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The mainstream media won’t tell you what really happened to Jay Leno — but the yinzers know the truth.
Earlier this week, the 74-year-old late-night comedy legend revealed a nasty shiner that he says he suffered from a fall down a hill in the Pittsburgh area, one that also left him with a broken wrist. Leno claims that, last Friday, he was trying to take a shortcut to the restaurant where he planned to eat his lunch, telling Inside Edition of his thought process, “Well, the hill doesn’t look that steep, let me take a… yow!” Leno said of the collision. “I hit a bunch of rocks. It was 60 feet.”
In their coverage of the incident, Inside Edition showed a hill next to the Hampton Inn where Leno was allegedly staying and claimed it to be the culprit of the accident, despite the slope looking about 50 feet shy of Leno’s estimate.
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Immediately, the skeptics and conspiracy theorists of the internet began to dissect the inconsistencies in the news story, and most jumped to the conclusion that the “fall” was a convenient cover for the ugly truth that Leno must be in deep with the mob, and that he incurred the injuries by being late on a payment rather than late for lunch.
User Pure-Statement-8726 of the Pittsburgh subreddit asks us to go deeper. In their deep dive titled “The Hill Jay Leno Fell Down,” they proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Inside Edition left out some insider information.
“The Inside Edition reporting was lazy, and they showed a picture of the incorrect hillside Jay Leno fell down, so I did some of my own journalism to bring you the accurate story,” the Steel City sleuth began. “He was staying at the Hampton Inn in Greensburg, PA because he was performing later that day at the Palace Theater in downtown Greensburg. Many people are confused as to why he’d be staying at a Hampton Inn, but that’s one of the only hotels in the Greensburg area. The only other option would be an hour drive away in Pittsburgh.”
Familiar with the area, Pure-Statement-8726 connected some dots. “Jay wanted to eat at the nearby Dino’s Sports Lounge (a popular area eatery that specializes in buffalo chicken wings) prior to the show,” Pure-Statement-8726 explained. “To walk to Dino’s you’d either have to walk 750ft on the road (not a mile and a half as Jay mentioned), or you could shave off 350ft if you walk down the grassy hillside. Jay noticed a dirt path worn into the hillside (as is common around the Pittsburgh area) so he attempted to take the shortcut and walk down the hill. Since the path was rough, not maintained and eroded away, he tripped and rolled down the hill, hitting his head on the exposed rocks and earth on the way down the hill.”
Though Pure-Statement-8726 didn’t have a photo of the real hill on hand, they did note that Leno’s description of the slope was actually dead-on, and the inconsistencies in the story that sparked a thousand mob theories are all due to Inside Edition‘s comparatively shoddy reporting. “Jay was remarkably accurate as he estimated the hill to be about 60ft. After measuring, the hill is 56 feet from top to bottom,” Pure-Statement-8726 confirmed.
“LenoGate cracked wide open,” one commenter wrote. “This should be national news.”
“This is the journalism that the people deserve!” another concurred.
One more added, “The grassy knoll where it all went down. Back and to the left.”