Minnie Driveris counting her blessings after a near-death experience.
TheGood Will Huntingstar shared she is recovering after getting in a car crash while she and friendBen Homewoodwere visiting France.
“Paris update is that I’m actually back in London,” Driver said in an Aug. 6 Instagram post. “I got into a really bad car accident a few days ago with my friend Ben and we somehow walked out of it. Well we didn’t walk out of it. We crawled out of it. But we did get out of it alive.”
TheStarstruckalum emphasized, however, that the collision was not because of their doing.
“To be very clear, it was not our fault,” she continued. “We were driving on a country road in the middle of France and a car didn’t stop at an intersection and was going at speed and we just T-boned it. I’m fine. I’ve got a sprained neck.”
Indeed, the 56-year-old, mom to sonHenry, 17, admitted that her biggest injury wasn’t necessarily physical.
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“I’m really in a sort of shock,” she added, “and cry all the time but I’m gonna heal and the reason that I’m not dead honestly is the car that we were driving.”
In the caption, theCircle of Friendsactress added of her emotional journey, “My brain keeps replaying the crash which is very hard but seems to be a necessary part of processing. Weeping too, feels good and helpful.”
And Driver—who has been in a relationship withAddison O’Deasince 2019—also couldn’t help but highlight the car that she felt saved her and her friend’s lives.
“We were in this little tiny Kia,” she detailed. “I’ve never been in a crash before but the kind of 360 degree airbags are what saved our lives. The fact that the entire car didn’t just crush us is down to the design of that car which is frankly astonishing.”
Although Driver joked she wasn’t trying to make her health update into a car advertisement, she acknowledged, “I want to celebrate that car.”
“I’m Minnie Driver, pun intended,” she joked. “I need to celebrate the car that saved us because we’ve got families and people who love us and I’m so grateful to be alive. So, Kia, you are a baller car company. You’re amazing. And thanks very much from me and my mate Ben Homewood and my family and the people who love me.”
For more stars who have detailed experiences in freak accidents, keep reading…
Jamie Lynn Spears/Instagram
“When we were finally able to get her out of the water and I saw her and then the first responders took her from me, we thought she was gone,” Jamie Lynn recalled on a 2020 episode of Maria Menounos Better Together podcast. “We thought we’d lost our daughter.”
Though the family wasn’t sure what sort of damage had been done, Maddie was awake and talking two days later. A few weeks after that, she was back to her normal routine.
“God gave me the blessing of giving me my daughter back,” Jamie Lynn continued. “I lost her and I got her back.”
Surrounded by a pool of her own blood, “I was freaking out,” she admitted of the 2023 incident. “They take an ambulance and they have to call a plastic surgeon, because if they didn’t, I would have been permanently disfigured. So we got the plastic surgeon, they did all the stitches, and you can’t tell now.”
He described it as “ring avulsion,” and it kept him in the hospital for 10 days as doctors worked to prevent him from having to get it amputated.
“He started to experience some hallucinations,” Ryan explained to to the SFGATE of the 14-year-old. “He knew he was hallucinating. He said he saw things like snowmen and Kermit the Frog.”
Ryan managed to stop his teen from walking off the cliff multiple times as they made their way back down the trail. “He was in an altered mental state, and I don’t know what caused it. We still don’t know,” the father noted. “My best guess is a combination of exhaustion, sleep deprivation, probably some dehydration and lasting effects from the altitude sickness. But he essentially started to doubt reality.”
And on a third attempt, Ryan was too far away to catch Zane, watching as his son fell roughly 120 feet off the cliff. After waiting six hours for an Inyo County Search & Rescue helicopter to get there and fly Zane to Southern Inyo Hospital in Lone Pine, he was stabilized and transferred to a pediatric trauma center in Las Vegas. Placed into a medically induced coma, he eventually began breathing on his own.
“It’s going to be a survival story in the end,” Ryan said of his teen, who suffered head trauma along with a broken finger, ankle and fractured pelvis, “but right now we’re still in the middle of it.”
“As I lay on the ice, my heart rate slowed, and right there, on that New Year’s Day, unknown to my daughter, my sisters, my friends, my father, my mother, I just got tired,” he wrote in his 2025 memoir My Next Breath. “After about thirty minutes on the ice of breathing manually for so long, an effort akin to doing ten or twenty push-ups per minute for half an hour . . . that’s when I died.”
Fighting broken bones, blood loss and the threat of hypothermia, “I know I died—in fact, I’m sure of it,” he wrote. “When the EMTs arrived, they noted that my heart rate had bottomed out at 18, and at 18 beats per minute, you’re basically dead.”
Chandler Police Department told USA Today that officers responded to a drowning call at a residence on May 12, for a child who had been pulled unconscious out of a backyard pool. Both police and firefighters administered CPR on the scene, before taking Trigg to Chandler Regional Hospital. But, sadly, the toddler died six days later.
Emilie later filed a lawsuit against Maricopa County public offices requesting that the court prohibit the public release of details surrounding his death. “Emilie is trying her best to be there for her surviving son, two-month-old Theodore,” the lawsuit stated. “But every day is a battle.”
As such, the orthodonist found a new reason to smile through the pain. The experience “taught me something I think we all need to be reminded of when we get caught up in the little things: What a precious privilege it is to be alive,” Cara shared, “being able to breathe, eat, talk, move your body, is something grand and something to be celebrated.”
“Today, the rescue team managed to reach the place where Juliana Marins was,” detailed a post on an Instagram account providing updates from her family. “With great sadness, we inform you that she did not survive. We remain very grateful for all the prayers, messages of affection and support that we have received.”
“I have a skin graft that they had to take from my leg,” she later detailed on a 2024 episode of her and Jennie Garth’s podcast 9021OMG. “Not many people can say, ‘Hey, I’m wearing my thigh on my arm,’ and I’m not even kidding. So I’m wearing a thin layer of my thigh on my arm because the skin burnt so bad.”
And, of course, adored by his longtime love. “He was an exceptionally talented man, with so many strings to his bow,” Haley wrote in her own Instagram post. “There really was nothing he couldn’t do. He was a fantastic friend to so many, an amazing dog Dad….but most of all he was my world & it will never be the same without him.”
Sanjay, 56, died of his injuries at the hospital following the accident, the paper reported, while 52-year-old Vishwanath sustained a severe head injury and passed months later.
Still, he detailed, “When I was in the hospital, I was told for the first four days that I may never walk again. That was really the beginning of what was a long and painful journey for me into recognizing and understanding some of the patterns that had been in my life that had led me to having numerous accidents. And the culmination was breaking my back, which was a near-death experience.”
Leaving the hospital in a back brace with heaps of physical and emotional pain, “I started partying straight away—with the back brace on,” he shared with GQ in 2005. “It took me a couple of months to realize this was my life, and I didn’t want to mess it up.”
The experience has “informed everything in my life,” he added. “Until you’re close to losing it, you don’t realize. I used to ride motorbikes and drive cars like everything was a racetrack; it was ridiculous. It wasn’t because I thought it was cool; it was just because I loved living on the edge. But I’ve chilled.”
