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Doherty also claimed that Priestley’s memory recall could be improved with time and surgery. “He’s going to be a different person because of the accident. He’s going to have a different perspective because of the accident,” she said. “I don’t think there’s any real difference between me and Jason, other than my love for him.”
Jason Priestley suffered fractures to both feet and his spine, as well as head and facial injuries in the accident, as reported by AutoWeek. At the time, Indy race doctor Dr. Steven Bock said Priestley’s injuries were complex. “Both of his fractures are rather complicated fractures,” he explained. Priestley underwent several surgeries following the accident, including back surgery. “I had the operation to repair the shelf that my eyeball sits on. I had the operation to repair my nose,” he told ABC News in 2003.
In 2011, Priestley told CNN’s Piers Morgan that the two years following the crash were the toughest of his life. “After I had my big racing accident, I was really trying to get back on my feet,” he said. He also admitted that after suffering extensive facial injuries, he feared it would mark the end of his acting career. It didn’t, but it was the end of his professional racing career.
Priestley’s TV sister Shannen Doherty has speculated that the accident damaged parts of his brain. Doherty made her comments after Priestley published his 2014 tell-all book “Jason Priestley: A Memoir.” Doherty took issue with some of the stories Priestley shared in his book and claimed some parts of it were fictionalized. In an interview on the “Just Jenny” podcast, Doherty told host Jenny Hutt, “I love Jason, but you know he had a car accident, a racing accident, and I think maybe parts of his memory got altered from that.” “Everybody changes…they have their own perception of the truth,” she added. “And his is definitely different than mine.”
