Hayden Panettiere was haunted by back pain from bizarre on-set accident with a zebra

Hayden Panettiere’s lifelong crippling back pain stemmed from a bizarre on-set accident where she was thrown from a zebra as a child actor.Panettiere, who died this past weekend at 36, was just 14 when she suffered a crashing fall in South Africa while filming the 2005 movie “Racing Stripes” — and the excruciating pain tortured her for 20 years, she revealed in her memoir.The New York native played Channing Walsh, a 16-year-old girl who turns a zebra into a racing horse, and quickly fell in love with the “sweetheart” animal she worked with, Sam –  even though it had already sent two of her stunt doubles to the hospital, the actress wrote in “This is Me: A Reckoning.”Panettiere wasn’t fazed when she mounted the animal despite its recent record – before things quickly went south.“Trusting that he’d always be the angel I knew him to be, I mounted him without a worry in the world,” she wrote.“At first things went fine.

But when I approached what we called the ‘mounting pads,’ which were elevated platforms that helped us mount and dismount, Sam bucked – at the exact moment I tried to hop off him.“My foot was caught in the stirrup, so my body swung up into the air, then came down hard on the ground.I felt an excruciating pain shoot through my back.”Heath Harris, a renowned Australian horseman, rushed over to the stricken actress – asking if she was OK.“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Panettiere recalled replying — while admitting, “It was a total lie.

I was injured, in pain, and screwed.”Knowing she was “far away from the hospital,” she said she “kept my mouth shut and endured the pain in my back and neck.”“Over twenty years later, these injuries still bother me,” she wrote in the memoir published in May, just three months before her death from a suspected overdose.Panettiere was 15 when she was first introduced to drugs, just months after “Racing Stripes” was filmed.She recalled in July 2022, she was given ...