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- What Does Paula Abdul Claim About Being In A Plane Crash?
- Was Paula Abdul Really In A Plane Crash?
In the years since American Idol premiered in 2002, several of the show’s winners have become rich. On top of that, several Idol competitors that lost have gone on to do amazing things, including one of the show’s contestants who quit.
While a lot of fans focus on Idol’s competitors more than anything else, Idol’s judges have also played a key role in the show’s success. Most notably, original judges Simon Cowell, Randy Jackson, and Paul Abdul played a huge role in making the show what it is today.
On top of her years as an Idol judge, there is no doubt that Abdul has been extraordinarily fortunate. Unlike most stars who rise to fame and quickly fade away, Abdul has somehow managed to beat all the odds by having many chapters to her career in the entertainment industry.
Considering everything Abdul has achieved and the fortune she has amassed, her life has been so incredible that it almost seems like something out of a fantasy. Of course, Abdul’s life is very real but many people wonder if the plane crash she claims to have been in was pure fantasy.
What Does Paula Abdul Claim About Being In A Plane Crash?
Since at least the year 2003, Paula Abdul has claimed that she was in a plane crash in the early-’90s. In 2019, Abdul was being interviewed by RuPaul when she spoke about the plane crash.
“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,”
Still not through, Abdul went on to say that the crash resulted in her suffering major injuries that required extremely serious medical intervention. Furthermore, Abdul said that the crash was the reason she disappeared from the spotlight for years.
“I withstood 15 cervical spinal surgeries and I had to take seven years off. And then I re-appeared on American Idol.”
During some of Abdul’s other media appearances, the topic of the plane crash has come up. In 2020, Abdul was interviewed by Yahoo Entertainment and she went into detail about the medical ramifications she suffered following the crash.
“I started losing all feeling on my right side, and I was starting to really live in excruciating pain. So back then neurosurgery, especially with having spinal cord injury and having surgery, there was a 50/50 chance to get better.”
“But I was willing to try, because the quality of my life was starting to really suck, and it hurt. … From a [pain] scale of one to 10, my ‘normal’ was hovering at seven. You learn to live like that. It was not fun. I wasn’t able to do what I love, my heart place, which is dancing. That wasn’t happening.”
Abdul also said she developed reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome (RSD), a disorder that “fires so intensely that sometimes your skin can break out in lesions like shingles”. Abdul also stated that she began traveling the world looking for a cure and learned a lot.
“I felt like I could become an honorary neurosurgeon, because I knew so much about what was happening to my body.”
Finally, Abdul says she has been medication-free and pain-free for years because she “tried neuroscience. And that changed my life.”
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“It’s all through exercises that are like audio-spatial. I’d stare at a screen and look at red squares, yellow dots. I would see if the pain is easier or worse if I’m going ascending from the top of the screen, to descending, ascending from he bottom of the screen to the top, back and forth.”
“Then you do ear-irrigation and balancing exercises. It was crazy. What they did is they rewired my neurotransmitters to block pain.”
Was Paula Abdul Really In A Plane Crash?
In the years since Paula Abdul first started to talk about being in a plane crash, some observers have been skeptical of her claims. In an attempt to confirm or deny Abdul’s claims, some of those skeptics have done research into the performer’s story.
The first thing that skeptics point to is their perceived inconsistencies in Abdul’s story. A prime example of an inconsistency skeptics point to is that in 2020 she claimed neuroscience fixed her but in 2019 Abdul said she underwent “15 cervical spinal surgeries”.
Of course, Abdul possibly could explain that inconsistency. However, something else skeptics point to is that they can’t find any National Transportation Safety Board records that match the details of Abdul’s plane crash story.
Finally, there is one other aspect of the story that skeptics point to, the fact that there weren’t any news reports about the singer who was popular at the time getting in a crash.
During the aforementioned 2020 Yahoo Entertainment interview, Abdul addressed the skeptics. First off, Abdul stated she didn’t care if the skeptics believe her.
“You know what? It’s like, there are seven other people that were on the plane, who were in that plane accident with me. So, I really don’t care what people have to say. I don’t.”
“It’s like, you learn and grow through wisdom and experience of being in this business, especially with the internet. You can’t take things personally, and the things that resonate with you that can help you become better, the best version of yourself, you hold onto and you work through that.”
“If there’s something that you know you can actually work on that can improve who you are as a performer or as a professional or as a human being, I resonate with that. And the other stuff isn’t my business.”
Also during the same interview, Abdul said that the reason there weren’t reports about the crash at the time is she was unwilling to talk about the incident in the years after it took place.
According to Abdul, she “didn’t want to talk too much about it, because it took me a long time to build the career that I had, and I didn’t want to be counted out or fearful of people not understanding and thinking that, ‘Well, maybe she’s really not doing well,’”
