She’s Gwynnocent, your honor!
It seemed like everyone on the internet was tuned into Gwyneth Paltrow’s eight-day-long trial, where they breathlessly watched as she appeared, chic as ever, to successfully beat the ski crash allegations.
The ski trial has become one of the more popular celebrity events as of late, dwarfing the Oscars ceremony by a couple million. According to Variety, nearly 30 million people tuned into Paltrow’s court trial across YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok.
The Law and Crime Network live streamed the trial on its YouTube page, where it garnered 16.5 million views. The trial also received 7.4 million views on Facebook and 4.2 million views on TikTok. Variety notes that these number do not “account for similar airings on Court TV and the Associated Press live feed.”
In comparison, the 2023 Oscars ceremony had 18.8 million viewers in total, which Variety noted is a 13 percent increase from the previous year.
Rachel Stockman, president of the Law and Crime Network, said, “This trial performed incredibly well for us across all of our platforms. The interest continued to multiply each day we streamed it.”
Paltrow was being sued by retired optometrist Terry Sanderson, who claimed the Oscar-winning actress crashed into him while skiing in 2016. He claimed he had sustained broken ribs and a concussion, resulting in longterm brain trauma. After the week-long trial, Paltrow was found not guilty of causing the crash.
“After the Johnny Depp defamation case, there seems to be a particular fascination with celebrities in court and this pretty simple personal injury case is the perfect example,” Stockman said. “If there hadn’t been a celebrity involved, no one would have cared. To be honest, viewers would have found the details quite uneventful in this civil suit. For this trial, however, we saw just the opposite, with viewers hanging on to every nugget.”
Viewers certainly did hang onto “every nugget” in this case. From noticing her green juices to gossiping about her courtroom fashion, this trial attracted a rather surprising media circus.
Gwyneth’s memorable goodbye to Sanderson as she left the courtroom will certainly become ingrained in everyone’s memory for years to come.
