Jay Leno, the ever-popular comedian, television host, and writer, has revealed he's suffered some pretty horrendous injuries after a recent fall. The 74-year-old was staying at a Hampton Inn around 30 miles outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he was set to perform a standup routine at the Palace Theatre when he decided to head to a restaurant for dinner before going on stage.
Without a car to drive there, the former host of NBC's The Tonight Show opted to walk and attempted to utilize an apparent shortcut down a nearby hill rather than take the one-and-a-half-mile route around it. After discovering that the mound was much steeper than he had anticipated, the star fell 60 feet down it and clattered his head on a rock. Despite what happened, he embodied the age-old adage "the show must go on," as pictures posted by the Palace Theater on Instagram show he still performed.
In a subsequent interview with Inside Edition, Leno -- who was wearing an eyepatch to hide his injuries -- revealed, "I broke my wrist, lost my nail on the finger, and then I'm all black and blue." He then described how his bruises spread down the entire left side of his body.
In a separate conversation with TMZ in Beverly Hills, as he arrived at the Comedy for Koby event at the Fine Arts Theater, he described the incident by saying, "I fell down. Boom, boom, boom. I rolled down the hill, hit my head on a rock, knocked me in the eye, there you go."
Leno's accident is the third he's suffered in three years. Early in 2023, he crashed his motorcycle, broke his collarbone and two ribs, and cracked both kneecaps. Two months before that, almost exactly two years before his latest mishap, the Jay Leno's Garage presenter suffered second and third-degree burns while working on an old car in his Burbank garage.
The incident has raised some questions among the general public, with suspicion around the circumstances leading to Leno's apparent fall -- namely, why someone with a net worth of around $450 million (according to Celebrity Net Worth) would be staying at a budget Hampton Inn. Several people had their say about that on X.
The general consensus appears that, for some reason, Leno isn't providing the full details of what happened and has fabricated a story to avoid telling the truth. However, it has to be said that there's no reason to believe that's the case.
While it may seem questionable that Leno would choose to stay in a budget hotel, it's hardly entirely outside the realms of possibility. There are many reasons why that may be the case. Perhaps he's just a humble man, or maybe nothing else was available, or the Hampton Inn might have a secret luxury suite for multimillionaires that mere "normies" don't know about, or perhaps he's no longer as wealthy as widely believed. Regardless, we sincerely hope the star is well on the way to recovery and wish him well as his bruises heal.
