Martha Stewart Reveals She's Been Struck by Lightning 3 Times: 'I Just Attract Electricity'

"If it doesn't kill you, I think it's good for you!" Martha Stewart joked, of her multiple lightning strikes

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Published on January 20, 2022 04:44 PM

Martha Stewart has survived a lot in her four decade long career, including not one, not two, but three lighting strikes!

The global lifestyle icon revealed she had been struck by lightning three times before during a recent visit to The Ellen DeGeneres Show, which aired on Thursday.

"I mean, it's like, crazy," Stewart told DeGeneres, joking, "I think it actually is good for you. If it doesn't kill you, I think it's good for you!"

Her revelation came as she played a game of Two Truths and a Lie with DeGeneres.

At least two of the three instances happened while Stewart was at home. "Once, it came out of my water faucet," she recalled. "I was leaning against an iron sink. I saw the lightning go down the pipe out in my garden and then it came back up through the water and hit my right in my stomach — threw me on the floor! My [ex-husband Andrew] found me, I was alive but not very comfortable."

The second time didn't come from Stewart's sink but through her window. "A lightning bolt came through my skylight in my house," she said, teasing, "I just attract electricity. I'm so powerful."

Stewart didn't explain what happened the third time, but when asked what it feels like to be struck by lightning, Stewart said it felt "horrible."

Martha Stewart — Michael Rozman/Warner Bros.

According to the National Weather Service, there are five different ways one can be struck by lightning.

The deadliest is a direct strike, which are not as common and most often occurs to victims who are in open areas. In those strikes, victims can experience burns on their skin as a portion of the current moves over the skin's surface (called flashover), but the greatest concern is the portion of the current that moves through the body's cardiovascular and nervous systems.

Ground current strikes — which occur when lightning strikes an object and the current travels through the object and along the ground surface, hitting anyone nearby — causes the most lightning deaths and injuries, the NWS said, as they affect a much larger area than other causes of lightning casualties. Livestock are often most affected.

Other strikes include side flash (when lightning strikes a taller object near the victim, like a tree, and a portion of the current jumps to the victim); streamers (when offshoots of the main lightning strike, developed as the downward-moving leader approaches the ground, strike), and conduction (when, like what happened to Stewart, lightning strikes something and then travels through metal surfaces like wires or plumbing, striking anyone in contact with those).

The U.S. has averaged 43 reported lightning fatalities per year, the NWS reported, analyzing 30 years of day. Typically, only about 10 percent of those are killed, leaving 90 percent with degrees of disability.

Elsewhere in her Ellen appearance, Stewart also opened up about her dating life.

Though she said back in December that she's got a special someone in her life right now, it's clear that's not Sir Anthony Hopkins. She told DeGeneres that they dated but that she broke up with him because she "couldn't stop thinking of him as Hannibal Lector," his cannibal character from Silence of the Lambs.

"I have a big scary house in Maine that's way by itself on 100 acres in the forest and I couldn't even imagine taking Anthony Hopkins there," she said of the two-time Oscar-winning actor. "All I can think of was him eating... you know..."

She also revealed she had once been asked to host Saturday Night Live and that saying no was "my biggest regret."

New episodes of The Ellen DeGeneres Show airs weekdays in syndication (check local listings).