Howie Mandel is clarifying his remarks regarding the circumstances surrounding his wife’s bloody, painful fall in a Las Vegas hotel room.
The America’s Got Talent judge appeared on TMZ Live on Tuesday, where he clarified that his wife, Terry Mandel, was not inebriated when she fell and badly injured her face — but rather she was high on weed gummies.
“First of all, she wasn’t drunk,” Mandel said to TMZ. “She’s so worried people are going to intervene with her ‘alcohol problem,’ she doesn’t have an alcohol problem. I’m gonna tell you the truth — she took gummies.
Howie first addressed the incident on Monday when he sat down with Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos on Live With Kelly and Mark. Howie, 68, said that after enjoying dinner and a night of revelry in Sin City, he and Terry returned to their hotel room and went to sleep.
“She was tipsy, I did not know that,” Howie said at the time.
However, the comedian told TMZ on Tuesday that he had simply been hesitant to say that his wife had been high at the time of the incident, so he used the term “tipsy” as a catch-all phrase to simply mean cognitively impaired, and was surprised and upset to see how many outlets claimed that she was drunk.
Howie Mandel and wife Terry the 15th Annual Race to Erase MS at the Hyatt Regency on May 2, 2008 in Century City, California. – Michael Caulfield/WireImage
When first recounting the incident on Live With Kelly and Mark, Howie said that Terry hit her face on the wainscoting and “broke her cheek.”
Howie recounted he was woken up by the sound of her crashing on to the floor and yelling out in pain. When he turned on the light, he found Terry lying face down in a pool of blood while the true crime series Snapped was playing in the background on TV.
Howie recalled moving Terry to the bed, where he attempted to mop up the blood with towels. He couldn’t find any ice, so he attempted to use cold cans of soda from the minibar fridge as a makeshift ice pack.
“I put it on her head and she went, ‘No!’ ’cause it hurt, and she threw it across the room,” he shared. “When she did that, I saw her head and you could actually see her skull — it opened up. No, so I freaked. I freaked. And I went, ‘Oh my God, this is the love of my life.'”
Howie explained that he called the front desk and had them call 9-1-1 and security personnel responded to the room, where they began “taking pictures of the blood on the floor, the cans and everything,” Howie recalled, realizing that he was suddenly a suspect in the scenario.
“If somebody was ever beat up in that room, I promise it would be me,” he joked. “I am the most annoying person in the world. My wife is a saint.”
Howie went on to explain that his wife recovered quickly, adding, “She is absolutely perfect. There is not a scar. She is beautiful.”
The couple has been married for more than 40 years and together they share three children. The Mandels famously met in high school and were friends first before they began dating when Howie was 19 years old.