Saturday Night Live alum Chris Kattan claims that he broke his neck during a sketch in 2001 in his upcoming memoir Baby Don’t Hurt Me: Stories and Scars From Saturday Night Live.
Variety, which obtained an early copy of the memoir, reported that Kattan alleges he sustained the neck injury during a sketch that aired on May 12, 2001.
The 48-year-old comedian, who left SNL in 2003 after a seven-year run, wrote that he fell back in a chair during a sketch and hit his head.
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He said that he asked for a different chair and questioned his chair’s safety but never received a new chair.
Kattan said that he felt pain and was told by a chiropractor to get his injury checked out following the alleged fall.
He claims that the incident on set “nearly paralyzed him” and led to a drug and painkiller addiction.
Kattan told Variety that Saturday Night Live executive producer Lorne Michaels and producer Ken Aymong knew about the incident.
He said that Michaels gave him the recommendation of a doctor and NBC “paid for two of the five surgeries” he underwent.
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The actor said he regrets not pushing SNL to provide additional care for him.
“Had I known how everything would end up, I would have been better off saying something about it as opposed to being quiet because I thought it would get in the way of work,” he told Variety.
“NBC had stopped paying my medical costs after the second surgery,” Kattan wrote. “The SNL family I was part of had stopped taking care of me, and soon I wasn’t able to pay for everything myself. But I never really fought for myself or demanded anything. I never thought about the potential legal ramifications of what had happened to me on the set and what was happening now. I had been brought up to be responsible for myself. I wasn’t about to sue anybody. I never wanted to be that person: spending my life debilitated and fighting a network. I wanted to hide everything, pretending I was OK and in good enough shape to be going out in public and be social.”
“Even today, I still can’t open my hand wide enough to use my fingers normally on the keyboard,” Kattan wrote in his book. “The impact that my injury and subsequent surgeries had on my career was immense, but more importantly, the fallout proved to be devastating to some of the closest relationships in my life.”
Variety reported that it spoke to staffers and insiders Kattan mentioned in his memoir but no one could recall the injury.
The actor previously spoke about his injury when he was competing on Dancing With the Stars in 2017.