Slurring Anne Heche ‘joked’ about drinking vodka ‘with wine chasers”https://www.dailymail.co.uk/” Daily Mail Online

A slurring Anne Heche joked about drinking vodka with wine chasers as she detailed how she’s been having a ‘very bad day’ in an episode of her podcast that aired just hours before she crashed her Mini Cooper into a house.

In Friday’s episode of Better Together, the 53-year-old actress appears to slur her words as she and co-host Heather Duffy tell the audience Refined – a vodka distillery which sponsored one of their shows – provided them with free alcohol.

‘We each have a bottle in front of us because our friends sent us a bottle of Refined and I think we even did a bad commercial for them in the beginning of our days

‘Dr. Rahm said that we should be drinking vodka instead of wine,’ Duffy says, to which Heche adds, ‘and we listened, and we are drinking it.’

Duffy then reveals they are using wine to chase down the vodka, before Heche reveals: ‘Today’s been a very unique day.

‘I don’t know what happened, sometimes days just suck and I don’t know if you ever have them [but] some days, those no good, very bad days, and some days days just end up like this.

‘Sometimes days just suck and I don’t know if you ever have them, but you know some days, Mama says just gonna be like this,’ she continues. ‘Some days there’s those no good, very bad days.

‘And I don’t know why some days just end up like this, and things don’t really rock me like that.’

She later revealed how she has had a tough week, explaining how people interrupted her meditating at her apartment.

It remains unclear if the podcast was recorded on Friday, or if that is just when it aired.

But it came just hours before Heche pranged her Mini Clubman on a block of garages in Los Angeles around 11am Friday, before speeding off at up to 90mph and plowing 30 feet into a home.

She had earlier been pictured with what appeared to be a bottle of vodka in the cupholder of her Mini Cooper, and was filmed racing in her blue Mini Cooper down a Venice Beach road, which residents said she had circled several times that morning.

The video, obtained by TMZ, shows Heche gripping her steering wheel as she sped down the street at around 10.45am. The resident who took the video said it was actually the third time she circled the street, and on the second go-around people started screaming at her to slow down. 

Despite the speed of the smash and the intensity of the ensuing blaze, Heche was still conscious and able to speak as she was pulled from the wreckage, Los Angeles Fire Department Captain Erik Scott told ABC 7 in the aftermath of the devastating crash.

‘When we arrived on the scene, we had a solo vehicle that appeared to be driving at a high rate of speed on a perpendicular street and launched through the front yard into the home,’ 

Scott said Heche, a mom-of-two, was trapped in her car as the flames began to spread, but noted: ‘She was talking to us at the time that we were able to pull her out, so that’s a good sign.’

The actress, who once dated Ellen DeGeneres, was spotted on doorbell footage hammering down a residential street before she took out a hedge, slammed through a building, causing her car to explode on impact.

She is understood to have battled scorching heat in the burning vehicle for up to 30 minutes before 59 firefighters arrived to drag her to safety.

Authorities then had to use a crane to pull Heche out from the flaming vehicle, a neighbor who witnessed the crash told NBC 4.

Aerial footage later showed her bursting through the straps in a white bag before writhing in pain on a stretcher as she was bundled into an ambulance and rushed to a local ICU.

Heche remains hospitalized and in intensive care, an anonymous source told CNN.

‘Anne is in the ICU, she’s lucky to be alive,’ the unnamed source said. ‘She has severe burns and has a long recovery ahead.

‘Her team and her family are still trying to process what led up to the crash.’

Still, her ex-boyfriend, Thomas Jane, told DailyMail.com she is ‘expected to pull through.’

Last night, Heche was said to be intubated and in a critical condition in an LA hospital having suffered horrific burns during the collision.

She was recorded being dragged out of the mangled wreck by firefighters after her car burst into flames mid-morning on Friday.

She could be seen writhing around on the stretcher before she was bundled into the back of an ambulance and rushed to a nearby intensive care unit.

Shocking images also show the burnt out wreckage of her Mini Clubman as it was towed out of a hedge across the road from a school in the Mar Vista area.

And video captured by a doorcam shows the vehicle owned by the actress speeding down a Mar Vista street moments before crashing into a home, sparking the blaze.

Heche had been driving her blue Mini Clubman in the Mar Vista area of Los Angeles when she careered into a garage of an apartment complex, after possibly hitting a curb.

Locals rushed to help the stricken actress with one man demanding she get out of the car. She ignored the advice and restarted the ignition, slammed her car into reverse and sped off down the road at speed.

Pictures and video showed her looking dazed at the wheel after the first crash, with a witness captured her with a bottle with a red top on it in her car.

She later quickly veered off the road again, smashed through a hedge and and rammed into a nearby home in the 1800 block of South Walgrove Avenue.

The Los Angeles Fire Department said it took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the ‘stubborn flames’ and ‘rescue one female adult found within the vehicle.’

‘The house was tons of smoke. I think they used the crane to move the car to extract the driver. It was crazy,’ an eyewitness told NBC Los Angeles.

Aerial footage showed her with brutal scarring across her back from the fire after her top appeared to have been shredded by the heat and she writhed across the stretcher in pain.

Firefighters were able to get the flames out within about an hour, according to Fox 11 but Heche suffered severe burns in the resulting blaze.

‘If there’s somebody alive in there this is going to be a miracle’ Fox 11 reporter Stu Mandel said as he watched from a helicopter hovering above the scene.

Jaw-dropping pictures from the scene showed the burnt out hull of the car as it was recovered from the hedge before being towed away by the authorities.

‘We really had a multifaceted incident here,’ LAFD Capt. Erik Scott said. ‘We had a significant traffic collision, we had entrapment of a woman inside that, we had car that erupted into fire, and then we had a home that had significant fire that is red tagged. It’s at this point destroyed.’

‘Her condition prevents doctors from performing any tests to determine if she was driving under the influence of alcohol,’ TMZ reported.

The Los Angeles Fire Department also revealed how the vehicle had driven 30 feet into the residence but that the occupant had escaped without injury.

The vehicle struck a two-story house ‘causing structural compromise and erupting in heavy fire.’ The building was left ‘uninhabitable’, spokesman Brian Humphrey added.

DailyMail.com previously spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl who caught the incident on his doorbell camera. His home office looks out to his yard on a residential street about five houses away from where Heche crashed.

He said: ‘At about 10:50am I heard a car go speeding by and looked out my window where I saw the car going about 90 miles an hour.

‘Within seconds I heard a loud crash at which point I ran outside in my flip flops because I knew someone was hurt and boy was I right.’

Manpearl who has lived in the family friendly neighborhood said he ran towards the intersection where the Mini had crashed into the home.

‘Before I approached the car, I saw the resident of the home standing barefoot in the debris. She was in shock and frantically asked me to help get her pets out of the house.

‘I was able to get the leashes for her two small dogs and escorted her out of the side of her house. She had her two dogs with her and a tortoise.’

Manpearl explained how he then went to the car to help the driver who was wedged inside between the airbag and the seat.

he said: ‘I tried speaking with her a few times asking if she was ok but she wasn’t responding so I had to get closer. I was able to open the back door of the car and crawled half-way inside.

‘This time when I asked her if she was ok, she said no.’ Manpearl asked Heche if she could raise her hand to see if she was ok and she said no and made some grunts.

That was when the hero neighbor felt water dripping on him only to realize another neighbor was squirting a hose at the car which had now caught on fire and was quickly spreading up the walls of the house.

He continued: ‘I tried to talk to her again and noticed it was getting smokey and the flames were now on my right and my left so I quickly made my way out of the car.’

The engineer made his way to the front of the house and attempted to put out the flames with another hose but realized it was useless because the whole house was ablaze. By now nearly ten fire trucks had arrived.

He said: ‘I was positive that the driver was dead. That she had burned up. It took at least 30 minutes for the fire department to douse the flames, extract the car and pull her out of the car.’

‘I was surprised to find out that it was Anne Heche. I think I knew she had had problems in the past.’

The owner of the house that was hit, with all her pets including a tortoise, spent the remainder of the day at Manpearl’s house and was in the garden when the car hit. 

Neighbor Roy Morgen added that the homeowner ran inside his home for safety following the crash.

‘Luckily she didn’t get hurt and neither did her two dogs,’ Morgen told ABC 7. ‘She happened to be sitting with them.

‘She was just in the house with us o tell us that the dogs were sitting with her when the car came flying through, and the car stopped like two feet away from where she was sitting.’

The LAFD said her home is now destroyed. 

 Heche is now said to be ‘stable’ following the fiery crash.

She is ‘expected to pull through’ but remains intubated in hospital following the horror crash in Mar Vista on Friday morning, her ex-boyfriend Thomas Jane told DailyMail.com.

Jane, 53, also paid an emotional tribute to her, saying despite the fact they are no longer together he offers her his ‘thoughts and prayers’ and credited her ‘one of the true talents of her generation’.

Heche is a mother to two sons – Homer, with cameraman ex-husband Coleman Luffoon, as well as Atlas, who she had with former boyfriend James Tupper. 

Jane, who dated in 2019 and 2020 and worked together on the HBO series Hung, told DailyMail.com: ‘While Anne and I are no longer an item, todays tragic news was devastating to me and to all who love her.

‘My heart goes out to Anne and her two sons. As of right now Anne is stable and expected to pull through. My thoughts and prayers are with Anne, one of the true talents of her generation. Thank God no one else was hurt.’

The couple dated as recently as 2020 and had even bought a house together. They had known each other for more than a decade and had co-starred as an acrimoniously divorced couple in Hung from 2009 to 2011.

Heche, a native of Aurora, Ohio, most recently starred in the action pic 13 Minutes, in which she starred alongside Thora Birch, Amy Smart and Will Peltz.

She went through a very public divorce in January 2018 from her ex-husband James Tupper. The couple were together for 10 years and share a son, Atlas, 13.

She was well known for her romance with DeGeneres in the 1990s. She brought the talk show host to the premiere of her movie Volcano in 1997. She claimed the act saw her being ‘blacklisted’ from Hollywood.

‘I didn’t do a studio picture for 10 years,’ she told Page Six. ‘I was fired from a $10 million picture deal and did not see the light of day in a studio picture.’

Following her and Ellen DeGeneres’ public breakup, she was found incoherent and babbling in the California desert. She stumbled into a stranger’s home before being carted off to a hospital – hours after breaking up with the comedian.

‘I was told to go to a place where I would meet a spaceship. I was told in order to get on the spaceship that I would have to take a hit of ecstasy,’ Heche explained.

‘Fresno was the culmination of a journey and a world that I thought I needed to escape to in order to find love.’

Shortly after the couple dated, the director tied the knot to Coley Laffoon. They also share 20-year-old son Homer Laffoon.

Heche’s divorce from the cameraman was finalized in 2009, two years after they initially ended their romance.  The blonde later started dating Men In Trees co-star James Tupper in 2007, before they split in 2018.

Heche shares son Atlas with her ex James Tupper.

More recently, Heche had been involved with fellow actor Thomas Jane. The pair had co-starred as an acrimoniously divorced couple in the provocatively named 2009-2011 HBO series Hung. 

At the time, they were both involved with other people. She with James Tupper and he with Patricia Arquette.

Almost a decade later, the pair worked alongside each other once more as they portray a married couple in the Netflix indie thriller The Vanished.

In late 2019, the pair went public with their romance, although they are not together anymore. Heche has also previously been open about her battles with substance abuse.

‘I drank. I smoked. I did drugs. I had sex with people. I did anything I could to get the shame out of my life,’ she told ABC News in 2001.

She said her choices were because of a painful childhood in which she was sexually abused by her father, Donald Heche.

‘I’m not crazy, but it’s a crazy life. I was raised in a crazy family and it took 31 years to get the crazy out of me.

‘I had a fantasy world that I escaped to. I called my other personality Celestia. I believed I was from that world. I believed I was from another planet. I think I was insane.’ 

‘He raped me, he stuck his d**k in my mouth, he fondled me, he put me on all fours, and had sex with me,’ Heche said of the abuse by her father. 

‘I think it’s always hard for children to talk about abuse because it is only memory. I didn’t carry around a tape recorder … I didn’t chisel anything in stone.

‘Anybody can look and say, ‘Well how do you know for sure?’ And that’s one of the most painful things about it. You don’t,’ Heche said in the 2001 interview. 

Heche also revealed that she had herpes as a young girl, but did not know if her mother knew she was being molested by her father. ‘I had a rash, I had sores, I had welts on my nose and on my lips.’ 

She said she does not describe herself as straight, gay or bisexual. ‘I would never limit myself to saying I would be with a man or a woman,’ she said.

 

Anne Heche’s hour of horror: How star ‘drunkenly crashed into garage, sped away at 90mph’, plowed through an LA house and spent 30 minutes in a burning car before being rescued

Actress Anne Heche was involved in two car crashes minutes apart in Los Angeles on Friday. The second crash caused a fire that destroyed the house. 

As a result of the blaze, Heche, who is best known for her relationship with Ellen DeGeneres and her acting roles in the 1990s, was taken to a local hospital and intubated. 

Heche first crashed her car into an apartment building in Los Angeles on Friday morning around 11:00 am, she fled that scene and continued driving on the same block before crashing into another home.   

At the scene of the first crash, residents of the apartment building attempted to free Heche from the car. The star resisted, putting her car in reverse and speeding off. 

The TMZ report mentions that photos from the time of the first crash show that Heche may have had a bottle of ‘alcohol’ in the cup holder. In June 2021, Heche said on an episode of her podcast ‘Better Together’ that she is sober.   

Following the initial crash, Heche’s blue Mini Cooper is shown on a doorbell camera speeding past a home along South Walgrove Avenue in the Mar Vista neighborhood around 90 miles per hour. 

Minutes later Heche crashed into a two-story home along the same street causing the house and Heche’s car to become engulfed in flames. 

The home is located around 15 miles from Heche’s home in the Eastern Columbia Lofts building in the Broadway Theater District of Downtown Los Angeles. 

According to the Los Angeles Fire Department, the crash caused ‘structural compromise and erupting in heavy fire.’ 

In a tweet, the LAFD said that it took 59 firefighters 65 minutes to put out the blaze. The home is now ‘uninhabitable.’ The owner of the home was unharmed as they were in the backyard when Heche careered into the front of the building.

In a report from the scene prior to Heche’s extraction around 11:30 am, Fox 11’s Stu Mandel said: ‘If there’s somebody alive in there this is going to be a miracle.’ Minutes later, Heche can be seen being carried from the scene. 

A witness told NBC Los Angeles that a crane was used to extract Heche from her car.  

Los Angeles Fire Department Capt. Erik Scott told the media: ‘We really had a multifaceted incident here. We had a significant traffic collision, we had entrapment of a woman inside that, we had a car that erupted into fire, and then we had a home that had significant fire that is red tagged. It’s at this point destroyed.’  

The ‘Six Days, Seven Nights’ star was rushed to a local hospital. At the time of writing, she is listed as being in critical condition as she is being treated for burns. Heche is expected to survive

According to TMZ, Heche was behaving erratically. 

Video from the scene shows Heche being carried away with burned clothes and covered in a white sheet. At one point, Heche sits up on the stretcher and gesticulates with the firefighters while seemingly trying to escape. 

Burn victims are regularly wrapped in a sterile sheet doused in sterile water to cool the wounds.  

The incident occurred in the Mar Vista-section of Los Angeles. There were no other injuries as a result of the crash. 

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, a law enforcement source said that Heche was ‘deemed to be under the influence and acting erratically.’      

‘Her condition prevents doctors from performing any tests to determine if she was driving under the influence of alcohol,’ TMZ reported.

 DailyMail.com spoke exclusively with neighbor David Manpearl who caught the incident on his doorbell camera.

Manpearl’s home office looks out to his front yard on a quiet residential street about five houses away from where Heche plowed into a home.

‘At about 10:50am I heard a car go speeding by and looked out my window where I saw the car going about 90 miles an hour. Within seconds I heard a loud crash at which point I ran outside in my flip flops because I knew someone was hurt and boy was I right.’

Manpearl who has lived in the family friendly neighborhood said he ran towards the intersection where the Mini had crashed into the home.

‘Before I approached the car, I saw the resident of the home standing barefoot in the debris. She was in shock and frantically asked me to help get her pets out of the house. I was able to get the leashes for her two small dogs and escorted her out of the side of her house. She had her two dogs with her and a tortoise.’

Manpearl explained how he then went to the car to help the driver who was wedged inside between the airbag and the seat.

‘I tried speaking with her a few times asking if she was ok but she wasn’t responding so I had to get closer. I was able to open the back door of the car and crawled half-way inside. This time when I asked her if she was ok, she said no.’

Manpearl asked Heche if she could raise her hand to see if she was ok and she said no and made some grunts. That’s when the hero neighbor felt water dripping on him only to realize another neighbor was squirting a hose at the car which had now caught on fire and was quickly spreading up the walls of the house.

‘I tried to talk to her again and noticed it was getting smokey and the flames were now on my right and my left so I quickly made my way out of the car.’

The engineer made his way to the front of the house and attempted to put out the flames with another hose but realized it was useless because the whole house was ablaze.

By now nearly ten fire trucks had arrived on the scene.

‘I was positive that the driver was dead. That she had burned up. It took at least 30 minutes for the fire department to douse the flames, extract the car and pull her out of the car.’

‘I was surprised to find out that it was Anne Heche. I think I knew she had had problems in the past.’

The owner of the home, together with all her pets, tortoise included, spent the remainder of the day at Manpearl’s house where neighbors brought her food and clothes. The LAFD said her whole house is now destroyed.

The 53-year-old actress is best known for her roles in hit movies from the 1990s such as ‘Volcano’, ‘Donnie Brasco’ and ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer.’ In her early career, Heche won a Daytime Emmy Award for her role on the soap opera ‘Another World.’ 

Heche long claimed that she was blacklisted from Hollywood following her lesbian relationship with Elle DeGeneres. The couple dated between 1997 and 2000. 

Following that relationship, Heche married James Tupper and had a son together named Atlas.  

In a 2021 interview, Heche said that she was  ‘patient zero’ of cancel culture. 

In 2000, Heche was arrested after she went on to someone else’s property in Fresno wearing in her bra, California. This led to her being hospitalized. 

A witness said that time: ‘She proceeded to tell me that she was God and was going to take everyone back to heaven with her in some sort of spaceship.’

In her 2001 memoir ‘Call Me Crazy,’ Heche wrote that that at one point of her life: ‘I believed I was from another planet. I think I was instane.’

 Heche, a native of Aurora,, most recently starred in the action pic 13 Minutes,’in which she starred alongside Thora Birch, Amy Smart and Will Peltz.