Laura Clery sent a desperate text to her ex-husband, Stephen Hilton, while she was “pinned” by a refrigerator in a “terrifying” freak accident earlier this week.
Hilton revealed the horrifying message he received from his ex Tuesday night in a Substack entry posted Wednesday titled, “Laura Is In The Hospital – Police, Fire and Ambulance came out..”
“I got a text from Laura at 8 PM saying, ‘I’m dying. Come by now now now,’” he wrote.
Hilton described the text as “very confusing” and admitted he thought she could have meant it in a joking manner.
“I thought, does she mean ‘I’m dying’ because of a funny text I sent her earlier in the day? But why the ‘now now now’?” He said it “seemed completely out of character” for her, so he replied with a question mark.
But Hilton, 52, couldn’t have been farther from the truth as Clery, 39, was being crushed by a 600-pound refrigerator and “couldn’t breathe.”
“I then got a call from a hyperventilating Laura, barely able to get words out, panicking, struggling for breath, saying, ‘Help me help me help me help me,’” he recalled.
Hilton explained that his first thought was that “something awful” had happened to one of their two children, Alfie, 7, and Poppy, 5, who were home during the crisis.
“I tried to get the story out of Laura, who was inconsolable and incomprehensible. Eventually, through the panic, we got to the center of it,” the British record producer and composer continued.
“I could hear her saying to Poppy, ‘Go and get me a cushion. Go unlock the door,’ all disjointed and frantic. And Pop, to her credit, was remaining calm, but saying, ‘I’m just a kid.’”
Hilton said he tried his best to keep Clery on the phone because as he had “seen in films” that “if someone passes out, they’re more likely to die.”
When he finally got to her house, he said there were “firemen everywhere, police cars outside.”
“When I arrived in the kitchen, I was stunned to find about seven firemen in the room along with two paramedics. It took three men to lift the fridge off Laura,” he recounted. “She was inconsolable and panicking, and I tried to stay calm and show her I was there.”
According to Hilton, the incident occurred because their eldest child, who is autistic, had “accidentally pulled the fridge out of the housing it was supposed to have been securely fastened to when we built the house.
It seems some work had been done on the fridge recently and out of the eight screws that were supposed to hold it in place, only two had been put back in,” Hilton said, noting that he’s “going to try and find the guys responsible.”
Hilton said Clery was released from the hospital around 3 a.m. and is recovering at home.
“She had been medicated for incredible pain that being trapped under an 600lb fridge and crushed against a marble island would provoke. She was exhausted and went straight to sleep.”
Clery spoke out about the “most terrifying night of [her] life as a single mom” in an Instagram post on Thursday.
“I was home alone getting ready for bed when my 600 pound fridge slammed into me and pinned me against the counter,” she wrote. “I genuinely didn’t know if I was getting out of that alive.”
Clery and Hilton split in 2023 after 10 years of marriage.
The comic has said Hilton’s relapse into substance addiction — which he also opened up about in his Substack post — played a big role in the dissolution of their marriage.
