Gwyneth Paltrow insisted Friday on the witness stand that a 2016 ski collision at an upscale Utah ski resort wasn’t her fault, claiming it began when the man suing her ran into her from behind.
The actor-turned-lifestyle influencer testified that the crash shocked her — and the way the man’s skis veered between her two legs made her worry at first that she was being “violated,” she said.
“There was a body pressing against me and a very strange grunting noise,” she said.
“My brain was trying to make sense of what was happening,” she continued. Paltrow later clarified that after her split-second panic, she realised that the sudden collision wasn’t sexual in nature.
After sitting in court for four days, Paltrow remained calm and collected for more than two hours on the witness stand. Members of the Park City jury sat transfixed while she categorically denied fault for the collision.
Terry Sanderson, the retired optometrist who is suing her, is expected to give an opposing account of the crash when he takes the stand first on Monday.
Throughout Paltrow’s heavily anticipated testimony, the founder-CEO of Goop calmly and repeatedly said that Sanderson, sitting several feet away in court, ran into her — causing the two skiers to end up splayed out on the beginner run with Paltrow on top and Sanderson beneath her.
In the seconds after the collision, Paltrow acknowledged that she yelled at Sanderson and didn’t stop to ask if he was okay. Paltrow testified that she stood nearby on the mountain as one of her family’s four ski instructors promised to give Sanderson her contact information and file an incident report.
In an exchange that touched on recurring themes of the trial, Sanderson’s attorneys attempted to depict the decision as reflective of celebrity carelessness, while Paltrow insisted that she — not the 76-year-old man suing her — was the wounded party.
“You have to keep in mind, when you’re the victim of a crash, your psychology is not necessarily thinking about the person who perpetrated it,” she said.
