Gwyneth Paltrow’s Ski Collision Trial Continues with Defense

Gwyneth Paltrow listens in court during her trial, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP)
Gwyneth Paltrow listens in court during her trial, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP)
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Gwyneth Paltrow’s Ski Collision Trial Continues with Defense

Gwyneth Paltrow listens in court during her trial, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP)
Gwyneth Paltrow listens in court during her trial, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, in Park City, Utah. (AP)

Gwyneth Paltrow’s attorneys are expected to continue relying mostly on experts to mount their defense on Wednesday, the seventh day of the trial over her 2016 ski collision with a 76-year-old retired optometrist.

The judge presiding over the trial in Park City has made it clear that he wants Paltrow’s defense team to rest their case by Thursday afternoon — in order to give the jury enough time to deliberate and come to a consensus.

Terry Sanderson, the Utah man suing Paltrow, is asking for more than $300,000, saying that Paltrow’s recklessness on the slope caused the crash, leaving him with four broken ribs and years of post-concussion symptoms including confusion, memory loss and irritability. Paltrow has countersued for a symbolic $1 and attorney fees, alleging that Sanderson veered into her from behind.

In the second week of trial, it’s clear that both sides have spared little expense to ensure they have a roster of expert witnesses on call in case needed. Amid intense time constraints, multiple witnesses testified for longer than anticipated.

Paltrow’s attorneys have asked Judge Kent Holmberg repeatedly to clarify the timeline for the eight-day trial. They reversed plans to cross-examine Sanderson in order to keep time on the clock for the four expert witnesses they said they had put up in a nearby hotel on Tuesday.

Much like Sanderson’s attorneys, Paltrow’s legal team is attempting to cram into four days all testimony from family members, doctors and an accident reconstruction expert. They said on Tuesday that they planned to call four additional experts to testify, but left the door open to call to the stand Paltrow or Brad Falchuk, her television producer husband.

Holmberg gave Sanderson’s side the same amount of time to make its case.

Last week, Paltrow took the stand and insisted the ski collision wasn’t her fault. Her lead counsel Steve Owens said earlier in the week that he planned to call Paltrow’s teenage children — 16-year-old Moses and 18-year-old Apple — to the witness stand. But since Sanderson’s testimony extended into Monday, Paltrow’s legal team read depositions from her two teenage children for the record, instead of calling them to the stand to testify.

Over the last two days, Paltrow’s defense team has relied mainly on expert witnesses, yet read depositions from Paltrow’s children into the record on Tuesday. They’ve attempted to hold the jury’s attention by playing multiple high-resolution animations while their witnesses — including a collision expert, biomedical engineer, physician and ski instructor — have all testified.

The animations have not been included as trial evidence. Still, Sanderson’s attorneys have objected to their inclusion, arguing that Paltrow’s team is using the animations to mislead the jury.

Though the trial has titillated spectators worldwide who’ve consumed video clips circulated as memes on social media, it has tested the jury, whose eight members have gradually sunk deeper into their chairs through hours of expert-witness testimony.

After both sides give closing arguments on Thursday, the jury will likely make their decision later that day or on Friday.



When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
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When Did Disney Villains Stop Being So Villainous? New Show Suggests They May Just Be Misunderstood

An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)
An actor portraying Captain Hook from Peter Pan performs on a float during the Festival of Fantasy Parade at Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World Resort in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., Monday, April 18, 2022. (AP)

Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent issued a curse of early death for Aurora.

But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some people wondering: When did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ... villainous?

The live show, "Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After," debuts May 27 at Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida, resort. In the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstood villains of them all.

"We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been told before: Which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever after?" Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a promotional video.

That hook - the narrative kind, not the captain - is scratching some Disney observers the wrong way.

"I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are purely villainous," said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. "When you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and satisfying."

Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light, or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, "Cruella," for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actor Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her birth mother never wanting her.

Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of "Wicked," the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character from "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz."

The blockbuster success of "Wicked, " which was based on the 1995 novel "Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West," sparked the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.

"With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it's very predictable: Take a villain and make them sympathetic," he said.

The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel).

But they often made marginalized people into villains - older women, people of color or those on the lower socioeconomic scale, said Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children's literature at Texas A&M University-Commerce.

The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward emphasizing acceptance, she said.

"The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that we have kind of lost the villainous villains," Rowe said. "There is value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just because there is a reason doesn't mean it negates the harm."

Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.

The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than children. They also appreciate the villains' campiness, with some "Disney princesses" gladly graduating into "evil queens."

Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the villains, but understands why Disney would want to frame them in a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.

"I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the villain-related activities," Paul said. "Maybe that's why people like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they feel a kinship to the villains."