Laura Clery sent a desperate message to her ex-husband Stephen Hilton after he was “caught” in a fridge in a “horrifying” freak accident earlier this week.
In a Substack entry posted Wednesday, Hilton revealed the horrifying message she received from her ex-girlfriend on Tuesday night, titled, “Laura is in the hospital – police, fire, and ambulances were called…”
“At 8 p.m., I got a text from Laura saying, ‘I’m dying. Come now,'” he wrote.
Ms Hilton described the sentence as “very confusing” and admitted she thought she might have meant it as a joke.
“I was wondering, does she mean ‘I’m going to die’ because of the funny email I sent her earlier in the day? But why ‘now, now’?” He responded with a question mark because it didn’t seem “at all like it” to her.
But that couldn’t be further from the truth, as Clery, 39, was “unable to breathe” after being crushed by a 600-pound refrigerator.
“Then I got a call from Laura who was hyperventilating, barely able to speak, panicking and gasping for breath, saying, ‘Help, help, help,'” he recalled.
Ms Hilton explained that her first thought was that “something terrible” had happened to one of her two children, Alfie, seven, and Poppy, five, who were at home during the crisis.
“I tried to get the story out of Laura, but she was inconsolable and incomprehensible. Eventually, through the panic, we got to the heart of the matter,” the British record producer and composer continued.
“I heard her say to Poppy, ‘Go and get me a cushion. Unlock the door,’ which was incoherent and frantic. And Pop, to her credit, remained calm, but said, ‘I’m just a kid.'”
Hilton said she tried her best to keep calling Clery because “if someone loses consciousness, there’s a good chance they’re going to die,” as they “saw it in the movies.”
When he finally arrived at her house, “there were firefighters everywhere and police cars outside,” he said.
“When I got to the kitchen, I was shocked to see about seven firefighters and two paramedics in the room. It took three people to lift the refrigerator from Laura,” he recalled. “She was inconsolable and panicking, so I tried to stay calm and show her that I was there.”
According to Hilton, the incident occurred when their eldest son, who has autism, “inadvertently pulled the refrigerator out of its enclosure, which was supposed to have been secured when the house was built.”
“It appears that some work had been done to the refrigerator recently, and of the eight screws that were supposed to hold it in place, only two were not replaced,” Hilton said. “We’re going to look for the culprit.”
Hilton said Clery was released from the hospital around 3 a.m. and is recuperating at home.
“She was being treated for the incredible pain caused by being trapped under a 600-pound refrigerator and crushed by a marble island. She was exhausted and quickly fell asleep.”
Clery described the “scariest night of my life as a single mother” in an Instagram post on Thursday.
“As I was getting ready to go to bed alone at home, a 600-pound refrigerator slammed into me, pinning me against the counter,” she wrote. “I really didn’t know if I was going to make it out of there alive.”
Clery and Hilton divorced in 2023 after 10 years of marriage.
The comic states that Hilton’s relapse into drug addiction (which he also reveals in his Substack post) played a major role in the breakdown of his marriage.
