Just because she believes it happened doesn’t mean it really did

Source: http://www.crazydaysandnights.net

I think this former A list “singer” turned reality judge believes the plane accident happened and that is why she got hooked on pain pills.

The thing is, just because she believes it happened doesn’t mean it really did, but it is a great story she can continue to use on talk shows.

Paula Abdul

Paula Abdul Keeps Talking About Surviving a Plane Crash for Which No Record Exists

On Tuesday’s episode of RuPaul’s new talk show, RuPaul (which kicked off a three-week trial run Monday on selected Fox affiliates), consummate survivor and savior of this year’s Billboard Music Awards show, Paula Abdul, took to Ru’s pink couch to promote her upcoming Las Vegas residency. In the process, she told a story she’s previously told several times about surviving a plane crash during her Under My Spell Tour, which ran from 1991-92. She said:

“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 and that went on to… I withstood 15 cervical spinal surgeries and I had to take seven years off. And then I reappeared on American Idol.”

There are several remarkable things about this oft-repeated account that generally go unremarked. One is that this went entirely unreported at the time—a search of Nexis archives yields no news stories from the ‘90s about Abdul, who was at one point a bonafide superstar, surviving a plane crash (or even being in a plane that required an emergency landing). Ditto that on a search of Google Books. The earliest mention of Abdul surviving a plane crash that I could find was the May 20, 2003, episode of Dateline. As she did on RuPaul, Abdul has consistently told this story to explain the chronic pain that led to a series of surgeries and explain her absence from the spotlight in the late ‘90s, though her account as to whether this led to an dependency on painkillers has varied through the years (in 2005 she told PEOPLE, “No drug ever worked for me,” while a 2009 Ladies’ Home Journal profile said, “For the first time in 12 years Abdul says she’s no longer dependent on medication”).

Another remarkable thing is that none of the plane crashes in the National Transportation Safety Board’s database remotely fits Abdul’s description, given the possible dates when such a crash allegedly took place. – Source