,” she told the magazine. “As I got older, the drugs and alcohol became something I almost couldn’t live without.”
In the viral moment that defined her childhood injury, Panettiere’s zebra fall on the “Racing Stripes” set in South Africa occurred when Sam bucked as she attempted to dismount using the elevated mounting platforms. Her foot caught in the stirrup, sending her body swinging through the air before she crashed to the ground. The young actress hid her pain from crew members, enduring what she later recognized as serious back and neck trauma rather than seeking immediate medical attention in a remote filming location.
Panettiere died Sunday — five days before her 37th birthday — after suffering cardiac arrest following a suspected overdose. Police said she was taking a “bag of medication” at the time. An autopsy was performed Monday, but South Carolina coroners said full toxicology results could take up to 12 weeks to be released.