Celebrities—they’re just like us!
We recently covered a strange story out of Michigan last week, where a woman connected to a Zoom court hearing while driving her car down the road—and then tried to gaslight the judge about this fact. At the end of that piece, I noted just how often I see similar kinds of distracted driving, where people are (illegally in my state) one-handing cell phones even while navigating tricky intersections.
Famous people aren’t immune from this kind of behavior, either. Police in Martin County, Florida, today released their affidavit used to arrest golfer Tiger Woods after a car crash last week near his home. Woods was driving down a residential street, apparently at high speed, and managed to clip the trailer of another vehicle. He then swerved hard enough to flip his vehicle onto its side as it went skidding down the road. Woods had to be helped out through the front passenger-seat window of his SUV.
Woods blamed his cell phone use, though it sounds like he had actually been messing with both his phone and the vehicle’s radio. According the affidavit, Woods told police at the scene that he had been “looking down at his cell phone and changing the radio station and did not notice [that] the vehicle in front of him had slowed down.”
Manipulating a cell phone and a radio would be distracting enough if one’s faculties were running at full tilt, but the affidavit also noted that Woods had two hydrocodone tablets in his pocket, was “sweating profusely,” and had “bloodshot and glassy” eyes. Field sobriety testing led police to conclude that Woods was impaired—though he denied any recent alcohol consumption—and should not have been driving.
Woods has had a long and well-documented history of these kinds of problems. This isn’t even the first time Woods has flipped his vehicle. Woods has said in the past that he has had issues with prescription painkillers stemming from his numerous back and leg surgeries.
