1:58
- culture
- February 17, 2021
Ashley Judd opens up about near-fatal accident
Judd thanked her "Congolese brothers and sisters" for helping her.
\"Dieumerci stretched out his leg and put it under my grossly misshapen left leg to try to keep it still. It was broken in four places and had nerve damage,\" she described before naming Papa Jean, who \"calmly assessed my broken leg\" and began resetting it.
\"How he did that so methodically while I was like an animal is beyond me. He saved me,\" she confessed before mentioning the six men who spent three hours gently carrying her out of the forest.
\"Didier and Maradona: Didier drove the motorbike [to a doctor],\" continued Judd, saying Maradona sat in the back with her and kept her from passing out.
\"Together we did this for 6 hours,\" she added.
Judd was injured on Feb. 12 when she was hiking in the Congo to research the bonobos chimpanzee, an endangered species.
She said in an earlier interview that she was taken to South Africa and is resting in an ICU to treat her \"massive catastrophic injuries.\"
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