Gwyneth Paltrow has been vindicated of guilt in Utah ski accident from 2016 following which a man claimed the actress severely injured him and sued her, per Variety. The actress, 50, was awarded the $1 she requested in her countersuit on March 30. The 76-year-old man, retired optometrist Terry Sanderson, sued Gwyneth in Jan. 2019 for $300,000, and the televised trial had been heavily covered once it commenced on March 21.
Terry alleged Gwyneth toppled him while skiing at the Deer Valley ski resort without ever looking back. He claimed his injuries resulted in a concussion, four broken ribs, and a brain injury. The suit was originally for $3.1 million, but a judge ruled against allowing any punitive damages. The actress testified on March 24 and confirmed that she collided with Terry, but said he as the one that ran into her.
“You skied directly into my f****** back,” the Goop founder recalled yelling in her testimony, clearly unhappy about the ordeal. While being questioned by Terry’s lawyer, she even recalled debating if she had been sexually assaulted in a fleeting moment as she tried to figure out what happened. “I was skiing, and two skis came between my skis, forcing my legs apart,” she noted, “and then there was a body pressing against me and there was a strange grunting noise.”
“My brain was trying to make sense of what was happening,” Gwyneth recalled. “I thought, ‘Is this a practical joke? Is someone doing something perverted?’ This is really, really strange. My mind was going very, very quickly and I was trying to ascertain what was happening.”
#GwynethPaltrow said that she briefly thought the ski crash may have been an assault of a “sexual nature” when recalling the collision. “There was a body pressing against me and there was a very strange grunting noise,” the famed actress said. pic.twitter.com/OFEHJhA2Ku
— Law&Crime Network (@LawCrimeNetwork) March 24, 2023
In the original lawsuit documents, Terry’s lawyers claimed the Academy Award-winning actress “skied out of control and hit the back of Terry Sanderson, another skier, who was downhill, knocking him down hard, knocking him out, and causing … serious injuries,” per Us Weekly. “Paltrow got up, turned and skied away, leaving Sanderson stunned, lying in the snow, seriously injured.”
Gwyneth’s 18-year-old daughter Apple Martin testified on Mar. 28 and said she became aware of the collision after meeting up with her mom, who she claimed was visibly shaken. “My mom told me. She was very — she told us what happened… I noticed she looked a bit shocked, and I asked what had happened, and she said, ‘This A******ran into me. He ran right into my back,” she claimed in a recorded deposition.
“And I remember she did this motion saying he ran into her back and they both went down. I remember that’s what she said. She was in a state of shock,” she continued. “She decided after that she was not going to ski for the rest of the day, which she never does; she always stays on. But she decided to get off because she was in shock and she was in a bit of pain.”
Gywnth’s 16-year-old son, Moses Martin‘s, deposition was also shared on march 28. “I recall skiing with my instructor and briefly seeing the collision,” he said. “Then he skied over, and I followed him. And I saw my mother and a person behind her who had crashed.” He added, “When I skied over, I heard my mom yelling at the guy. She was saying something along the lines of, ‘What the F-word. You just ran into me.’ ”