Comedian Laura Clery says she nearly died inside her own kitchen Monday night after a 600-pound stainless steel refrigerator toppled forward and crushed her against the counter while her two young children were inside the Los Angeles home.
Clery, 39, recounted the harrowing accident in a series of videos and posts shared from her stretcher, the back of an ambulance and, eventually, her hospital bed. The single mother of two — son Alfie, seven, and daughter Poppy, five, whom she shares with ex-husband Stephen Hilton — said she was preparing for bed when her son tried to climb the French door fridge, knocking it slightly out of place.
What she thought would be a quick fix nearly killed her.
A Routine Push Turns Catastrophic
“I thought I’d just nudge it in and move on with my day like a woman who has control over her life,” Clery wrote on Patreon. “The second I pushed it, it came down on me, not slowly.”
The full weight of the appliance slammed her backward into the kitchen island, pinning her lower back and hips. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. Her attempts to shove it off, she said, felt like pushing against a building.
Inside the house, panic erupted. Her daughter began to cry. Her son bolted outside in fear. Clery, alone and crushed, said the pain rivaled labor contractions at full dilation. She could feel consciousness slipping away — and with it, she feared, any chance of getting help to her children before morning, when she was supposed to drive them to school.
Her phone, by sheer luck, was still in her pocket. She dialed 911.
Firefighters Break Through the Garage
Three firefighters arrived within minutes, breaking through her garage door to reach her. Together, the men lifted the refrigerator off her body and carried her out of the home on a gurney. One of them, she later recalled, recognized her mid-rescue.
“And then right as one of them pushes the fridge off me, he goes, ‘Wait… I watch all of your videos!’ and they all start hyping me up. Like sir… I am currently being flattened, but thank you,” Clery wrote in a post thanking the first responders.
Footage Clery filmed from the stretcher shows her in a neck brace, oxygen tube in her nose, groaning and asking emergency responders whether she had broken anything. They couldn’t say for sure — so they rushed her to a trauma center.
In one clip from the ambulance, she turns to a paramedic and asks, almost in disbelief, “So I was crushed by a 600-pound fridge, is that correct?” The paramedic answers simply: “Yes.”
Fentanyl Fears for a Recovering Addict
The comedian and podcast host, who has built a sizable following on YouTube with her vlogs and sketches and once played a receptionist in Season 2, Episode 18 of “2 Broke Girls,” is also open about her sobriety. When paramedics offered her fentanyl for the severe pain, she hesitated. As a recovering addict, the prospect frightened her.
She ultimately accepted the medication and later said she was grateful she did, describing the pain as so intense it barely felt real.
Remarkably, despite being trapped under hundreds of pounds of steel, Clery suffered no broken bones. She is now recovering at home.
Plans to Sue the Installers
Clery has made clear she intends to take legal action against the appliance installers, arguing the refrigerator should never have been able to topple in the first place.
“This is a nearly 600-pound stainless steel French door fridge that was NOT properly mounted into the wall,” she wrote on Facebook. “Because of that, my 7-year-old was able to pull it forward, and when I tried to push it back, it fell on me and was fully crushing me. It nearly killed me. And it could have absolutely killed my child. This should never have been possible. This was negligence.”
Properly securing tall, heavy appliances and furniture to wall studs is a basic safety measure recommended by manufacturers and consumer-safety regulators precisely because tip-overs can be fatal — particularly to children, who account for the majority of such deaths each year.
Reflecting on how close the call came, Clery struck a tone of gratitude rather than anger in her first public statement after the rescue.
“I keep thinking about how differently this could have gone, and I just feel overwhelming gratitude. No broken bones, my kids are okay and safe, I can walk… I’m so lucky!” she wrote, praising the firefighters who saved her as “absolute heroes.”
For now, Clery says she is still shaking — and still processing how an ordinary moment in her kitchen became, by her own description, the most terrifying night of her life.