Jamie Lynn Spears became chocked up on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! as she opened up about the nightmare incident in which her young daughter almost died by drowning.
The actor, best known for being Britney Spears’s sister, has two daughters: Maddie, 15, who she shares with ex Casey Aldridge, and Ivey Joan, five, with husband Jamie Watson.
Despite initially struggling in the jungle – particularly due to missing her children – Jamie Lynn has now settled into life in the I’m a Celebrity camp. During Monday (27 November) night’s show, the Zoey 101 star said she’d made friends for life on the show, with whom she opened up about the traumatic accident 2017 that almost claimed her daughter Maddie’s life.
After recalling her childhood in Louisiana, she told Sam Thompson, Tony Bellew and Marvin Humes: “I almost lost my oldest daughter… she drowned and we couldn’t save her. We tried really hard. She was trapped under a little side-by-side that we ride around our pond.”
Explaining that Maddie had only been “eight or nine” at the time, she said: “My father-in-law, my mother-in-law, me and my husband, we run to jump in to save her and you kind of, in that moment, think, this is not real, she’s going to pop up, this isn’t real.
“I could feel her arm, and I’m jerking it, I couldn’t get her up because it’s a pretty heavy machine. In that moment you think, you know logically she’s been under water too long… nobody can live if they’ve been under water this long. You logically are thinking these things.”
Jamie Lynn continued: “Then you hear the sirens coming. Thank god my mother-in-law, first thing she did was call 911… [Maddie] was caught in the safety netting. So when they got there, she was not alive. They took her from me and they incubated her.”
“I was sitting on the rocks, I’d thrown up on myself, the adrenaline, then I heard [my mother-in-law] call my mum and say, ‘Lynne, we’ve lost Maddie.’ Then the fire fighter came over 3 seconds later and was like, ‘We’ve got a pulse, we’ve got a pulse.’
“They airlifted her… she’s hooked up on life support, breathing machines and all that… they come in, a priest to read her her last rights, and when they did, her body physically sat up, her spirit responded to it for whatever reason… She got better and better every day and walked out of the hospital. This has no repercussions.”
Jamie Lynn explained that she became Catholic after this experience. “For about five minutes I thought I’d lost my daughter and then I was given the miracle of having her back,” she said, through tears. “My biggest fear was she was going to die thinking her momma wasn’t trying to save her.”
I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! airs Sunday to Friday at 9pm and Saturday at 9.30pm on ITV.
