Famed High-Wire Performer Breaks Every Bone in Her Face, Lives to Tell the Tale

The Flying Wallendas — a legendary circus act created by a family of high-wire performers — made headlines in February after a horrific accident occurred when they were practicing a stunt without a net, which is par for the course for the troupe.

At the time, seventh-generation daredevil Nik Wallenda told reporters that eight aerialists were practicing a human pyramid. After someone — or more than one person — lost their balance, five of the acrobats fell an estimated 47 feet to the ground. All survived, but four performers suffered trauma. The one most critically injured was Nik’s sister, Lijana.

Lijana had sustained a lacerated liver and was experiencing internal bleeding from her fall during the death-defying stunt, according to the Sarasota Herald Tribune. But in a new interview with the Today show, Lijana appears on camera, along with the rest of her family, for the first time since the catastrophe occurred on Feb. 9 in Sarasota, Fla., where the troupe is based.

“My mouth is wired shut,” Lijana tells her interviewer through a clenched jaw. “I broke every bone in my face. And so they had to put it all back together. … I have three plates and 72 screws in my face.” The family was practicing to set a Guinness World Record when they all came crashing down that day.

“Everybody fought till the bitter end,” Nik told Today of the tragic event, which he managed to survive unharmed. “Every single person fought as hard as they possibly could till the last second; till they couldn’t hold on anymore.” Pedro Reis, founder and CEO of the Sarasota Circus Arts Conservatory, where the act was being performed, confirmed to Fox News that nothing was wrong with the rigging during the stunt.

Rietta, Nik and Lijana’s aunt, was at the top of the pyramid before it collapsed. In the interview, she credits fellow aerialist Tom Blakewell for breaking her fall and saving her life. She did end up hitting the ground, but her impact was softer than Lijana’s. “I love you,” she tells Blakewell in the interview, while Nik calls him “an angel.”

The accident was not unprecedented in the Wallenda family. In fact, it was eerily like history repeating itself. In 1962, members of the Austrian-Hungarian family — which has been performing as acrobats, trapeze artists, aerialists, and animal trainers since about 1780 — were practicing a seven-person chair pyramid, similar to the pyramid the Wallendas were attempting in February.

All it took was one misstep for the entire balancing act — which they had reportedly performed hundreds of times — to collapse, though. That night, at the State Fair Coliseum in Detroit, two members of the Wallenda family were killed and a third was left paralyzed. “That whole thing was running through my mind from the time we started to go down till I hit the floor,” Rietta told Today.

The two killed in that accident a half-century ago were the nephew and son-in-law of family patriarch Karl Wallenda. His adopted son, Mario, was paralyzed from the waist-down, but Karl himself escaped with just a pelvis injury. Other members of the Wallenda family have also died while performing over the course of several centuries, including Karl’s sister-in-law, who fell from a sway pole. Karl eventually died while performing a stunt in Puerto Rico in 1978, according to Fox News.

Despite the history of fatalities and debilitating injuries, the Wallenda family perseveres. “You know, accidents happen,” Nik told Today when asked if any of the troupe members feel responsible for the fall. “I mean, I think we all question that. Was it our fault, or what could we have done differently? I think that’s natural.”

Nik, the family’s most prominent member, crossed the Little Colorado River Gorge near the Grand Canyon in 2013 and was the first person to cross a tightrope over the brink of Niagara Falls in 2012.

When asked if she would get on a high wire again after the February accident, Rietta does not hesitate to reply, “Of course, I will.” And Lijana, the most severely injured of all, is perhaps the most optimistic. “I know it’s such a miracle that we’re all alive, and we’re going to fully recover from this,” she tells Today. “So I’m just overwhelmingly thankful for that.”

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